DPC is delighted to give members a preview of its latest Technology Watch Report: Preserving eBook by Amy Kirchhoff and Sheila Morrissey of Portico.
‘There are some serious preservation risks associated with the formats in which eBooks are created, explained the authors. ‘This is particularly true for proprietary formats, and those tied to a commercial vendor’s hardware platform or distribution system.’
This report discusses current developments and issues with which public, national, and higher education libraries, publishers, aggregators, and preservation institutions must contend to ensure long-term access to eBook content. These issues include legal questions about the use, reuse, sharing and preservation of eBook objects; format issues, including the sometimes tight coupling of eBook content with particular hardware platforms; the embedding of digital rights management artefacts in eBook files to restrict access to them; and the diverse business ecosystem of eBook publication, with its associated complexities of communities of use and, ultimately, expectations for preservation.
‘We’re delighted to add this latest report to the series’, said William Kilbride of the DPC, ‘and to release it to members first. Although the report stands up on its own, it has strong connections to other reports in the series especially Preserving eJournals and Web Archiving which were published last year. In that sense it’s the third volume of an informal ‘Preserving e-Publications’ trilogy.’
The report is available online at: http://www.dpconline.org/knowledge-base/tech-watch-reports(login required) and will be released to the public in late June.