E-böcker på folkbibliotek : Fokus på prismodell och bestånd

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this thesis is to explore the situation for ebooksin Swedish public libraries. The background is anincreasing lending of e-books in public libraries, with anacquisition model formed when e-books were more of anexperiment in a few libraries. The debate has escalated in therecent years and in this thesis I aim to investigate thelibraries’ experience with e-books and the current pricemodel. The empirical material comes from interviews witheight head of public libraries in the Västra Götaland region.As theoretical background, I have used Michael Buckland’sfour roles of collections and price models from Lee andBoyle.My results show ambivalence with the price model. Thereare worries that the cost will escalate out of control, but atthe same time my respondents do not want to lose thebenefits of a digital file by limiting the use of it to f e oneuser at a time. At the moment my respondent are not beingactive, but are instead waiting for a better solution to come,perhaps from the Royal Library. Looking at the roles ofcollection regarding e-books, the effect is disputable andpoints towards centralization, mostly because of theindividual libraries’ lack of independence and control overthe e-books. I also suggest that we look at e-books fromanother point of view: that we could benefit from regardingthem more as databases than books in our collections.