E-Book Exploration--What's My Choice?

McGraw Hill's Connect

Son asked me to pay for this textbook he needed for his school: Business Driven Information System 3rd edition by Paige Baltzan. He gave me the link and login information to access the e-book trial version from connect.mcgraw-hill.com.  Like any parents, I started to think if there were any ways I could save some money. My first  thought was to check the book availability from his school's library, but no luck. I started looking around, here are my options:

1) Purchase from McGraw-Hill that provides two choices

• Connect Plus: $96
• Connect: $39.99

No matter which version I choose, the online access to the book will expire on July 30, 2012. I won't own the book. 

2) Purchase paper copy from www.textbook.com. 

• Used: $101.38
• New: $143.85

I will get 50% cash back when the books are returned to the site by June 30, 2012.

3) Purchase from Amazon.com

• Kindle version: $105.95
• Paperback: $134.99

4) Purchase from www.inkling.com, accessible only on iPad

• Entire book: $139.99
• One chapter: $21.99

Later I found out. I really didn't have any choice but pay for the Connect Plus from McGraw Hill. Why? Because it's a required textbook version from the instructor. Look at McGraw Hill's ads about its Connect, which has so many attractive build-in features and tools that any instructor, I'm afraid, can resist taking it.  It ties coursework closely with the e-book content and saves instructor lots of time. I can see this really as a publisher driven model that has nothing to do with the library. They aim directly to the instructor. I guess, the publisher might even provide a free copy for the instructor to use for the course. In return the instructor might require the entire class to buy a Connect ebook. When the instructor wants it, the student won't have any choices, will they?

Looking at this model, questions swept through my mind: What's the library future for electronic books? Who are the driven force for electronic books? What can or should libraries do about this, ignore, accept, or do something? What's the best for students?

Rough or Peaceful?

Happy New Year! Wishing my readers a healthy, happy, and excellent 2012.

 

How did you feel about your life, rough or peaceful? You can be the driver of your life. I love this saying "attitude is everything!"

 

New PubMed Advanced Search Builder

Today new PubMed Advanced search page gave me a Wow! I think it is more user friendly than the old page.

New PubMed Advanced Search Page

The neat thing is you can stay on this page and keep adding different search terms to the search history saving the time to go back and forth between the search results page and search builder page. The search results will be displayed in History.  You can easily combine them by clicking the Add button.

I do wish one thing to be added for the new page the Limits, which will make the search even more intuitive.

Where are MeSH Terms in PubMed Mobile?

While teaching students searching for medical literature, I enforced the importance of expert searching, which started with MeSH database. I also recommended students using MeSH terms associated with each citation as their search terms. For this purpose, I asked students to enter a PMID in the PubMed search box and find the MeSH terms. Interesting thing happened. Several students used iPad2 to search PubMed and they were forced automatically to use PubMed Mobile version. They were not able to find the link to MeSH terms from the mobile site. After some look around, I wasn't able to find the MeSH terms, either.

PubMed Mobile Search Results

What's the solution for that? Click the Standard PubMed link at the left corner of the page, and you will find MeSH terms. 

Standard PubMed Search Results

Keep in mind that PubMed Mobile is a light version of PubMed. Standard PubMed link is always available somewhere on the mobile site. You can switch to it whenever needed.

Last Presentation of the Year

Yesterday I gave a presentation on literature searching to 75 DNP and PhD nursing students. The course director sent me a nice email afterwards:

"Thank you for the excellent presentation you gave to the DNP and PhD students this afternoon! The content of your presentation and the pdf file you have shared will be useful to the students and me as course director. The faculty who are assisting with the course and I can readily refer students to the pdf file to reinforce the information you shared today."

Looking back, I really had a good year with my liaison services to the College of Nursing. The more I actively engaged myself with them,  the more return requests I received. A good busy year! 

Snow=Good harvest