Chris Armstrong is one of the speakers at E-books and E-content 2007, Putting content in context. The one-day event takes place at University College London: 8 May 2007, 10.00 to 16.30. Details are available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slais/e-books/, which describes the day as:

E-books have finally become accepted in many organisations and licensed e-content is proliferating through library catalogues and web portals. How do we exploit this growing body of quality e-content to best effect; how do we ensure that it connects to our other offerings and services; how do we exploit our own information assets and how can we differentiate from Google driven web sites, often of poor quality and potentially even misleading? Indeed, should we even be talking about e-books when studies suggest that what comes across the Web is not seen by users as books per se or as anything other than just "stuff"?

Chris' paper on e-books and libraries is:

Users and Usage: The Library Perspective

Chris Armstrong
Information Automation Limited

Abstract
e-Books may have been around in one form or another since the seventies, but it is only in the last 10 years that they have begun to be treated as a serious resource. Long enough it seems – almost – for the format to have become subsumed into a grey mass of ‘eContent’. Not long enough – very surprisingly – for any serious studies of use and usage. Which leaves publishers and aggregators making available, and librarians acquiring, e-books – each with several degrees of uncertainty. Managing collections of e-books raises a number of specific issues; our work has offered us the opportunity to talk to hundreds of university and school librarians, and it is the concerns voiced by them which will be presented. Not the least among which is how to discover the availability of new titles. With the arrival on the scene of the new generation of e-book readers, management issues become more complex.

References

Hernon, Peter; Hopper, Rosita; Leach, Michael R.; Saunders, Laura L. and Zhang, Jane (2007) E-book Use by Students: Undergraduates in Economics, Literature, and Nursing. Journal of Academic Librarianship 33 (1): 3-13

Ismail, Roesnita and Zainab A.N. (2005) The Pattern of e-Book Use amongst Undergraduates in Malaysia: A case of to know is to use. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science 10 (2): 1-23.

Rowlands, Ian; Nicholas, David; Jamali, Hamid R. and Huntington, Paul (2007) What do faculty and students really think about e-books? Learned Publishing [Due] April 2007.

PowerPoint available soon [large file]