Preference for Print or Electronic Book Depends on User’s Purpose for Consulting
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Review of:
 Rod-Welch, L.J., Weeg, B.E., Caswell, J.V., & Kessler, T.L. (2013). Relative preferences for paper and for electronic books: Implications for reference services, library instruction, and collection management. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 18(3-4), 281-303. 
 doi: 10.1080/10875301.2013.840713
 
 Abstract
 
 Objective – To determine patron format preference, perceived usability and frequency of e-book usage, and to study use and preference of e-reading devices.
 
 Design – Survey questionnaire.
 
 Setting – Large public research university in the United States of America.
 
 Subjects – 339 students, faculty, and staff members
 
 Methods – An anonymous 23-item survey was available in online and print formats. Print surveys were distributed in the lobby of the library and throughout various buildings on campus. A direct link to the online version of the survey was included in e-newsletters, on the library homepage, and on the library’s Facebook site. A definition of e-book was placed prominently at the beginning of the survey. Questions included information on preference of format (11), experiences using e-books (3), ownership of particular devices for reading e-books (1), attitudes regarding library purchase of e-books and readers (3), demographic information (4), and additional comments (1).
 
 Main Results – Of the 339 completed surveys, 79 were completed online and 260 in print. When asked about preference in format for reading, 79.6% of respondents preferred print books compared to 20.4% choosing e-books. If the library was purchasing a book to support class research and projects, 53.9% preferred print and 46.1% preferred electronic, but if the library purchased a book for leisure reading, 76% preferred print and 24% preferred electronic. In response to the question about how often they used e-books from the library, 50.1% of respondents never used library e-books, 21.1% used once per year, 20.8% monthly, 7.4% weekly and 0.6% daily. Of those who used e-books, 38.1% read only sections they needed, 31% searched keywords, 24.2% downloaded and printed pages to read later, 21.8% read the most relevant chapters, 17.1% skimmed the entire book and 14.2% read the entire book. If both formats were available, 25.1% felt that the library should purchase the print book, 16.7% the e-book, and 58.2% chose both formats. When asked about downloading e-books, 51.1% of respondents would use an e-book only if they could download it to a hand-held device. A majority of the respondents, 81.7%, felt that the library should provide e-readers for checkout if the library purchased e-books instead of print books. When asked which types of books they preferred to read in electronic format in an open-ended question, 22% preferred textbooks, 21% leisure reading, 18% research books, 15% other types, 6% journals, 5% reference books, and 3% anything. Regarding which types of books were preferred in print format, 42% preferred leisure reading, 21% other, 14% all, 11% textbooks, 6% research books, 2% no e-books, 2% journals and 2% reference books.
 
 Conclusion – Preference for book format (electronic or print) depends on the users’ purpose for reading the text. This will likely change over time, as users gain more familiarity and experience with e-books, and better support is provided from the library.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.219 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it