Focus Group Participants Needed for Paid Ebook Study

The University of California Libraries are recruiting participants for a paid focus group study on the future of e-books and digital lending within higher education. Project LEND is a UC-wide library effort, led by the UC Davis Library, to expand the lawful use of digitized texts. We are conducting focus groups this fall to ensure that any system we develop is grounded in the needs of our students and faculty.

If you are a University of California faculty member, staff, postdoc, or graduate student, and if you use e-books or e-book corpora for research purposes (such as text analysis), or as a vital component of teaching and taking university courses, we want to hear from you – please help us shape the future of ebooks for higher education. If you are interested, we encourage you to sign up soon, while space in the focus groups is still available.

Whether you are reading books in-depth, consulting indices, checking citations, making computational use of a body of texts, or simply previewing and searching through texts, we are eager to talk to you. We invite you to share your unique perspectives on your experiences with e-books as well as opportunities for improvement.

You may have accessed e-books for research, instruction, or coursework from any of the following channels: (1) through memberships with public or university libraries on platforms such as OverDrive, Libby, Hoopla, HathiTrust, or JSTOR, (2) through purchasing e-books via Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Google Play Books, Kobo, etc., (3) through a subscription service, such as Audible, Scribd, BookLender, or Bookmate, (4) through websites that provide access to ebooks for free, such as Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, Project Muse, ManyBooks, or others (whether authorized or not).

To be included in the study, you must:

1. have been using ebooks (including digital journal articles) via one or more channels mentioned above for teaching or taking courses and/or conducting research regularly,
2. be able to speak English, and
3. be age 18 or older.

Focus groups will take place online (via Zoom) and last approximately 1.5 hours. Participants will receive a $75 Amazon e-gift card. If you are interested in participating, please complete this Qualtrics questionnaire. If you have any questions, please contact the study coordinator Lin Li at lin.li@uci.edu.

Please feel free to share this announcement with colleagues, staff or graduate students who may be interested in participating. (This round of focus groups is focused on more advanced research; undergraduate perspectives will be invited separately later in the process.)