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E-Book Reading Practices In Different Subject Areas: An Exploratory Log Analysis, Robert S. Freeman, E. Stewart Saunders

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Print books pose inherent difficulties for researchers who want to observe users’ natural in-book reading patterns. With e-books and logs of their use it is now possible to track several aspects of users’ interactions inside e-books, including the number and duration of their sessions with an e-book and the order in which pages are viewed. This chapter reports on a study of one-year of EBL user log data from Purdue University to identify different reading patterns or ways in which users navigate within different types of e-books—authored monographs vs. edited collections--and in e-books in different subject areas. The analysis of …