How to Issue E Book

[Manavta Jugeshh]

Dear Professionals, 

What is the procedure of  circulation for E- documents (e- Books, E- journals). How to issue e-book and how  we get return the book from user. These books are in a soft copy which we download from internet. How to deal with these books.

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Ms. Manavta Jugeshh,

I have gone through your post. In case you are a LICENSED user of the e-material for multiple users, it is available to you either as an IP encrypted item (which is mostly applicable to Indian institutes) or by way of  allotted User ID+ Password supplied by the publisher. In this case if you have given an option to create your own password which is quite likely if you have a multi-user license,(here , as administrator ONLY YOU will be eligible to create a new password) the easiest way is you just allocate one such password to the person concerned for a certain period of time and keep a record in a note book. After the expiry of the requisite period, you can change the password and provide the password to another user. So after expiry of the first users time when you will change the password, the first user (whose period of borrowing has expired) will not be able to use the document. As I understand certain publishers do have such provisions at least in the western countries. In case it is IP encrypted, your institutional IP or institutional IP range (as the case may be for campus based institutes) will be encrypted by the publisher and the desired number of people (& not beyond that) will be able to access the material 24/7. In IP encrypted system, you can make some arrangement that at least one material can be made available through certain password protected or locking system.(within the same IP) This will help you to get access by ONE USER as per your discretion (this is virtually like the traditional reference copy of  books)

However, I could not understand  your second part of the question "...soft copy downloaded from internet.." As I understand, such licensing  does not generally allow you to download the entire book because, in such cases (especially in our country, unfortunately) most people will NEVER pay for multiple copies. They will pay for a single copy and will download it and will make several copies of that materials which is gross violation of copyright law.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta