Re: Interview w/Sarah Pritchard, Univ. librarian, Northwestern U.

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Joe's right. At risk of repeating myself: all OECD books are 
freely available via Google Books (and have been since 2005). 
Last year we had 2.5 million visits (almost double the year 
before) and print sales fell by 20%. Luckily, we have a 
well-established e-books offer which earned a majority of our 
books income last year. If academic book publishers still think a 
future business strategy can be centred on print for sales 
income: think again. The numbers are against you.

By the way, our first book App for iPhone has had more than 75k 
downloads since last August. Amazingly we see half-a-dozen tweets 
about it daily! It's free (we launched it as an experiment) but 
proves there is demand for reference content adapted for tiny 
screens.

Next step: find a way to charge for it or find a sponsor/run ads 
on it. And we're now playing with an iPad. The one problem is 
ePub because it's useless for books with large numbers of tables, 
charts and graphs - but I guess someone will fix that soon 
enough.

Toby Green
OECD Publishing

----- Original Message -----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Sat Jun 05 02:05:09 2010
Subject: Re: Interview w/Sarah Pritchard, Univ. librarian, Northwestern U.

Make the text free online and sell the print version?  How long 
will that tactic last?  Is no one in the OA world paying 
attention to what is happening with the Amazon Kindle, the Apple 
iPad, and even the Barnes & Noble Nook?  And the gorilla has not 
yet entered the market: Google Editions, due probably in July. 
Book professionals are now forecasting that in five years, 25% of 
the book market will be electronic. How can anyone expect to sell 
print under these circumstances?  Is the academy the only segment 
of the society that does NOT believe that books are going 
digital?

Please, test this for yourself. Buy an iPad, put 3-4 books on it, 
and then tell me what this will do to your future consumption of 
print.

Whatever the virtues of OA, financing it through anticipated
print sales is not a long-term strategy.

Joe Esposito