Re: ebook acquisition collectives

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Sandy,

You have put us in a statistical thicket.

The way to estimate how many books Ingram and B&T sell to Amazon 
is (a) to ask them (you will get a mealy-mouthed but nonetheless 
meaningful response) and (b) to extrapolate from figures from 
presses that have switched to selling to Amazon directly on a 
nonreturnable basis.

In any event, all this is apples and oranges.  I was talking 
about ALL books sold by U. presses, Sandy is talking about 
monographs only. Presumably monographs (assuming you can define 
them to everyone's satisfaction) have a higher proportion of 
library sales.

As for the question of what constitutes a trade book, the matter 
will be resolved in the event.  As physical bookstores decline in 
importance, more books, whether in print or digital form, get 
sold online.  In online marketing the need to offer deep 
discounts is minimized.  So books that editorially may be called 
trade books may be published with short discounts.  A variant of 
this is going on now in commercial book publishing, where some 
publishers (5 or the largest 6 trade houses) are experimenting 
with "agency" pricing, which limits the online bookseller's 
margin to 30% rather than the 40-50% offered to bricks-and-mortar 
stores for print books.

Penn State Press is not a representative U. press.  I'm not sure 
if there is any press that I would call typical.

Joe Esposito


On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Sandy Thatcher
<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
> Mary is correct that it was decades ago when libraries
> constituted the principal market for university presses, but in
> those days back in the 1960s one could sell around 3,000 copies
> of a typical monograph to libraries. The erosion of sales to
> libraries became recognized in the early 1970s after a famous
> 1975 NSF study by librarians Bernard Fry and Herbert White
> documented the beginnings of the "serials crisis" that resulted
> in a dramatic shift of library acquisitions away from books
> toward journals (as reflected in the many ARL charts over the
> years since).
>
<snip>