Academic Publisher Web Sites Assessment

[Mary Summerfield <msummerfield@press.uchicago.edu>]

Not-for-profit scholarly presses that have a goal of disseminating
scholarship at low cost also wrestle with the issue of how libraries view
the tradeoff of bells and whistles and price for electronic editions.

If we provide electronic resources at much lower cost than our commercial
competitors, will libraries understand that perhaps we cannot provide as
sophisticated an execution of an electronic product or that we might have
a modestly greater amount of downtime, etc.  Would libraries prefer higher
prices and more features and reliability?  Which features are more
critical and worth the higher cost that would have to charge to cover our
expenses?

University presses face these issues in publishing electronic journals
now.  We will face them increasingly in the future if we attempt to
provide databases of backlist books to libraries.  How do libraries think
about the look and feel of a product such as the ACLS E-History Project vs
ebrary vs netLibrary?  How do they feel about image PDF files vs vector
PDF files vs HTML?  How important are annotating tools and the like?  How
important is sophisticated search or linking from footnotes to the
referenced material?  And so on.

Mary Summerfield

At 05:29 PM 6/25/2003 -0400, you wrote:
> This message prompts me to ask the following:  From a technical point of
> view, not from the point of view of pricing or the granting of rights,
> which academic publishers have the finest Web sites?  To put this
> differently, from the perspective of the academic community, which
> companies should other publishers emulate?  Or to put it differently yet
> again, who in the academic publishing world is the technical equivalent of
> such fail-safe consumer services as Amazon, NetFlix, and Yahoo?  (Which
> may raise another question: Why are consumer Internet services so much
> better than just about all the others?)
>
> And I ask this question because I seek to emulate those companies that the
> customers deem the finest.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Joe Esposito