Potential SPAM : Potential SPAM : RE: AAP/Google in Chronicle of HigherEducation

["David Groenewegen" <d.groenewegen@ballarat.edu.au>]

Toby, 

Thanks for this very interesting publisher perspective on the issues.
Perhaps my experiences with your products can help answer some of your
questions about the practices of librarians.

My former employers have subscribed to SourceOECD for a few years now. We
subscribed to it partly to avoid a perennial problem with OECD
publications, which was the difficulty in distinguishing between book
series which we had blanket orders for and individual publications that we
would be asked to order that may or may not be part of one of those
series. Because it was so hard to tell these apart (especially as we
catalogued some books only as parts of series, not as individual titles)
we often bought titles that we were going to get (or had already gotten)
as a part of a series. It seemed we were paying almost as much for print
as the cost of the package anyway, once we factored in the duplicating
(and in some cases triplicating). And there was no other option anyway, so
we went with the package. With most other ebook publishers we preferred to
go title by title.

You are quite right that OPAC records create usage. For every other ebook
publisher we had, we added records. The smart ones gave us MARC records,
or at least links with full bibliographic information.  When we subscribed
to SourceOECD we were promised MARC records (as I say, this was a few
years ago). I am very pleased to see that they might finally appear next
year - we asked about them about once every six months, and were always
assured that they were imminent. Instead we were offered the lists of
titles, with a link. I have just checked the latest book list, which
contains 1329 titles, and consists of an ISBN, a link, a date and a title.
Some of these are annual publications, where the year is the only
different part of the title. Others are parts of series, but this
information is not included in the spreadsheet. Some books are listed only
as part of the series, but on the journals spreadsheet (which is a
different one). Very confusing.

Now we could have just taken this information and made very brief records
for all the titles on the list, but who would find them? What if they were
searching by author or committee? Subject heading? Series title?
Individual book title? We could have tried to attach them to print
records, assuming we had a print record. Or we could have had a busy
cataloguer sit down and click on every individual link and create a an
individual record for each item, and copy the abstract into the record,
etc. And it would have to be a good cataloguer, because they would need to
understand the difference between series and individual titles and so on.
Which, in a world where 550 libraries all have the exact same set of
titles is a massive waste of our resources, because creating 1329 records
takes time, which we know to be true because we are still waiting for the
OECD to do it. The movement to MARC records on your part is appreciated,
but long overdue.

I would also point out another advantage of publisher supplied MARC
records for a packages - by supplying regular updates the publisher is
given a great opportunity to make sure our catalogues are up to date with
information about their product. Then everyone is happy.

 Finally, you say:

"Perhaps librarians need to start thinking more carefully about this model
if they really want to work with publishers - without it, you'll have to
work with intermediaries."

Libraries like to work with intermediaries - we have been doing so for
decades. We still do most of our book business through them, and we'd do
more journal business if some publishers didn't make it so hard in an
electronic world. We deal with publishers because they seem to want to. We
just want what we need quickly, cheaply and efficiently, and we'll deal
with whoever we need to to get it. I'd love to know what percentage of the
library supply market Amazon has now, but I bet it's a lot.

I hope this doesn't come across as a personal attack, and I would
congratulate you on your generally impressive service and what seem to me
to be sensible strategies, but having had more conversations than I care
to remember about being able to link to SourceOECD on a title by title
basis both internally and externally, the line:

"Despite doing all this, and providing our EasyLinks, we're discovering
that many librarians are not making the links to their OPACs. "

really got up my nose.

David Groenewegen
Information Resources Management Librarian
Information Services
University of Ballarat
PO Box 355
Ballarat VIC 3353
AUSTRALIA

Ph: +61 3 5327 8078
Fx: +61 3 5327 8231

email: d.groenewegen@ballarat.edu.au 

>>> Toby.GREEN@oecd.org 06/25/05 10:44 am >>>

Thanks for your posting. I've just returned from SSP in Boston exceedingly
depressed and disappointed by the book publishing community represented
there. I had hoped to learn some new tricks to help us improve our e-books
offer - but instead found myself preaching and teaching disbelieving book
publishers about what we've been doing since 2000. Much of what we are
doing is along the lines of what you advocate, in particular a move to
chapter-based publishing. At OECD we publish around 150 books annually. In
January 2001 we launched an e-library containing all our books published
since 1998. To begin with they were only available as a single PDF file.
In 2003 we started to break some of the books into chapters, as well as
offer the complete file. Our aim was to enable the various discovery tools
find an individual chapter - just as they find individual articles in
journals. In fact, we are using an e-journal platform to publish our
e-books because we couldn't find an affordable and flexible e-book
platform to do the job. And why did we take this step? Because we didn't
want our books to be drowned out by e-journal articles!

The results are impressive. In 2000 we had around a core set of 250
libraries worldwide buying >60% of our books. Today we have 550 libraries
worldwide with online access to 100% our books - an impressive growth in
reach and accessibility. Around 200 of these libraries still choose to buy
a print collection. Downloads of our books started slowly, I think because
users didn't expect to find books online so weren't looking for them. We
also didn't have a persistent linking system in place making it hard for
librarians to link from their OPACs. In 2003 this changed, we launched our
(persistent) EasyLinks and downloads took off. Last year we delivered more
e-books (or e-chapters) than we did printed books for the first time.
Usage levels are on a par with our e-journals, so you are quite correct -
if book content is delivered in an e-journal-like way usage does increase.

This positive message is one I'm trying to get across to specialist book
publishers - but they seem to find it difficult to accept that an
e-journal model works very well indeed for scholarly monographs. Our
business model is just like e-journals: i.e. multiple-simultaneous access;
no DRM (we deliver standard PDF files); IP access; remote access; walk-in
usage; licence to include excerpts in course packs; e-ILLm - in short, a
licence to use our content as much and as frequently as possible! [For any
book publisher reading this, you may be interested to know that our print
sales between 2001 - 2004 declined at a similar rate to the previous
three-year period but, following a change to the way we promote our books
(and having had some better titles!) they have increased a little since
Nov 2004! Clearly, delivering standard, unprotected PDF files is not
destroying demand for print.]

[SNIP]

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate