Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

John:  Two points:

1.  You are incorrect about Anderson's primary point.  Please 
look at the book again.  I threw my copy across the room when I 
read the astonishing claim that college textbook publishers don't 
mind the used book market as it allows them to come out with new 
editions more frequently.  I am not asserting that these errors 
of fact overturn your argument, only that it is not wise to use 
Anderson to support any argument.

2.  The Long Tail is not a peculiarly Australian view.  The LT is 
a very real thing and a very important thing everywhere.  For OA 
it is the only justification, as OA (as is being discussed on 
another thread on this list) adds access marginally.  If you want 
the Short Head, Elsevier already has it.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Houghton" <John.Houghton@vu.edu.au>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: Decision making by Libraries on serials and monographs and
useage (re puzzled by self-archiving thread)

> Joe, I think Anderson's primary point is about market extension 
> (number of titles for which there are customers), more than 
> intensification (number of copies for which there are 
> customers) - although both are important.
>
> My point on possible differences between average and marginal 
> returns was based on reported citation differences between 
> subscription and OA articles, particularly in so far as it 
> related to research use (intensification?), and on the "long 
> tail" idea in general, particularly in so far as it related to 
> potential non-research use (extension?) - although the mapping 
> was obviously far from perfect.
>
> IF Amazon sells anything like twice as many titles as are 
> stocked in the largest physical bookstore, it does at least 
> suggest that extension might add significantly to 
> intensification. And, to get back to the original point, rather 
> than speculating as to whether marginal returns are decreasing 
> or possibly even increasing, we used average returns as a 
> starting point for preliminary estimations.
>
> Perhaps its an Australian (small/remote country) perspective, 
> but tails seem an important potential benefit of OA from here. 
> Try getting a history of Fiji published by one of the major 
> North American or European publishers and, regardless of its 
> scholarly merit, you would be unlikely to succeed, because they 
> don't think the market for it (that they serve) is big enough. 
> And yet, if you look at download statistics from institutional 
> repositories at local universities where there are significant 
> Asia-Pacific research schools, you see thousands of downloads 
> of things like histories of Fiji (a number of downloads 
> sometimes 2, 3 and 4 times the average print run of the 
> popular/mainstream academic titles that are published). So 
> there does appear to be a substantial un(der)-served market - 
> for more titles and more copies.
>
> Regards, from the tail end of the world...
> John Houghton
>
> Centre for Strategic Economic Studies (CSES), Victoria University
> VoIP: (FireFly) 88207699  (Skype) John.Houghton
> E-mail: john.houghton@pobox.com
> Web: www.pobox.com/~houghton
>
>
> Joseph J. Esposito wrote:
>
> > I don't want to engage the argument between Sally Morris and John
> > Houghton, but I do want to point out an error of fact in one of
> > Houghton's sources. Houghton quotes Chris Anderson's The Long Tail (not a
> > very good book, by the way:  read it and see) to this effect: " 'if the
> > Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even
> > sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that
> > are.'" This is simply wrong.
> >
> > Amazon's statistics are not a guide.  It is apparently true that Amazon's
> > sales come predominantly from "long tail" titles, but Amazon has enormous
> > market share for those titles--for some titles that share is 100%.  For
> > better-selling titles (the 130,000 Houghton cites, though a figure a
> > third of that would make more sense, if the aim is to reflect the
> > realities of bricks-and-mortar bookselling) the share is distributed
> > across thousands of booksellers.  The market for books outside the top
> > 130,000 is decidedly not bigger than that for the 130,000.
> >
> > To the extent that Houghton's argument is propped up by Anderson's
> > authority, it has to be said that Houghton's thesis is unproven.
> >
> > Joe Esposito