Re: ebook acquisition collectives

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

As a long-time advocate of open-access monograph publishing, 
given a business model that works for this type of publication, I 
find the suggestions here (and in the linked blog post) quite 
intriguing.

In answer to the final question (#7), I offer a few thoughts.

Besides the "free rider" problem that Eric takes note of in his 
blog, to which I don't think he has a completely satisfactory 
answer, I wonder about how university presses would go about 
deciding on which books to publish as e-books. On Eric's model, a 
library collective presumably makes its choices only after a 
press has incurred a significant amount of "first copy" costs, 
and perhaps even gone ahead and done a first printing. Is he 
proposing that the collective reach its decisions BEFORE any 
decision to print is made? This could be done, perhaps, on the 
basis of press seasonal catalogues, but books included in those 
seasonal catalogues are scheduled for printing over the entire 
span of six months or so that the catalogue covers. What about a 
book due to be published in February announced in a Spring 
catalogue that only goes to press in December? Is the collective 
going to be able to reach a decision that quickly and communicate 
its order to the press before any books get printed? What kind of 
streamlined decisionmaking process does he have in mind to deal 
with this potential problem?

Currently, presses make a significant amount of income selling 
scholarly monographs in paperback editions for course adoption. 
Not all monographs have such a market, of course, but a 
substantial number do. That market gets wiped out, under Eric's 
scenario (as does also revenue coming from permissions for reuse 
in coursepacks and e-reserve systems), since the ebooks would be 
readily available for such uses at no charge. That's a good 
thing, in principle, but it does mean that the collective's 
purchase would have to cover the ENTIRE publishing costs for any 
ebook published in the proposed manner, since secondary markets 
like this would be sacrificed to the greater good of open access. 
How do librarians feel about picking up ALL the costs for 
monographs, only part of which their budgets are covering now? (A 
more accurate range for the cost of publishing an average 
monograph would be $25,000 to $35,000, though about a quarter of 
those costs are associated with making a book available in print, 
viz., paper, printing, binding, and warehousing.)

I've always felt that OA monograph publishing would be a way for 
the U.S. to contribute to the foreign aid of underdeveloped 
countries, making available a range of valuable scholarship in 
book form to these countries at no cost to them beyond an 
Internet connection and the needed hardware and software. But 
since all foreign sales would be sacrificed also (which, for some 
presses, can be as high as 20% of their gross sales, though 
typically it's closer to 5% to 10%), how do librarians feel about 
covering the costs that would otherwise be paid out of foreign 
sales revenues?

I do think there could still be some residual income, under 
Eric's scheme, for presses in providing POD editions of these 
ebooks through vendors like Lightning Source and what used to be 
called Book Surge and possibly even Espresso book machines sited 
in libraries. In fact, that source of income is what is mainly 
funding some OA monograph publishing programs that are in 
existence at a number of presses, including my former press Penn 
State.

As long as these books all go through the regular peer-review 
procedures that university presses provide, I should think 
academic authors would be delighted to have their monographs 
available OA to the world. It's much better for them to have many 
more eyes looking at their books than the number that can 
feasibly access them when only 400 copies exist on the shelves of 
academic libraries--or even, if some of the consortial, 
subscription-based ebook schemes Eric notes come into existence 
and broaden the reach to probably most ARL libraries and their 
associated campus communities, at least. The foreign exposure, in 
particular, would be extremely valuable to scholars in a number 
of fields that are very internationally focused, like art 
history.

But the problem does remain for fields like art history that the 
digital rights for the images crucial to such books are 
difficult, if not impossible, to obtain--which means that for a 
while Eric's proposal could be a solution only for fields where 
significant rights issues do not exist.

Anyway, his is a very forward-looking proposal, which deserves 
wide discussion. How about a panel on this at the Charleston 
conference in November. (Katina, are you reading this?)

Sandy Thatcher


>I've been exploring the possibilities for open-access ebook 
>acquisition collectives, with a bit of a twist.
>
>My logic goes like this.
>
>1.Ideally, libraries should be providing access to content to 
>anyone for free
2.Therefore, libraries should be trying to acquire rights to 
>give ebooks to anyone for free.
>3. For ebooks, the coexistence of free access and toll access to
>a particular work is problematic
>4. Every publisher has his price for any book.
>5. The way for libraries to meet the publishers price for most
>books is to organize into a cooperative.
>6. The amount of money libraries spend on books is sufficient to
>acquire outright many works sold mostly to libraries.
>7. So... why isn't this happening?
>
>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2010/08/library-monopsony-for-monographic-ebook.html
>
>Eric Hellman
>President, Gluejar, Inc.
>Montclair, NJ