Re: ebook acquisition collectives

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I think Sandy's comments are on target, but that his points can 
be pushed further.  The market erosion that this program 
envisions is even more extensive than eliminating course adoption 
sales.

Let's imagine a typical U. press's sales breakdown to be as 
follows:

*25% of revenue derives from library sales (mostly vis Baker & 
Taylor)

*25% of revenue derives from course adoptions

*10% of revenue derives from international sales

Which leaves 40%.  Where does that come from?  It mostly comes 
from individuals, who are by and large affiliated with 
universities.

Sandy's point is that libraries would have to cover their own 
piece of the pie (the 25% sold to libraries now) PLUS the piece 
sold to students (another 25%).  But there is also that 40% to 
individuals to consider.  Thus libraries would have to cover 90% 
of the costs, up from 25%.  I don't think this is feasible.

In fairness to Eric, he quite clearly stipulated that he was 
thinking about books sold mostly to libraries.  But university 
presses do NOT sell books mostly to libraries, though they used 
to, many years ago.

What's at issue here is that the market is the academic community 
at any particular institution, but that community has multiple 
purchasing points:  libraries, students, and faculty and 
administration.  All of these pieces are necessary to make the 
economics (just barely) work.

Yes, of course not every university press has the sales 
distribution that I sketched here, but if there is an average 
press, these numbers would fit pretty well.

Joe Esposito

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 2:22 PM, Sandy Thatcher

<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

> 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