Re: ebook acquisition collectives

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

I'd like to respond to this by suggesting that we may be on a 
path "back to the future." As I was contemplating Eric's 
proposal, it occurred to me that we once had a system in place in 
England whereby books were only published once there was a market 
known to exist for them.  Since my own knowledge of this system 
is sketchy, I called upon a true book historian, Jim West at Penn 
State, to provide the details, which he has generously done, as 
follows:

At 11:39 AM -0400 8/15/10, James West wrote:

>What I remember, Sandy, is the book subscription system.  The 
>author and/or various traveling book agents for the publisher 
>would go out and solicit advance orders for a book.  The author 
>might approach well-to-do friends or patrons and ask for sums of 
>money to subvene the book, often in return for a dedication (if 
>the amount was sufficiently large) or for having the donors' 
>names listed in the front or back matter, if there were several 
>donors.  Thus, in C18 and even C19 American books, you might see 
>lists of an author's friends or of men with whom he served in 
>the military, whom he would hit up.  This was demeaning for the 
>author, of course, and probably had something to do with the low 
>status of scribblers in C18 and C19.
>
>Book agents, by contrast, went door to door and, in rural parts 
>of the country, town to town, soliciting subscriptions.  The 
>subscriber would pay half the cost of the book up front and the 
>rest upon delivery.  The agent would deduct his commission from 
>this money and forward the rest to the publisher, who would use 
>the money to subvene the printing and binding costs.  Lots of 
>salesmen's dummies survive, mostly from C19, which document the 
>practice.  We have about a dozen of them in rare books here. 
>Some are quite elaborate, featuring various cloths and bindings 
>sewn in so the buyer could select the standard, middle, and 
>deluxe binding---sort of like tall, venti, and grande in 
>Starbuck's.  There are often blank pages in the back of these 
>dummies which list the names, addresses, and amounts paid by the 
>subscribers.
>
>You can see the point in all of this.  The publisher, with help 
>from author and agents, was determining ahead of time how many 
>copies he could count on selling.  He would manufacture these 
>with the advance money, printing overruns of the sheets for the 
>subsequent sales but probably not binding up very many of these 
>overruns.  It is a cautious but effective way of publishing. 
>You could pretty well predict what your fixed or plant expenses 
>were going to be, before the book went to press, so you have to 
>have at least enough guaranteed sales to cover these fixed 
>expenses, plus some money for your running costs (paper, ink, 
>press time, etc.) once the book went to press.
>
>Mostly what we are talking about here are books printed from 
>standing type, before electrotype and stereotype plating become 
>common for books that the publisher expected to be reprinted. 
>It seems to me that the earliest plates were cast in the 1830s 
>and 1840s; the practice did not become widespread until perhaps 
>1870, and even then not all books were plated.
>
>This is not unlike what you are describing to me about ordering 
>monographs on open access as ebooks.  In a funny way, everything 
>changes but nothing changes in book publishing.  I have found 
>the equivalent of publishing conglomerates in C18 England, the 
>idea being to spread the cost and the risk of a given title.

The parallels here are fascinating to draw. For the "patrons" we 
can substitute the purchasing libraries, whose names might be 
listed in the front or back matter. A library service like EBSCO 
might be the counterpart to the "book agent," soliciting orders 
and taking down payments up front. Joe's proposed online 
catalogue could serve as a vehicle for providing the "dummies" on 
which the libraries would base their orders. And so it goes....

What goes around comes around?

Sandy Thatcher