Re: ebook acquisition collectives

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

The reason I focused on monographs was that i believe Eric's 
proposal was aimed in that direction, not at trade or others 
types of books that university presses may publish. I wouldn't 
expect, nor would he, I imagine, that his proposal would apply 
across the board to all press titles. But, as I explained, 
publishing monographs (and scholarly journals) was the original 
rationale for university presses to exist in the first place, and 
it was only because of the economic pressures exerted on presses 
by the serials crisis and its impact on monograph sales that 
presses began diversifying their lists in the way they did and to 
the extent they did. (Publishing regional books preceded this 
crisis, but it remains a special case.)

Joe may be right that over time, as the role of 
bricks-and-mortars stores continues to decline, trade books may 
become less distinctive as far as discounting is concerned. but 
they likely will continue to be more expensive to publish because 
the marketing needed to make them successful will be as expensive 
as, perhaps more expensive than, it is now.

I would hope, in any case, that the fate of university presses 
does not ultimately rest on what happens with trade books and 
their markets.

Sandy Thatcher


At 9:45 PM -0400 8/19/10, Joseph Esposito wrote:
>Sandy,
>
>You have put us in a statistical thicket.
>
>The way to estimate how many books Ingram and B&T sell to Amazon
>is (a) to ask them (you will get a mealy-mouthed but nonetheless
>meaningful response) and (b) to extrapolate from figures from
>presses that have switched to selling to Amazon directly on a
>nonreturnable basis.
>
>In any event, all this is apples and oranges.  I was talking
>about ALL books sold by U. presses, Sandy is talking about
>monographs only. Presumably monographs (assuming you can define
>them to everyone's satisfaction) have a higher proportion of
>library sales.
>
>As for the question of what constitutes a trade book, the matter
>will be resolved in the event.  As physical bookstores decline in
>importance, more books, whether in print or digital form, get
>sold online.  In online marketing the need to offer deep
>discounts is minimized.  So books that editorially may be called
>trade books may be published with short discounts.  A variant of
>this is going on now in commercial book publishing, where some
>publishers (5 or the largest 6 trade houses) are experimenting
>with "agency" pricing, which limits the online bookseller's
>margin to 30% rather than the 40-50% offered to bricks-and-mortar
>stores for print books.
>
>Penn State Press is not a representative U. press.  I'm not sure
>if there is any press that I would call typical.
>
>Joe Esposito
>
>
>On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Sandy Thatcher
><sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
>>  Mary is correct that it was decades ago when libraries
>>  constituted the principal market for university presses, but in
>>  those days back in the 1960s one could sell around 3,000 copies
>>  of a typical monograph to libraries. The erosion of sales to
>>  libraries became recognized in the early 1970s after a famous
>>  1975 NSF study by librarians Bernard Fry and Herbert White
>>  documented the beginnings of the "serials crisis" that resulted
>>  in a dramatic shift of library acquisitions away from books
> > toward journals (as reflected in the many ARL charts over the
> > years since).
> >
><snip>