Re: PDA Sales (was Interview with Springer's Derk Haank)

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

This is VERY enlightening, Michael, and thanks for providing all 
these details, which help allay some of my concerns about the 
effects of PDA on monograph publishing. Still, there is a problem 
that many smaller presses are not equipped to sell e-books by 
themselves but can only afford to do so through 
aggregators--which was also true for smaller journal publishers. 
But how does PDA apply, if at all, to aggregations like Project 
Muse, JSTOR, and UPeC? PDA presumably means item-by-item 
purchasing, not purchasing in bulk (which is more like the "Big 
Deal"). Although I know some, maybe all, of these aggregators 
will offer subsets of their e-book databases, they still will not 
be offering individual title purchasing, will they? And, if not, 
what does PDA mean in this context? Will it then be applied as a 
supplementary tool, to plug gaps left by the packages?

Sandy Thatcher


>Some of my colleagues make the same argument about Patron-driven
>models (PDA) delaying purchasing.  This is a concern to vendors
>as well as to publishers.  Though there is little direct data
>yet, based on ebook approval plan data (and approval plan use in
>libraries generally), I don't believe that PDA will cause any
>delay.  We know that the vast majority of books acquired by a
>library don't circulate.  In a recent study of an *ebook*
>approval plan at an ARL library, about 900 titles were acquired
>from roughly 75 publishers in 11 months, and most were acquired
>in the last 6 months of the period.
>
>Nearly 400 of the titles had already been accessed by the end of
>the 11 months (with 1300 user sessions and 18,000 page views).
>This far surpasses the circulation activity we would expect for a
>similar sample of print titles acquired on approval. This
>strongly suggests, to me at least, that if we make titles
>available and discoverable, they will be used (libraries
>experimenting with PDA also report that their catalogues are
>being used far more than they thought).
>
>With approvals, often electronic notification slips are sent in
>lieu of the book because of profile parameters (for UPs in
>general, about half their titles are acquired as auto-ship
>approval books and the other half are ordered; for trade presses
>the approval sales are lower).  So, for all those titles for
>which slips are sent to the library, we must wait for a library
>selector to review the slip (sometimes the same day it is issued,
>sometimes once per quarter or once per year...) and hopefully
>place an order.  The patron has little to no voice in the matter.
>
>With PDA plans, a broader selection of bibliographic records
>(generally based on a looser profile) go immediately to the
>library catalogue making the content instantly discoverable.
>And books that might never be selected by a collections librarian
>(but still fall within the broad scope of a library profile) have
>a chance to find a reader.  If the approval ebook use data are
>any indication, more books are likely to have more use than they
>would in the print world.  This does give rise to questions of
>budget for libraries, but before we worry too much, we should
>consider PDA as just another tool.  Approval book and
>notification plans are important mechanisms, especially
>considering that 80% of monograph content is still available only
>in print at the time a title is published (in the academic
>monograph vendor world) - and of the 20% available in e, only a
>small portion is PDA-eligible.
>
>A collections librarian and friend said to me recently, "I want
>to support university presses, but if they cannot make their
>content available to the library in the format our patrons need
>when they need it, I'll have to prioritize other content."  I
>think we've seen that happen already to some degree.  The UPeC
>initiative is an effort to mitigate this, but that's another loaf
>to slice.
>
>Getting back to packages for a moment, it is also worth
>considering that profiling, which underpins both approval plans
>and PDA, can also be applied to packages of content (publisher
>permitting) - an old tool for slicing new bread :-)
>
>
>Michael Zeoli
>YBP Library Services