RE: Business models for U. presses

["Michael Zeoli" <mzeoli@ybp.com>]

In Contoocook, New Hampshire 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contoocook,_New_Hampshire), a small 
cadre of very passionate book people have been committed to 
providing service to academic libraries since 1971 (the same year 
in which Project Gutenberg was founded).  The spirit of 
innovation has been pervasive and their work with libraries has 
always been collaborative.  Many of the Contoockonians have read 
the AAUP report (http://bit.ly/e89vfe) and have indeed been 
following the UPeC initiative with great interest.  They are 
greatly cheered to see the UPs rallying.  And yet they are 
confused that in the 'Publishing e-books for Sale' discussion on 
page 19, for example, no mention of ebook integration into print 
approval plans or Patron-driven integration into print workflows 
are mentioned, despite their on-going efforts over the past 5-6 
years to support library needs for eContent.  In fact, 
consideration of library workflows from point of discovery and 
duplication control, through cataloguing and electronic invoicing 
is hard to find.  In the 'Metadata' section, no mention is made 
of book-in-hand (including ebooks) profiling and the value this 
provides to libraries in sifting through massive amounts of 
information, whether for ebooks, approval plans, patron-driven 
selection pools, series, etc....  Even for National Academies 
Press, a very innovative press and rightly pointed to as a model, 
these Contoocookites have delivered nearly 60,000 bibliographic 
notification slips since July 1, 2010, for 160 unique titles 
(some in print and others in digital format), to librarians who 
have developed specific 'profiles' for this content (this number 
of notifications is similar for many of the university presses). 
The question being raised in the little hamlet of Contoocook is 
whether the business models discussed in the report will cause 
the university presses to be excluded by libraries on their 
profiles later this year?

(The Contoockskies are by nature a curious lot and have other 
questions and wonder at some assertions such as: "if libraries 
begin to purchase e-books instead of print - and there are 
indications that this is already happening - there might well be 
further erosion of revenue" (p.20), for they have dedicated 
painstaking effort in developing their systems for 40 years to 
prevent duplication for libraries... - they guess that perhaps 
this was in regard to public libraries, but this is another 
discussion.  Time to get back to processing those UP ebook orders 
for Hong Kong libraries so they can make the morning UPS delivery

:-)

Michael Zeoli
YBP Library Services



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy 
Thatcher
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 5:17 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Business models for U. presses

I share Joe's assessment of this report, which is one of the best 
ever issued by the AAUP. Among its valuable contributions are its 
clarification of the kinds of "value added" that publishers bring 
to the scholarly communication process (still not well understood 
by many librarians, as comments on this and other listservs have 
revealed), its analysis of how the OA approaches of two 
non-profit presses at RAND and the National Academies are unqie 
in ways that make their direct application at most university 
presses problematic or at least not straightforward, and the 
emphasis on the need for greater collaboration than ever among 
all the participants in the scholarly communication ecosystem if 
the system is to survive and flourish in the future. Also, if you 
ever harbored the illusion that e-publishing is a whole lot 
cheaper than print publishing, this report will be a wakeup call 
for you!

Sandy Thatcher

>The AAUP has just released a report on business models on
>university presses.  It is a very good report, which I recommend
>to everyone involved with scholarly communications.  The report
>can be found here:
>
>http://bit.ly/e89vfe
>
>I commented on it at the Kitchen here:
>
>http://bit.ly/gyKL9z
>
>And an article on the report by Jennifer Howard appears here:
>
>http://bit.ly/fV0pNR
>
>Joe Esposito