RE: Report of Library E-Book Acquisitions Survey

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

Thanks to Duke University Press for making this report public. 
It really highlights nicely recurrent themes vendor-service 
providers are hearing in academic libraries and raises some 
important questions:

-> packages good for high quality content *if* discount is 
significant
*   Trend steering away from packages to more integrated 
approaches (e/p approvals, PDA, firm and series ordering)
*   One argument mentioned for packages is savings in selector 
time, but what are the hidden costs and other trade-offs! (Not 
discussed)
*   Who manages duplication issues for packages that include only 
a portion of the publisher's titles?  Can aggregators be expected 
to manage this *gratis* for libraries when the vendor stands to 
lose a significant piece of current business?  Can that vendor 
then decrease overall discount to a library based on a 
significantly reduced level of business? And this becomes a much 
larger issue for consortial deals.
(Not discussed)

-> Metadata/Cataloging, but is this a business publishers really 
want to wade into?  Should they be expected to, particularly 
given that good cataloging is expensive and the report repeatedly 
cites demand for "free" records?

-> zero tolerance for e/p duplication (unless patron requested - 
the same has  always existed for p/p dup)

-> little taste for deeply discounted print added to e packages

-> Consortial models raise several questions which vex vendors as 
well as libraries currently.  In no case can a consortium say we 
want a PDA plan without negotiating with publishers one-by-one ex 
novo.

Dio ci aiuti when monographic content begins to get shredded, and 
charged by pages or chapters and the recombining of these...

Many thanks to Duke for opening this report for discussion.  They 
are far ahead of most presses (trade as well as UP) in engaging 
eContent sales to academic libraries.  One of the interesting 
things about Duke UP, is that although they began selling 
packages to libraries directly several years ago, they did not 
exclude any of the other sales channels. At YBP, they remain 
among our 'Top 10' UPs in sales (excluding OUP and CUP), and lead 
most other publishers in providing front list content for 
eApproval plans, where we have seen their sales grow by over 100% 
in the past year via one of the ebook providers we offer (other 
UPs have seen 3-4 times that growth, but only because they 
started with far fewer ebook titles available).

Mike

Michael Zeoli
YBP Library Services