RE: Column on licenses

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

David,

I agree that usage of books in libraries was rather like the old 
adage about spending money on advertising - only half of it 
works, the trouble is knowing which! However, rather as Google 
and others are changing the way advertising works (advertisers 
now pay just when the ad gets a response), we're seeing that 
e-books are changing the way books work.

Rather than languishing on shelves, we're finding that delivery 
via the desktop (ie eliminating the need to walk to the library) 
is increasing the frequency of use. (This no-walk factor was 
noted by Tenopir and King as a key driver in increasing usage for 
journals too.) If librarians wait for users to ask for a book 
then there's a high chance the user will not bother - perhaps 
choosing to read something that is more accessible and the 
opportunity for use is lost. This is not in anyone's interest. 
Thus the goal is to work with librarians to get as many books to 
be accessible as possible. This means breaking the old monograph 
book price spiral and the costly buying-title-by-title mentality. 
(Yes, I know Open Access would deliver this, and we've got some 
OA titles thanks to generous funding from project sponsors, but 
this is the exception, not the rule, and from what I hear from 
our main project sponsors, is not about to change anytime soon.)

Our model offers institutions subject-based collections of books 
on an multiple-user, all-you-can-eat basis, charging less than 
the sum of the list prices (print is an option). The institution 
not only can afford to buy more titles because of the lower 
per-title cost, they also save administration costs because they 
no longer have to make decisions on a title-by-title basis. 
Judging by the number of new libraries choosing to buy books from 
us in this way, it's an affordable option and consequently more 
of our titles are available to be read by more readers at their 
desks. What's interesting is that we're finding that 
multiple-simultaneous use is happening: presumably because it's 
so much easier now than in the past, classes are beginning to use 
our monographs more. This shows that multiple-user e-rights are 
useful for monographs in a way we rarely saw with print.

Toby Green
Head of Dissemination and Marketing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate

-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of David Goodman
Sent: 24 October, 2006 12:36 AM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Column on licenses

Joe,

about half the books a university library buys are never read. 
This has been known for half a century now, and seems to be 
general. (The difficulty for a selector is predicting the right 
half.) It is possible for a library to buy only if requested, and 
facilitating this is one of the good things about e-books. The 
result, of course, will be that half the books requested are 
never used again.

This is one of the consequences of Lotka's Law, which applies to 
books as well as to journal articles.

If the OSU library did not buy a particular book, the publisher 
would most likely get nothing at all from the OSU market. There 
are many academic books whose sole purchasers are libraries 
(except for a few dozen specialist faculty), because the pricing 
spiral applies to books as well as journals, and the cost of 
research monographs, just like the cost of research journals, has 
become too great for both students and faculty, unless they have 
a special need.

As with non-academic books, a few become best-sellers, and then 
the price is such that individuals buy (generally it is possible 
to spot them in publishers catalogs--they are the ones that also 
come out in paperback, that year or the following. )

A few become widely used in reserve, and then the library either 
buys a number of copies in paperback, or buys the appropriate 
multi-user rights for an e-book. For an e-book read by only one 
user at a time, there is no reason multi-user rights are 
appropriate or necessary, any more than multiple copies would be.

Before indulging in poetic economics, it is advisable to know 
something about the actual situation.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu