RE: Are you selling/buying individual PDF's ?

[<Toby.GREEN@oecd.org>]

Chuck,

Yes, we are offering individual PDFs of e-books and articles for 
sale via a variety of channels.

We have an online bookshop (www.oecdbookshop.org) which offers a 
print+online service (the e-book is available free to purchasers 
of printed editions) and e-books (at a 30% discount on the print 
edition price). We're selling about 1200 books a month via our 
online bookshop, of which 30% are e-books, the rest are print +/- 
e-books (we don't know for sure how many print customers take 
their e-books since our system automatically loads the e-books 
into the customer's e-bookshelf in our online bookshop. Customers 
can retrieve their e-books whenever they want and as often as 
they want from their e-bookshelf). About 15% of our online 
bookshop customers are librarians, but it's difficult to tell 
because we don't ask our customers to state their profession.

We also offer e-books for sale via NetLibray and e-books.com. One 
or two of our printed book distributors also make e-books 
available to their customers, usually in tandem with print. 
E-articles are available via Infotrieve and Ingenta.

Overall sales of e-books are low (around 1% of our total sales) 
but there are signs that sales of individual e-books have started 
to rise over the past 18 months, but we do not think the sales 
will become significant in the foreseeable future.

Why are sales of individual e-books so small? I'm sure the key 
factor is our e-library (SourceOECD) which gives access to our 
entire online catalogue of e-books, e-journals, working papers, 
reference works and databases from 1998 onwards. We launched the 
service in 2001 and most libraries with a strong interest in OECD 
publications have already subscribed and use the service quite 
heavily so they would have no need to purchase individual 
e-copies. Nonetheless, there are a host of other libraries with 
occasional interest in our publications and, based on what I can 
see, they are still mainly purchasing print but beginning to 
dabble with e.

One thing's for sure. For us, e-books now dominate, with print as 
a still-demanded support act. We disseminated more e-books than 
print for the first time in 2004 (as measured by downloads from 
our e-library vs print copies sold) and the gap is widening fast. 
Sales of printed books have fallen but overall more libraries 
have access to our entire catalogue in one form or another than 
ever before, so total dissemination is up significantly - which 
is good news for our authors and for the reading community.

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
OECD Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
http://www.oecd.org/Bookshop
http://www.SourceOECD.org  - our award-winning e-library
http://www.oecd.org/OECDdirect  - our new title alerting service


-----Original Message-----
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Hamaker, Charles
Sent: 20 August, 2007 8:37 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Are you selling/buying individual PDF's ?

If you are selling individual pdf's of books/articles, etc are 
libraries buying them?

What are libraries doing with them?

If you are a publisher or library with experience in this area, 
please respond either to the list or to me directly. I really 
want to know what the range of expectations is on both sides of 
this particular equation.

Chuck Hamaker
Associate University Librarian Collections and Technical Services Atkins
Library University of North Carolina Charlotte Charlotte, NC 28223