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

[vkalk@worldbank.org]

Dear Chuck,

We at the World Bank sell e-books to institutions in two ways: 
directly as a subscription-based collection called the World Bank 
e-Library (www.worldbank.org/elibrary, which includes over 4,500 
e-books and working papers), and as individual e-books through 
content aggregators such as Netlibrary, Ebrary, Ingenta, and 
others. From what we can see, libraries that are interested in 
World Bank publications until recently have tended to buy e-books 
in collections rather than individually: either publisher-based 
(for example, a subscription to the World Bank e-Library) or 
subject-based (for example, a collection in economics with 
e-books from multiple publishers from Netlibrary).

We have experimented offering sub-collections of e-books from the 
World Bank e-Library (by region or by subject), but we have not 
got a single subscriber, while our institutional subscribers to 
the whole collection are growing.

So I am not sure how this will evolve, but I suspect these trends 
might change and I believe the future will see an increasing 
demand of individual e-books.

Cheers,

Valentina Kalk
Rights Manager
Office of the Publisher
The World Bank
e-mail:  vkalk@worldbank.org

owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu wrote on 08/20/2007 02:37:03 PM:

> 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