Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Adam,

I reread Toby's posts and find nothing in them to suggest that a 
book  publisher should *only* market through aggregations to 
libraries.  Toby  can speak for himself, but it seems to me that 
libraries (purchasing  bundles, by whatever name) are but one of 
many  marketing channels.   Some channels have more potential 
than others, obviously, but a shrewd  publisher will be 
aggregating, disaggregating, repackaging, selling by  the piece, 
selling by the yard, cooperating with integrated products  (aka 
mash-ups in the consumer market), and generally finding as many 
ways as possible to marry investments in content to the needs of 
paying  customers.  Copyright is infinitely divisible, but many 
publishers have  little imagination for the means by which their 
material can be used.

There is a subtext to this point.  Part of the "crisis" (terrible 
word  in this context) of scholarly communications is a result of 
limited  imaginations among publishers, who look to academic 
libraries for all or  close to all of their revenue.  This 
imposes an enormous burden on  libraries, which have to pay the 
freight for virtually all of the  publishing enterprise.  An 
imaginative publisher would be seeking to see  a proportionate 
(not absolute) decline in library revenues year over  year.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: Adam Hodgkin
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 6:36 PM
Subject: Re: universities experiment with paying OA fees


There are certainly advantages and efficiencies which come with 
scale, and with big bundles. But selling and licensing systems 
which move in the direction of monopoly impose inefficiencies on 
their markets. There have been concerns about these monopolistic 
tendencies in the STM journals market, which is moving to 
consolidation with a few large players. I dont think that a 
parallel model is going to work for digital books -- which in my 
view is a good thing.

The challenge for aggregators who believe in the efficiency and 
all- round benefits of their aggregation strategy is to figure 
out ways in which they can aggregate efficiently whilst at the 
same time disaggregating 'gracefully' when the need arises.

What I mean by 'disaggregating gracefully' is this: I assume that 
OECD book publishing has been very effective in the last 20 years 
by publishing printed books which have found their way into 
10,000+ libraries world wide, quite possibly there are 20,000 or 
more institutional libraries that have at least one OECD book on 
their shelves. Many excellent libraries will have fewer than 10 
OECD books in their shelves and that they have those books is a 
very good thing.  There is no doubt that a 'tight bundle' 
strategy for OECD digital books can serve well the libraries in 
the world that need the majority of OECDs 250 pa output. Suppose 
that there are 1,000 such libraries, then a 'tight bundle' will 
work very well for those leading libraries.

Bundles work well enough for the short head of libraries in any 
particular field. They do not work so well for the long tail of 
libraries that has a serious need for a few books from the OECD 
output. Toby may have this well covered with the OECD thematic 
bundles which cover just ten books.

If that style of offering (small thematic bundles) is working I 
would say that OECD is disaggregating gracefully and that is 
delivering an important service to specialist libraries which do 
not need the whole of the OECD output. If those mini-bundles are 
not working, there may be a case for looking again at the 
distribution and packaging strategy....

Adam Hodgkin