RE: Digital publishing and university presses

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

Joseph makes a great observation when he writes that: " 
Electronics do great things, print does great things, but they 
don't do the same things, and one is not a substitute for the 
other."  I am reminded of the Newsweek cover from November 2007 
showing a smiling Jeff Bezos holding his Kindle on which we read: 
"Books aren't dead.  They're just going digital."  The inference 
that one is simply a substitute for the other propagates the 
misconception.  The very nature of the digital text changes its 
context and its universe.  But this is not exactly the comment I 
wanted to make.

Our perspectives are too often subject to powerful blinders and 
too often he Ptolemaic universe has made sense to us.  We all 
know that information exists in a network - and a strong network 
providing ease of access to end users and offering substantial 
means to support continued technological and content development 
will form the successful models. Google has an enormous lead 
here.

All too often, however, vendors are discounted in a discussion of 
the information supply chain.  Baker & Taylor, Ingram, YBP 
Library Services, Blackwell, and Coutts to name the foremost 
North American vendors with a vested interest in university 
presses are investing enormous amounts of time and money 
researching the academic publishing market in search of models 
that will allow their businesses to thrive in the digital world. 
Print sales are being cannibalized by ebook sales.  In the vendor 
world, it is becoming clear that the ebook is not a simple 
substitute for the print book.  And the stakes in understanding 
this couldn't be higher for the vendors.

What has not yet happened, but what must happen, is a redrawing 
of the lines of partnership between vendors and publishers - and 
first and foremost for this particular set of vendors is the 
relationship with university presses.  These vendors know and 
appreciate the value of the university press.  These vendors know 
academic (and public) libraries and support not just the mere 
purchase of a book (the cheapest part of most transactions), but 
all of the value added services required for a library to ingest 
that unit of content and make it discoverable to the end user in 
the most efficient and cost effective manner.  This entails 
providing cataloguing, OCLC records & connections, ordering and 
invoicing processes numbering in the hundreds per day, interfaces 
that provide highly effective transactional capability, and most 
recently e-Content platform capability and all the services 
related to digital content.

These vendors and publishers (and libraries) are very deeply 
intertwined in each others processes - and shared interests run 
deeper than most of us, as individuals, are aware.  This is the 
time, together, to reconsider relationships, sales data, usage 
data, technology capabilities and development needs, and to 
redraw the lines of partnership in the information supply chain. 
Those who will continue to view the print book and ebook as 
'simply' different formats and try to use the same approaches in 
creating and vending them will find themselves in the museum 
beside Concord coaches and buggy whips. Getting partners to the 
table does not come naturally, and getting the right partners to 
the table is even less natural (people matter), but moving to a 
Copernican view of the universe is important to our shared 
future.  And this will only come at the price of facing our own 
inquisitors and the outcome is far from clear.

If you haven't seen the interview with Eric Schmidt on the 
Harvard Business Publishing site, it's worth an hour to watch: 
http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hamel/2009/02/25_stretch_goals_for_mana 
gemen.html

Michael Zeoli
YBP Library Services


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 5:05 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Digital publishing and university presses

If we indeed see the leap envisioned in Scott McLemee's article,
it will significantly increase the cost to the university press
system.  The American university presses (that is, leaving OUP
and Cambridge out as special cases) have combined book sales of
just over $300 million, which requires a subsidy from their
parents of around $35 million/year.  Most of the digital plans
that I have seen will likely increase the need for subsidies by a
factor of about 3--that is, to around $100 million/year. Where
this money will come from in these economically depressed times,
I do not know.  The most likely outcome is that the presses'
activity will be reduced, thereby further limiting the number of
publishing options available to scholars, especially in the
humanities.

As for why the costs will rise, the reasons are various, but the
principal one is that most (75%) university press books are
purchased by individuals, not libraries.  For individuals the
preferred format remains print.  People who argue that POD
(really SRP) solves this problem overlook the fact that all the
presses have SRP systems in place and have had them for some
time, usually with vendors such as Ingram, BiblioVault, IBT, and
CodeMantra.  An enlarged digital program thus adds little to the
core market of individual scholars, though it may add some heft
to library sales, assuming the libraries will purchase electronic
aggregations of books just as they are cancelling electronic
subscriptions to journals.

It is simply wrong to make an evaluation of any publishing
process based on the medium of publication alone.  Electronics do
great things, print does great things, but they don't do the same
things, and one is not a substitute for the other.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:08 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> wrote:

>>From insidehighered.com, discussing a Sandy Thatcher article in
> "Against the Grain."
>
> "It's clear that the recession is accelerating the shift to
> digital publishing. 'With the economy shaping up as it seems to
> be,' one astute observer of trends in the university press world
> told me last summer, 'we're going to see a 15 year leap in
> publishing in the next two years.' And that was well before
> trillions of dollars started vanishing into the ether."
>
> Full text:
> http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee237