RE: Digital publishing and university presses

["Adrian" <adrian.stanley13@gmail.com>]

Joe, always good to read your postings as ever, here's an 
additional point to put forward and consider.

I was at an advisory board meeting last week with publishers, 
librarians and researchers, one of the questions asked to the 
researcher was how many times a day/week would he print out 
locally an article from an e-collection to read, add comments on 
(it seemed to be agreed that for in-depth reading and research, 
it was better not to read the whole article on screen).

The answer was quite surprising, (to me anyway), the researcher 
said he would print out 5-15 articles a day, if you multiple this 
over a week, month, year and add in another 10-20 researchers, 
one could easily see how a million pages a year are printed out 
locally in the institution. This institution covered all the 
printing local costs, I know other libraries will make the 
students contribute to printing costs. This question all came 
about because the researcher had said he had to cancel a $70 
subscription to a print journal he read. I'm not quite sure of 
the exact costs to print this number of pages locally at an 
institution, a quick look online at the HP printer costs for 5000 
pages ranges from around $600 to $1400 depending on the model of 
printer, that would be at least $200,000 a year for the above 
researchers, and that is not counting the switch to online 
collections and how this may affect their reading and printing 
habits. I'm not saying this researcher is going to be a role 
model for all researchers, but it did make me think what the 
implications might be if this were the case, and more local 
printing will occur in libraries, the environmentalists may also 
raise an eyebrow or two as well.

With the possible move to more online only collections, and 
reduction in libraries buying printed copies as some suggest may 
be a way to make decisions on budget cuts, my question or comment 
is; is the local printing cost at a library or institution going 
to increase, and is this cost some what hidden and pushed outside 
of collection and purchasing decisions ? I was wondering if any 
study or research has been done on this area. Alternatively an 
additional point is how many of the on-screen reading platforms 
and devices will allow comments and highlights to be added and 
saved locally by the researcher, so they don't have to print out 
paper copies. Is this an area being actively looked into and 
developed ?

Looking forward to hearing replies, best wishes.

Adrian Stanley
Chief Executive Officer
The Charlesworth Group (USA)
Web:  <http://www.charlesworth.com> www.charlesworth.com

-----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