RE: Digital publishing and university presses

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

Several emails have come to me privately regarding the post below 
- I thought it would be useful to make a couple of points more 
concrete. As I wrote, the 5 major North American vendors have a 
vested interest in the university press.  Titles from these 
presses represent about 1/5 of the new titles we offer our 
academic library customers annually (but the percentage of sales 
is higher than 1/5).  Oxford and Cambridge account for about a 
third of the new UP titles.  [All this information is available 
to the public on our website: 
http://www.ybp.com/title_reports.html]

Two questions gnaw at me:  What is the role of the 
aggregator/vendor in the ebook equation, particularly for 
university presses?  How do our sales to libraries affect sales 
of scholarly titles to individuals?

Here's one example that's helped me think about this.  My wife 
does research in linguistics.  This weekend she needed to find 
recent scholarly books in a particular subject.  Because of my 
position, we were able to use an academic book vendor search 
engine (take your pick: GOBI, Collection Manager, or OASIS). 
The benefit of these databases is that an appropriate 
bibliographic universe has already been aggregated from myriad 
sources and circumscribed by the nature of those companies' work. 
The bibliographic entries are complete - which might not be the 
case in a library catalog.

Using the book aggregator interface, we were able to create an 
appropriate list within minutes, and based on the rich 
bibliographic information, she quickly narrowed her result to 3 
or 4 titles: 1 each from Oxford, Cambridge, and Yale.

Just one of the titles was available as an ebook in the vendor 
system. Her next step was to look for the titles in Google where 
she found them. This allowed her to read just enough of each 
title to make a purchase decision - print was the only way to 
access fully the content for 2 of the 3 titles.

She then ordered the books from Amazon and had them in 2 business 
days - with a holiday weekend in the middle.  Had the books been 
easily available digitally, she would have had them nearly a week 
earlier and been further ahead in her research.  She used 3 
disconnected resources, spent a lot of time jumping between them, 
and ended up with a second-choice format - late (and fortunately, 
none of the costly and complex library workflow support stuff was 
necessary).

Had she found the book in the library, would she have purchased 
her own copy?  How many UP titles are acquired by individuals 
after discovering a book at the university library?  Would she 
have preferred to purchase the e-version?

Does this process extend to the academic library community and 
does it affect the sale of UP titles to individuals?  How does a 
UP title end up in the library?  As an example, let's take a 
large academic consortium with a focus on both cooperative 
collection development and ebooks.

This consortium uses a particular vendor interface in the same 
fashion as my wife, albeit on a much larger scale and in a more 
sophisticated way.  The 80+ libraries use the approval plan as a 
way of automatically generating appropriate title lists each 
week, and use the vendor interface - of which they were *design 
partners* - to coordinate collecting with other libraries in 
their consortium.  By focusing their use on one interface, they 
are able to maximize efficiencies in collecting and workflow. 
This system has been in place for a decade.

Unfortunately, the system (itself healthy) breaks down on the 
digital barrier reef.  Ebooks, when they are available, are 
listed in the interface, however, more often than not the title 
is NOT available at all digitally - and if it is, it is often an 
older title that the library already owns in print - academic 
libraries as a rule will not duplicate (a rule reinforced by the 
current economy).

One of the top tier university presses published about 65 titles 
in the fiscal year 2007-2008.  On average, the consortium bought 
6 print copies.  All but 4 titles sold at least one copy, and the 
best-selling title sold 14 copies (just 5 titles sold 10 or more 
copies) within the consortium.  Undoubtedly, the consortium would 
love to purchase at least a large section of this publisher's 
list digitally - and if it could be delivered pre-print, it would 
likely drive further e and print sales for the press, most likely 
through Amazon and the like (not for the aggregator). 
Unfortunately, none of this UP's titles are available as ebooks. 
None are in Google to preview, and no Amazon 
'Look-inside-the-book' is available.

A similar group of titles from a similar UP are available on 
various ebook platforms.  Usage at 8 large university libraries 
in North America in the course of just 1 year on just one of the 
ebook platforms, generated over 600 user sessions and over 9000 
page views!

Imagine if we had more complete usage statistics available for 
our consortium - similar to those for print book sales.  And 
imagine being able to track print usage deriving from content 
discovery via the ebook. And imagine being able to track sales of 
print and/or e-copies after the title has become available to 
academic libraries digitally.  Is aggregator supply to libraries 
a form of advertising and how significant is it?  [Opportunity 
for a nice pilot project here -]

If digital plans will increase the need for subsidies to presses 
by a factor of three, are there non-traditional sources 
potentially arising from new digital resources and ventures?  As 
I said in my earlier post, "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." 
Partnerships are ripe for the university press and academic 
library community if we can just find a way to facilitate more 
productive discussion and experimentation together.  Our end 
users are struggling to find and use the services we provide.


Michael Zeoli
YBP Library Services

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Zeoli
Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 6:42 PM
To: 'liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu'
Subject: RE: Digital publishing and university presses

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.

<snip>