From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 14:15:32 +0000
> I’m not sure how any university press could identify "what percentage
> of UP publications are purchased by libraries” since so many go
> through intermediaries like Amazon, Ingram, etc., and the presses do
> not know who the ultimate purchasers were.
Although the books may be purchased through multiple channels, those that
are sold to libraries all have one thing in common: they end up in library
catalogs, which means that most of those sales (in North America, anyway,
and to some degree around the world) are documented in WorldCat. I¹m
working right now with a colleague at a university press to analyze what
percentage of sales during one recent year are currently represented by
WorldCat holdings; while this won¹t give us perfectly accurate data (since
not all libraries are OCLC members), and while you can only derive so much
universal truth from one year of data from a single publisher, the results
will give us more to work with than we¹ve had before. The numbers are very
interesting so far. I expect to publish the report in the Scholarly
Kitchen, and I¹ll be sure to announce it here.
On a related note, it turns out that my library¹s local system is capable
of generating holdings and circulation reports based on the presence of
the phrase ³University Press² in the 260 field of the MARC record (which
contains publisher information). So I¹m now also working with my
collections manager to create and analyze a series of data sets going back
ten years (one sample set every other year) to see what percentage of our
holdings were UP titles in each of those years and what percentage of our
circulations were represented by UP titles. I also plan to take a random
sample of each year¹s UP population to see what percentage of them were
scholarly monographs. This should yield some very interesting data as
well. I expect to make the analysis and the complete data sets publicly
available, probably also through the Scholarly Kitchen.
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
[log in to unmask]
On 6/9/14, 1:37 PM, "LIBLICENSE" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Sun, 8 Jun 2014 12:01:40 -0500
>
>I'm not sure how any university press could identify "what percentage
>of UP publications are purchased by libraries" since so many go
>through intermediaries like Amazon, Ingram, etc., and the presses do
>not know who the ultimate purchasers were. Presumably you'd have to
>get data from those intermediaries as well, and Amazon for one is
>notoriously protective of sales data.
>
>Joe Esposito has guessed at a figure of 25% for monographs in the
>past. I think it varies a lot by type of publisher and what kinds of
>books the publisher puts out. I'd peg the figure at around 40% or more
>for a press like Penn State, which publishes mostly monographs and
>very few trade books (outside of popular regional titles), but for a
>press like Yale that does a lot of trade books, the library sales
>would like be even below the 25% figure Joe cites. These are all just
>wild guesses, of course, though I had the advantage of seeing sales
>figures for two different sizes of presses, Princeton and Penn State,
>over the course of my career.
>
>As Rick knows, i did study the sales of monographs at Penn State in
>fine detail over a 20-year period for one field, Latin American
>studies, though I did not try to assign a percentage of those sales to
>libraries, for reasons explained above.
>
>Sandy Thatcher
>
>
>
>> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 13:52:58 +0000
>>
>> Rick, you have made a very serious and sweeping claim that "an awful
>> lot of scholarly books probably shouldn't be published." When asked
>> for evidence you have referred to your subjective impressions and
>> well-documented declines in circulation at large research
>> universities, and concluded that anyone who disagrees with you should
>> just ignore and dismiss your claims. That seems out of character for
>> a sober-minded discussion about the future of publishing and curating
>> and disseminating scholarly research.
>>
>> Fair enough. It has occurred to me that I might actually have a way of
>> tracking circulation in my library by publisher type, and I'm going to
>> start exploring that idea here with my staff today. Hopefully I'll be
>> able to provide some data that suggest the shape of the problem I
>> believe exists - at least in the library context.
>>
>> I'm hoping that librarians and scholarly publishers and book
>> acquisitions and collections development services (YBPet al.) can work
>> together to come up with real data and evidence that might suggest the
>> best way forward for our collective efforts.
>>
>> The problem isn't "coming up with" real data - the data are easily
>> available. The problem is that it's held by publishers, and publishers
>> don't want to share it.
>>
>> Richard, you're the director of a major university press, so you're in
>> an excellent position to help move us in the direction you propose.
>> Would you be willing to share with the group the title-level sales
>> data for GUP's 2012 imprints? We don't need to know the titles; you
>> could simply report them as "Title 1," "Title 2," etc., though knowing
>> publication type would help (so we can see the difference between
>> sales for scholarly monographs and other types of book), as would some
>> indication of at least the broad disciplinary area of each title.
>>
>> For what it's worth, I'm currently working with another UP on some
>> data that I think will help shed a more rigorous light on the question
>> of what percentage of UP publications are purchased by libraries, with
>> breakdowns by book type and by discipline. Watch for something in the
>> Scholarly Kitchen within the next few weeks, fingers crossed.
>>
>> ---
>> Rick Anderson
>> Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
>> Marriott Library, University of Utah
>> [log in to unmask]
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