The previous sending somehow lost the distinction between Richard
Brown's and Rick Anderson's content.  Apologies for that.  Trying
again.

****

From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 13:52:58 +0000

RICHARD BROWN WROTE:

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.

RICK ANDERSON REPLIED:

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.

RICHARD BROWN WROTE:

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.

RICK ANDERSON REPLIED:

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.

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Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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