From: Richard Brown <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 08:43:33 -0400

Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful
lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not? It may
be the case that libraries won't buy them, that the traditional market
may not be there, and fair enough, that's one piece of the puzzle. But
what about a book's contribution to the field? And to the (possibly
small) number of scholars and students who need that kind of research
for their own work? Would they agree that there's no real need for
these kinds of publications?  Arguing that books "shouldn't be
published" implies that library sales are the only game in town, and
that's just not the case for many scholarly publishers.

Richard Brown, PhD
Director
Georgetown University Press
Suite 250
3240 Prospect Street, NW
Washington, DC 20007
[log in to unmask]
www.press.georgetown.edu


On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 1:42 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 01:44:08 +0000
>
>
> >Those prices will continue to go up until nobody buys the books any
> >more.  Then they won't be published.  That's where we are heading.
>
> The thing that concerns me for UPs is that this may be where we¹re heading
> regardless of what happens with prices. What we¹re seeing here, I think,
> is not just the relatively elastic nature of demand for scholarly books
> (³Raise your prices? Whatever, we¹ll just buy less²), but also a formerly
> irrational system ‹ one where books were sold in numbers that had nothing
> to do with the amount of demand for them ‹ gradually becoming more and
> more rational as sales start to come more and more into line with demand.
> That¹s what PDA/DDA does ‹ it starts to expose what has, up until
> recently, been largely hidden by the library¹s traditional just-in-case
> collection-building practices: the actual amount of reader/researcher
> demand for scholarly books. And the results would be pretty terrifying to
> me if I were a publisher.
>
> The simple reality, I think, is that an awful lot of these books probably
> shouldn¹t be published ‹ at least, not in the sense that we¹ve
> traditionally understood that word.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
> Marriott Library, University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]