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]