From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2016 19:40:17 -0500

I think the problem is Amazon's dominance of the marketplace. No one
is willing to invest in ebooks because Amazon has such a huge market
share and has built a moat around its own operations with super-low
pricing. I don't think that we will see any improvement until (a) the
Amazon monopoly/monopsony is challenged or (b) an academic consortium
is put together to build apps designed for scholars (more formats,
ability to display complex pages, etc.) and that is coupled with an
academic bookstore.

I have put a lot of time and thought into (b), but I have not found
anyone interested in pursuing this.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 4:37 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 11 Dec 2016 14:02:15 -0700
>
> Jill O'Neill of NISO has an interesting place from which to observe
> the various insanities and inanities of the market in what publishers
> and libraries persist in calling "ebooks" and she has an excellent
> posting on the Scholarly Kitchen on the theme:
>
> https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/12/05/monographs-transparency-and-open-access/
>
> Observe that it's not just that "discovery tools" fail in this case
> (without a lot of hunter-gatherer work on the user's part), but they
> fail because traditional metadata don't capture quite enough:  we
> don't want merely title, author, keywords/subjects, and similar
> information, but we also want to know things about conditions of
> access.  If we're lucky, it's as simple as OA/Paywall, but in this
> case it's something that happens to be OA on a site that has a range
> of kinds of materials, and the first discovery tool in fact
> misinformed her about the conditions she would find there -- and it
> was only stubborn persistence that got to the final revelation.  So
> this is a case where the issues are one part technology of ebook and
> two parts legal/contractual questions of access to resources.  What
> will make progress happen?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> ASU