From: adam hodgkin <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2017 15:03:02 +0100

Jim poses an interesting question.

I see that Oxford will license the whole collection or subject sets.
That seems like a good decision, since for some purposes 500+ very
short introductions may be too many to resonate

http://www.veryshortintroductions.com/page/subscribe/how-to-subscribe

More generally, it seems that publishers and aggregators have not
completely thought through the advantages of packaging digital books
in groupings.

Exact Editions is now working with publishers to sell themed sets of
books on an annual subscription basis. We have been debating
internally the factors that bear on optimal size/connectedness for
groupings of books. The advantages of being able to search a
collection of books and see integrated search results tends to argue
for larger groupings. On the other hand the advantages of being able
to browse and cross-compare a group of closely related titles tends to
argue for smaller collections.

from tomorrow a collection of 70+ Carcanet poetry books will be
available for annual sub by individuals from Exact Editions,

https://shop.exacteditions.com/carcanet-collection

and 21+ books of Social Care and Health from DunedinAP for institutions.

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/dunedin-academic-press

I am not sure what can be done to stop collections from being "lost in
the OPAC". Meta-data for collections and series perhaps? Ideas
welcomed....

Adam


Adam Hodgkin
www.exacteditions.com
Italian: +39 3460964211
skype name: adam.hodgkin


On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 2:04 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 07:35:25 -0700
>
> Oxford Press publishes a series of useful and smart paperbacks under
> the "Very Short Introductions" rubric:  502 volumes at last count on
> topics like:
>
> Buddhist Ethics, Cancer, Catholicism, Chaos, Children's Literature,
> Chinese Literature, Choice Theory, Christian Art, Citizenship, Civil
> Engineering, Classics, Clausewitz, Climate
>
> They sell for about $8 each on Amazon.  A license for digital access
> for a campus might cost as much as a complete print set I'm guessing.
> They're very well done and offer an appreciably-better-than-Google
> introduction to a wide variety of subjects.  But I worry that they
> would disappear into our OPAC and be essentially invisible.  I'd be
> tempted to buy the full print set and shelve them together in a
> visible place:  interesting if that were a way to make the print
> version get more use than digital would.
>
> So I write now to ask if anyone knows of library experience promoting
> this series, either digital or print.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Arizona State University