From: Frank Smith <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 2015 11:15:27 -0400

Thanks for your message, Sandy. Your examples illustrate well the
challenges presses face with this particular category of books and how
hard the problem is to solve.  I would like to emphasize that the
decision of which books to offer in our program rests with presses.
At JSTOR we are aware that presses must balance how they handle
on-line library offerings, just as they do with print by publishing
some books only in hardback and some in paperback.

We will continue to work closely with the publishing and library
communities to ensure our model balances our common desire to expand
awareness, sales, and use of books and most importantly, the thinking
and work of their authors.

Frank Smith
Director, Books at JSTOR


On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 7:15 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 30 Sep 2015 09:22:02 -0500
>
> That is a very critical consideration. At the press I used to head,
> Penn State, fully 40% of our revenue came from sales of paperbacks,
> and the largest portion of that revenue by far came from sales of
> monographs in paperback for course use.  If those titles were
> available for multi-user access in a JSTOR aggregation, those
> paperback sales would dry up and the press would be in dire straits. I
> frankly don't know how presses predict which titles will have such
> use. In my experience some of the best-selling paperbacks were revised
> dissertations that were case studies of single countries. like Peter
> Evans's Dependent Development (1979), which sold well over 20,000
> copies in paperback for course use for Princeton University Press. Who
> could have predicted that kind of sale for that kind of book? And I'm
> wondering what kind of monitoring JSTOR could possibly do that could
> "ascertain the impact . . .  on usage and sales."  If a press is
> experiencing good classroom sales for a monograph in paperback, why
> would it risk making it an ebook for multi-user access in a JSTOR
> program? And if it was not in paperback first but immediately put into
> the JSTOR program, what evidence could there be that sales in
> paperback were sacrificed?
>
> Sandy Thatcher