From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 09:00:08 +0000
I agree with Joe's view (a strategy of OA + print will not be
financially sustainable in the long run). Based on our experience,
making our catalogue gratis OA (i.e. the content is free to read
online) has done nothing to boost demand for our print editions. Last
year we recorded a 24% increase in online access to our various
digital editions (free and premium) and a 7% decline in demand for
print. In 1998, when we launched our first e-books, we sold around
750,000 print units. Last year, our e-books (free and premium
editions) racked up more than 15 million digital accesses and we sold
70,000 print units. If we relied on print sales for our income, we'd
be well and truly bust. As Joe hints and as we are discovering,
financial sustainability in the long run will be rooted in premium
e-book editions and making these as useful and as valuable as
possible, combined with other services that 'wrap' around them (other
content, discovery, workflow tools) to create a knowledge resource to
meet the needs of both librarians and readers.
[To help put the numbers above into perspective, we publish ~400 new
titles annually and have a back-catalogue of ~3,000 titles 'in print'
via POD. Since we didn't have POD in 1998, the 70,000 print units we
sold last year drew on a larger catalogue than the 750,000 units in
1998. What's interesting is that each and every one of the ~7600
ebooks (from 1998) we have available online is accessed every year, so
there is demand for the backlist - but clearly not as printed
editions.]
Toby Green
Head of Publishing
Public Affairs and Communications Directorate
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
[log in to unmask] || www.oecd.org || www.oecd-ilibrary.org
Visiting address:
4 Quai du Point du Jour, 92100 Boulogne Billancourt, France
-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:18:17 -0500
The idea of using a free online version of a book in order to drive
print sales is short-sighted. As ebooks get better (they already are
much better than in 2007 when the Kindle launched) the line between
the digital version and the print version erodes. What then? Do we
deliberately make the digital version as bad as we can to keep the
print business going?
Personally, I read both print and digital books. This is not a
religious issue for me.
Open access is not the answer. See above. Also consider this: Why must
the entire book be OA if the point is to drive sales for print? Why
not experiment? Begin by making every page but one available online.
Then drop two pages, then three. At some point you will have
determined what is the optimal number of pages to be OA to drive
sales.
As for undergraduates and the use of books, our intrepid moderator
published a piece some years ago entitled "BYTES: Books You Teach Each
Semester." You can find it here:
https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BYTES-AOkerson2001Stf.pdf
University press publishing is a very big piece of the undergraduate curriculum.
Finally, I hope everyone on this list has had the opportunity to read
the piece in the NY Times yesterday on college syllabi by Karaganis
and McClure:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html
I have been probing this database all day--it beats shoveling snow.
Some of the books that appear over and over at campus after campus
will surprise you.
Joe Esposito
On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 7:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:11:29 -0500
>
> To that I might add that participating in Evidence(Patron/Demand)
> Driven Acquisitions seems to be shaping out to be a model that does
> exactly what Carey hypothetically considered, giving away free content
> to libraries specifically for the purpose of discovery. I haven't
> found a single university press earning any significant income from
> the model, yet in the rare instances when analytics are shared about
> usage of our content in those models, we're looking at exponential
> increases in usage of our books.
>
> My concern about just giving libraries a free digital copy of every
> book we produce is related to what I think makes up a significant
> amount of usage of our content, and that is use by undergraduate
> students. We like to pretend that what we publish is so arcane and
> erudite that undergraduates aren't sufficiently prepared to understand
> it, only serious scholars, but I've got seven undergraduate interns
> and when I asked if they've ever cited a university press book in
> their papers, a majority have claimed they have. I asked the same
> question of the interns at the UP I used to work for over a year ago
> and got the same results.
>
> When questioned further about how they discover the appropriate
> passage to cite, Google or occasionally Google Scholar is mentioned,
> and if the resulting content is part of their library's catalog,
> they're seamlessly shuttled to the passage that supports their paper's
> argument without needing to read any more than that page, maybe the
> next. If that content is part of a DDA program the library is
> participating in, I strongly suspect that kind of usage will not
> trigger a purchase, yet it is exactly the kind of usage that
> publishers were compensated for back when library acquisitions
> approached the collection with a just-in-case philosophy, purchasing
> physical books.
>
> Granted, university press interns probably represent a self-selecting
> sample, typically brighter than your average college student, but as
> we watch the library market for any format of UP content in a
> freefall, I've got to wonder if there isn't some sort of connection
> between certain kinds of electronic access and the apparent collapse
> of that market segment.
>
> I would be more comfortable with embracing Carey's hypothetical
> (ebooks are investments in discovery) if there were actually a
> mechanism for the scholar or even the student to purchase a print copy
> directly at the point of discovery. If it's through the library's
> catalog or accessed using the library's license, there isn't.
>
> Meanwhile, there's ProjectMuse and JSTOR, which provide DRM-free PDFs
> of our ebooks, which is also likely to be causing libraries to remove
> UP content from their approval programs, further exacerbating the
> collapse of the library market revenue stream. I figure Jim isn't
> seeing a critical mass of what his patrons need from those
> collections, because they're not specifically mentioned by him, but
> there aren't any significant restrictions placed on those files at
> all, other than they're not flowable and you have to download each
> chapter. Again, great for undergraduate use, and eroding this time the
> textbook market, yet still no option for a print purchase if it's the
> point of discovery for either scholars or students.
>
> Another important question is the ethical issue at the other side of
> file functionality, why aren't are ebooks more accessible for those
> with disabilities? Boy, I'd love to sink some money into embedding
> that into the workflow, but I don't have that money (see above),
> there's no market reason to do it, and thus far, most requests for
> better files can be handled relatively cheaply on a case-by-case
> basis. Still, I'm more bothered by not doing that upfront for
> everything we produce than I am about the plethora of platforms and
> FUBARed functionality. As long as our parent institutions insist we
> engage with markets and offset almost all of our costs with sales,
> then I've got to play by the rules of the market, and the platforms
> that dominate them. For years OSUP sold DRM-free PDFs on CDs to anyone
> who wanted them. Not a single library ever bought one. So perhaps
> libraries also need the platforms and their associated vendors, and
> the services, metadata, and efficiencies they provide.
>
> Best,
>
> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
> Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
> ohiostatepress.org
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