From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 09:23:19 -0500

The answer to this, I believe, is the creation of an academic
bookstore. Such a service would be designed with academic audiences
(both institutional customers and individuals) in mind. Among other
things it would include a suite of reading apps for mobile devices,
apps that would include the affordances that scholarly readers
require.

The reason to do this at the retail level is that that is the point of
aggregation. At least in theory, everything should be in a bookstore.
Publishers don't have the resources to do this by themselves, and for
smaller publishers there isn't even time to have a conversation about
it. And even if publishers tried, they would be accused of collusion
and wind up back in court.

I have been trying to get support for such a bookstore for years now
and have pretty much given up. The odd thing for me is that I have not
been able to get people in the U. press community interested. They
would be the biggest beneficiaries of such a service, but end-use of
their products does not seem to be their priority.

Perhaps a library would like to take this on????

Joe Esposito


On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 7:57 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 20:11:23 -0700
>
>
> My thanks to the various contributions here.  Carey Newman was most
> provocative, essentially telling me in the very nicest possible way to
> get over it – stop wanting an e-book to please my book-wanting eye.
> Others performed more as enablers for my hankering, and I’m still
> inclined to accept their encouragement. I had forgotten, until one old
> friend here reminded me, that it was another old friend, Mike Jensen
> at National Academies Press, who first successfully implemented the
> cripple-your-book strategy for making material available on-line and
> sustaining print sales.  Revolutionary twenty years ago, an albatross,
> I fear, now for many of us.
>
>             BUT:  the Jensen strategy put the crippled books up on the
> open web for worldwide free access.  My complaint a few nights ago was
> about “e-books” that we “buy” at a price I could complain about and
> that are only accessible to our university community inside the
> paywall and come crippled.  That’s a distinction with a difference, I
> think.  In the new technical language of librarianship that I’ve begun
> to master, that’s nuts.
>
>             AND:  I learned one incidental thing in reading this
> thread and looking at the Open Syllabus thread started by the article
> the other day in the New York Times.  Of their
> books-most-frequently-taught (where, as somebody pointed out, they
> follow in the footsteps of the BYTES project Ann O. led some years ago
> and which produced, on a smaller data set, quite similar conclusions),
> 33 of the top 50 are readily available in open access, howbeit often
> in translations that now ring a little quaintly to our ears.  The
> aging of translations gives print publishers the opportunity to keep
> lots of versions of Augustine and Plato and Marx in print, selling
> briskly in exactly the place – the curriculum – where open access
> might be thought most welcome.
>
>             ONE COMMENT:  To my admittedly biased eye, the structure
> by which our vendors make content available for discovery, then charge
> us when we begin to use it (so many clicks into the content and the
> library has bought it, though the user does not know they have
> triggered a purchase) is potentially useful, but right now, the number
> of clicks is too small and the price is too high.  I still wonder if
> publishers actually see what a hash the e-book vendors make of their
> products.
>
>             SO:  what is to be done?  I’ll go back to Toby Green’s
> admirable post and ask him to say what it will take and when it might
> come about for there to be the premium e-book editions of which he
> speaks.  I still seek (and tens of thousands of ASU students need)
> books that are fully functional when accessed on-line.  Charts,
> diagrams, illustrations, footnotes, indices, hot-linked references and
> cross-references, ease of use – in short, digital objects with the
> ability to meet the demands of those who could be reading the same
> book in print and of those who want to take advantage of the new media
> to get new functionality:  when and how can we get these?  We can
> argue about price later, but that artifact does not now exist.
>
>             The e-book hasn’t been invented yet.  Who will do it and when?
>
> Jim O’Donnell