From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2014 15:35:29 -0500

I have been working on a Mellon-funded research project on how
university presses can and could sell books, print and digital,
directly from their Web sites.  Here is a summary of the project:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/01/06/announcing-a-university-press-research-project/

One hypothesis I had when I started out was that U. presses could have
trouble selling D2C because of privacy policies of the parent
institutions (that is, commercial organizations have fewer scruples
about collecting user data).  Now I am beginning to think I formulated
this question all wrong.  It's my understanding,  based on a number of
interviews with U. press personnel, that presses collect little user
data and don't distribute it often or widely.  I have stumbled on no
academic book publisher yet that places cookies on users' computers,
which significantly reduces the amount of information a publisher
could collect.  Have I simply been talking to the wrong people?

I would be interested to learn from members of this list how
institutional privacy policies are implemented.  In particular, I
would like to learn if any academic institution is using cookies.

I am myself completely torn about these issues.  I understand why
information is collected, but I dislike becoming a cog in an online
marketing machine.

Thank you for your assistance.

Joe Esposito

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