From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 2013 22:02:18 +0000

>I would also be interested to learn from libraries. Most of us know that
>libraries do not have sufficient funding to keep up with the costs of the
>increased level of publication. At the moment this is mainly the cost of
>subscriptions. They really do want to save on costs.

I'd like to push back, gently, on the idea that librarians want to "save
on costs." It's important to remember that a librarian isn't the same kind
of consumer at work that he or she is at home, and doesn't think about
economies in quite the same way.

If I go to a bookstore to spend my own money, my goal is to get as much
book as possible at the lowest possible cost. When choosing between two
books that I desire equally, I'm going to buy the cheaper one, and if I
have money left over after buying my books I will experience that savings
as a reward for my frugality. As a librarian, my goal and my incentives
are different. Notably, I have a budget that needs to be spent completely
-- instead of being rewarded for having some left over at the end of the
year, I will be punished for failing to spend all of it. For this reason,
my goal each year is not to spend less money; on the contrary, I'd like to
spend _more_ money every year. My goal is to use my budget as efficiently
and effectively as possible, which is a very different goal than cost
savings. Getting good prices figures importantly in my pursuit of
efficiency and effectiveness, but "saving money" is not the goal.

Why am I splitting this hair? Because I think it's important for
publishers to understand that when we talk about their annual price
increases being unsustainable, it's not because we're trying to save
money. It's because we're trying to keep spending our money -- all of it
-- on the products our patrons need. The faster the rate of price increase
(note that I'm not using the euphemistic term "inflation") the less
capable we are of continuing to spend our money -- all of it -- on those
products. Of course, I realize that no individual publisher is going to
care about our continued ability to buy stuff from other publishers. This
is what economists call the "tragedy of the commons." Note also that I'm
not making a "should" argument here about how publishers ought to set
their prices. I'm making an "is" statement about what will happen if they
continue to raise their prices according to past patterns, and if library
budgets continue to grow at current rates.


Rick Anderson
Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
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