From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2016 12:10:04 +0000

Jim,

Many thanks for your kind words. I'll elaborate on what I spoke of:

Our gratis OA versions are free for everyone (who has an Internet
connection) and offer a read-only experience. No links, no ability to
print, no ability to copy-paste but 100% access to the content.
However, we do offer the ability for users to share these editions via
social media and to embed them in their websites or blogs (and quite a
few do).

Our premium versions come in two flavours: PDF and ePub (not all
titles, yet). Since we are allergic to DRM, there is no DRM.
['Leakage' of premium editions out to non-paying audiences happens but
it does not erode our ability to generate sufficient income to pay our
bills and wages. We're non-profit, so our financial target is 'just'
to fund investment and pay bills and wages.] Personally, I think
offering DRM-free editions is an important part of our offer and is
one contributory factor to the loyalty of our subscribers.
Subscribers can offer unlimited use to their patrons (including
walk-in visitors), so if everyone in a class needs simultaneous
access, no problem. Educators can include our content in course packs
if they are at subscribing institutions.

When can you have e-books with more functions? Well, for many of our
titles, now. We offer links to underlying data (in Excel) to each
chart and graph (in most books, not all authors will give us the data)
and we're getting better at linking out from bibliographies and
references. Each chapter, chart and table is available as a separate
object (each with its own homepage and DOI) so users can discover and
download just the parts of the book they need. Since we also publish
working papers and datasets on the same platform, we're able to offer
these as related content and via the same search engine. We also
publish interactive indicators from the datasets which can be shared
and embedded. So, we're some of the way toward the knowledge resource
I wrote about. However, we're a long way from where I would like to
be, the journey is long!

Carey Newman made the point about separating discovery from delivery -
and we agree. We deliver MARC records to subscribers and have recently
completed work to have all our titles discoverable via the likes of
Summon and ExLibris. We are also part of the group of publishers
working with Gardner and Inger on a study to learn more about how our
users discover content - we see this as a vital piece of the puzzle.

We're constantly looking to add further value for both readers and
librarians. So, we're investing in XML conversion (you'd be surprised
how many authors give us 'ready-made' PDFs so they can control how the
content looks on a page. Re-engineering this 'dead' content so we can
offer the sorts of service you've listed, is non-trivial). This year
we're going to be running some experiments with semantic tools and
will be re-engineering our platform from top to bottom (it's seven
years old, so, in Internet time, aged!)

So, when will what you describe come about? Well, I can only say that
we're able to deliver some of it now and we're working on being able
to offer more. The challenge is cost and complexity. As I hinted
above, one of our challenges is getting authors to play ball. They are
increasingly tempted to do the layout themselves because tools like
InDesign are very accessible. This gives them greater control over how
their content is presented and this, they like. Not all are willing to
give us data or do the detailed work of hunting for persistent links
to referenced content.

However, if we, as publishers, are to build the experience you're
looking for, we need to have the content in a consistent, structured,
form across the whole catalogue. There's an interesting tension here
with what the author is aiming for and the cost of 'unpacking' what an
author gives us and adding the value that will deliver the features
you seek is significant. One would have thought authors would be keen
to offload the layout work and just hand over the manuscript, but from
our experience the desire to do-it-yourself seems to be strong right
now - and I've yet to meet an author who really understands that
digital content means the end of the 'page'.

One final comment: all of what I describe is expensive and can only be
cost-effective at scale. We publish c250 new titles a year (English
language editions, we also release c150 translations) which translates
into some 30,000 digital objects (because we publish as a granular
level) each of which has to be processed and managed each year. This
complexity means having a sophisticated e-publishing infrastructure to
give the service librarians and readers need at an affordable price. A
couple of years ago, we came to the conclusion that our catalogue's
not big enough to sustain the IT investments needed in the future. Our
solution was to invite other International Organisations to share our
e-publishing infrastructure and two are now using it (The Commonwealth
and the Nordic Council) with one to launch next month (the United
Nations). I can only imagine that other scholarly book publishers must
be looking to 'scale-up' in one way or another because e-publishing's
overheads (both IT kit and skilled staff) are significant and are
unlikely to get any smaller.

I hope this gives some insight into what it will take to deliver what
librarians and readers are asking for.

Toby

Toby Green
Head of Publishing
OECD


> On 27 Jan 2016, at 02:42, 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