From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2018 17:56:28 -0400

I don't see how you got to that hypothetical from my post. The point is not
the dollar, at least not in terms of publisher revenue. That may be a
meaningful figure for a consumer publisher of (say) science fiction or
romance, where the audience is highly elastic (you can literally sell
millions), but for academic titles it's hard to imagine selling many
copies, even at a dollar. It would not be worth it to set up the billing
system. This is one (only one) of the reasons that many books are not
available in developing countries: the cost of setting up the distribution,
even without taking into account the cost of creating the editorial
material in the first place, exceeds potential revenues.

The point of the dollar is psychological; it lies on the other side of the
transaction, as an expenditure for the reader. A nominal cost (would you
prefer $.50? $.01?) compels someone to think before downloading. How
important is this to me? And since expenditures of this kind are zero-sum,
if I pay the dollar for the download, what do I have to give up? A pack of
cigarettes? A baseball glove for my kid? The dollar cost, in other words,
is a proxy for the matter of intellectual value to the reader. If a
download is not worth a dollar, is it worth anything at all?

I hope this explanation makes it clear why your library example is off
target. Students have indeed paid for access to the books a library
provides through tuition.

Joe Esposito


On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:16 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Brundy, Curtis T [LIB]" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2018 13:50:23 +0000
>
> Does this hold for other free services? For example, most library patrons
> believe it is free to check out a physical book. Should we also begin
> charging a dollar per check out at the public library? And why stop at a
> dollar. If it is worth knowing the demand at $1, why not find out what it
> is at $5 and $10? I get it that download counts provide limited
> information. But charging for something we have intentionally invested in
> making free doesn’t seem like the right approach.
>
>
>
> Curtis
>
>
>
> *Curtis Brundy*
>
> Iowa State University
>
> *Parks Library <http://www.lib.iastate.edu/>*
>
> *P: 515-294-7563*
>
>
>
>
>
>
> From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2018 10:06:33 -0400
>
> It is, of course, a milestone that Knowledge Unlatched (KU) reached over
> one million downloads in 2018, but does anyone know what these figures
> mean? A download is a crude metric, comparable to the page view in consumer
> Web advertising. No one in the advertising industry uses anything so
> primitive any more. It is perplexing to me that the scholarly community
> would use measures less sophisticated than those used to try to sell us a
> Pez dispenser or a trip to Las Vegas.
>
>
>
> It is an article of faith in the OA community that the high price of
> scholarly materials (invoke Elsevier's 40% margins here) deny access to
> researchers and the general public. This must be at least partly true, as
> we read all the time about monographs priced at $40 or $90 and even, last
> week, a college textbook priced at $1,000. But going from a high price to
> no price at all--OA is free to the end-user, after all--is an odd bit of
> methodology. When we measure downloads instead of sales, we move from the
> demand economy to the supply economy. This is apples and oranges.
>
>
>
> The question I have is how many downloads KU or any other OA book service
> would have if there were a charge of $1 per download, thus marrying the
> demand and supply-side economies. Would the number of downloads drop to
> 900,000? 500,000? 15? We won't know until we try.
>
>
>
> It will be argued that even $1 is too much for some people. This is true.
> But where does the assumption that everyone is penniless come from? Surely
> there are some people who have downloaded books from KU who have a Netflix
> subscription, drive a Honda, and stopped off at Starbucks in the past
> month? A price of $1 download would help us find out what needs KU and
> other OA book publishers are serving and begin the hard task of measuring
> the real value these services provide.
>
>
>
> Joe Esposito
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 8:30 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From:  [log in to unmask]
> Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2018 19:48:24 -0400
>
> Knowledge Unlatched titles reach over 1 million downloads in 2018
>
> More than 250% increase in use compared to 2017
>
> Berlin, 28.08.2018. Knowledge Unlatched (KU) announces a new record
> for usage of its Open Access (OA) books. Over 950 titles from the
> Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) have been accessed more than 1
> million times by users worldwide in the past 8 months of this year
> alone. The increase in usage compared to 2017 is significant: On
> aggregate, KU content has seen 570,000 full-text downloads on the
> OAPEN platform and a further 490,000 chapter downloads on the JSTOR
> platform.
>
> "We are pleased that scientists around the world are using the content
> of our approximately 100 publishing partners to such an extent." says
> Tom Mosterd, Discovery & Account Manager at KU. "It is exciting to see
> that libraries are committed to ensuring that OA books are made
> accessible to a global audience, thereby playing a crucial role in
> reaching this key milestone.’’
>
> Financed by libraries worldwide, nearly 1,000 titles have already been
> made available through Knowledge Unlatched, and several hundred titles
> are added every year.
>
> About Knowledge Unlatched: Knowledge Unlatched (KU) offers every
> reader worldwide free access to scientific content. The online
> platform provides libraries worldwide with a central point of contact
> to support Open Access models of leading publishers and new Open
> Access initiatives.
>
> Contact:
>
> Philipp Hess, Publicity & Communications, Knowledge Unlatched
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
>