From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:18:17 -0500

The idea of using a free online version of a book in order to drive
print sales is short-sighted. As ebooks get better (they already are
much better than in 2007 when the Kindle launched) the line between
the digital version and the print version erodes. What then? Do we
deliberately make the digital version as bad as we can to keep the
print business going?

Personally, I read both print and digital books. This is not a
religious issue for me.

Open access is not the answer. See above. Also consider this: Why must
the entire book be OA if the point is to drive sales for print? Why
not experiment? Begin by making every page but one available online.
Then drop two pages, then three. At some point you will have
determined what is the optimal number of pages to be OA to drive
sales.

As for undergraduates and the use of books, our intrepid moderator
published a piece some years ago entitled "BYTES: Books You Teach Each
Semester." You can find it here:

https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BYTES-AOkerson2001Stf.pdf

University press publishing is a very big piece of the undergraduate curriculum.

Finally, I hope everyone on this list has had the opportunity to read
the piece in the NY Times yesterday on college syllabi by Karaganis
and McClure:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html

I have been probing this database all day--it beats shoveling snow.
Some of the books that appear over and over at campus after campus
will surprise you.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Jan 24, 2016 at 7:27 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2016 11:11:29 -0500
>
> To that I might add that participating in Evidence(Patron/Demand)
> Driven Acquisitions seems to be shaping out to be a model that does
> exactly what Carey hypothetically considered, giving away free content
> to libraries specifically for the purpose of discovery. I haven't
> found a single university press earning any significant income from
> the model, yet in the rare instances when analytics are shared about
> usage of our content in those models, we're looking at exponential
> increases in usage of our books.
>
> My concern about just giving libraries a free digital copy of every
> book we produce is related to what I think makes up a significant
> amount of usage of our content, and that is use by undergraduate
> students. We like to pretend that what we publish is so arcane and
> erudite that undergraduates aren't sufficiently prepared to understand
> it, only serious scholars, but I've got seven undergraduate interns
> and when I asked if they've ever cited a university press book in
> their papers, a majority have claimed they have. I asked the same
> question of the interns at the UP I used to work for over a year ago
> and got the same results.
>
> When questioned further about how they discover the appropriate
> passage to cite, Google or occasionally Google Scholar is mentioned,
> and if the resulting content is part of their library's catalog,
> they're seamlessly shuttled to the passage that supports their paper's
> argument without needing to read any more than that page, maybe the
> next. If that content is part of a DDA program the library is
> participating in, I strongly suspect that kind of usage will not
> trigger a purchase, yet it is exactly the kind of usage that
> publishers were compensated for back when library acquisitions
> approached the collection with a just-in-case philosophy, purchasing
> physical books.
>
> Granted, university press interns probably represent a self-selecting
> sample, typically brighter than your average college student, but as
> we watch the library market for any format of UP content in a
> freefall, I've got to wonder if there isn't some sort of connection
> between certain kinds of electronic access and the apparent collapse
> of that market segment.
>
> I would be more comfortable with embracing Carey's hypothetical
> (ebooks are investments in discovery) if there were actually a
> mechanism for the scholar or even the student to purchase a print copy
> directly at the point of discovery. If it's through the library's
> catalog or accessed using the library's license, there isn't.
>
> Meanwhile, there's ProjectMuse and JSTOR, which provide DRM-free PDFs
> of our ebooks, which is also likely to be causing libraries to remove
> UP content from their approval programs, further exacerbating the
> collapse of the library market revenue stream. I figure Jim isn't
> seeing a critical mass of what his patrons need from those
> collections, because they're not specifically mentioned by him, but
> there aren't any significant restrictions placed on those files at
> all, other than they're not flowable and you have to download each
> chapter. Again, great for undergraduate use, and eroding this time the
> textbook market, yet still no option for a print purchase if it's the
> point of discovery for either scholars or students.
>
> Another important question is the ethical issue at the other side of
> file functionality, why aren't are ebooks more accessible for those
> with disabilities? Boy, I'd love to sink some money into embedding
> that into the workflow, but I don't have that money (see above),
> there's no market reason to do it, and thus far, most requests for
> better files can be handled relatively cheaply on a case-by-case
> basis. Still, I'm more bothered by not doing that upfront for
> everything we produce than I am about the plethora of platforms and
> FUBARed functionality. As long as our parent institutions insist we
> engage with markets and offset almost all of our costs with sales,
> then I've got to play by the rules of the market, and the platforms
> that dominate them. For years OSUP sold DRM-free PDFs on CDs to anyone
> who wanted them. Not a single library ever bought one. So perhaps
> libraries also need the platforms and their associated vendors, and
> the services, metadata, and efficiencies they provide.
>
> Best,
>
> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
> Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
> ohiostatepress.org
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 10:08 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > From: "Newman, Carey C." <[log in to unmask]>
> > Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2016 02:58:51 +0000
> >
> > I would like to accept Jim's invitation to indicate what at least one publisher thinks about the (crappy) way their ebooks are displayed by various vendors.  The short answer: It doesn't bother me one bit; in fact, in the end, poor display features may prove desirable.  Let me explain this small irony.
> >
> > I believe, strongly, that all ebooks do is aid in discovery process for academics in the humanities.   About two ago years I put my staff in the conference to discuss one question: why shouldn't we give away all the tiles we publish to each and every library who wants them?  Forget selling to libraries; we should give our books to libraries just to be sure that each and every library that wanted one would have a copy. Why?  Because if it is in the a library's "system" scholars (both of the student and professional variety) would be able to find our books.  One can't find what's not there.  But in found, and if deemed useful, the scholar will go buy the book.  The rather animated discussion that afternoon led to what proved to be a huge paradigm shift for us: strategically, we began to separate discovery (on the one hand) from delivery (on the other).  Tactically, this discussion freed us, then, to embrace a decidedly pragmatic set of perspectives regarding e vendors (they are just for discovery; and forget about trying to make money from them).
> >
> > Once we had separated discovery from delivery, we next saw more clearly the third piece of the puzzle -- use.  Use (the way a scholar employs our books) has to be separated from delivery and discovery.  Indeed, we have spent countless hours thinking critically about how a scholar discovers, acquires and then uses our books.  The more we considered these three pieces of the chain the more we driven to the empirical data and to our own ingenuity
> >
> > This means I don't care about how our books get displayed.  All I care about is that the meta data and a TOC and, maybe, a page or two can be displayed.  Scholarly frustration with various e vendor displays only reinforces the fact that scholars love e for discovery but hate it for use.
> >
> > So, shrug.  While I am not crazy that someone might think we had something to do with how badly our books might look, even poor display leads to discovery, and discovery leads to use, and use leads to purchase.
> >
> > Carey C. Newman
> > Director
> > Baylor University Press
> > One Bear Place # 97363
> > Baylor University
> > Waco, TX 76798
> > baylorpress.com