From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2014 07:37:10 -0500

If that were the case, then some books presumably would have sold ONLY
to libraries. In my experience in the business over 45 years, at two
university presses,  I have never known there to be a book that did
not sell a single copy to individual buyers.  And most, of course,
sold more copies to individuals than to libraries, especially after
library sales had plummeted from the thousands to the low hundreds.

Sandy Thatcher



At 12:17 AM -0400 6/3/14, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:12:32 +0000


>Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful
>lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not?

Because in the case of many of these books, virtually no one needs to use
them or wants to read them. They are purchased by institutions in the
(mistaken) hope that they will prove useful to the scholars or students
those institutions serve, but instead they end up sitting on shelves and
are never (or virtually never) used. This is not necessarily any
reflection on the quality of the scholarship they contain Ð it©–s a
reflection on their relevance, which is, very often, so narrow and limited
as to make them effectively useless to anyone except the authors (whose
tenure bids they made possible).

Please note: I am not saying this is the case for all scholarly
monographs, only that it is the case for too many of those that are
published and then purchased by libraries.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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