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
1070 Carmack Road
Columbus, OH 43210-1002
ohiostatepress.org
(614) 292-7818

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
> 254-710-3522 (o)
> baylorpress.com