From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 01:44:08 +0000


>Those prices will continue to go up until nobody buys the books any
>more.  Then they won't be published.  That's where we are heading.

The thing that concerns me for UPs is that this may be where we¹re heading
regardless of what happens with prices. What we¹re seeing here, I think,
is not just the relatively elastic nature of demand for scholarly books
(³Raise your prices? Whatever, we¹ll just buy less²), but also a formerly
irrational system ‹ one where books were sold in numbers that had nothing
to do with the amount of demand for them ‹ gradually becoming more and
more rational as sales start to come more and more into line with demand.
That¹s what PDA/DDA does ‹ it starts to expose what has, up until
recently, been largely hidden by the library¹s traditional just-in-case
collection-building practices: the actual amount of reader/researcher
demand for scholarly books. And the results would be pretty terrifying to
me if I were a publisher.

The simple reality, I think, is that an awful lot of these books probably
shouldn¹t be published ‹ at least, not in the sense that we¹ve
traditionally understood that word.

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