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 [log in to unmask]