From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> Date: Fri, 6 Jun 2014 13:52:58 +0000 Rick, you have made a very serious and sweeping claim that "an awful lot of scholarly books probably shouldn't be published." When asked for evidence you have referred to your subjective impressions and well-documented declines in circulation at large research universities, and concluded that anyone who disagrees with you should just ignore and dismiss your claims. That seems out of character for a sober-minded discussion about the future of publishing and curating and disseminating scholarly research. Fair enough. It has occurred to me that I might actually have a way of tracking circulation in my library by publisher type, and I’m going to start exploring that idea here with my staff today. Hopefully I’ll be able to provide some data that suggest the shape of the problem I believe exists — at least in the library context. I'm hoping that librarians and scholarly publishers and book acquisitions and collections development services (YBPet al.) can work together to come up with real data and evidence that might suggest the best way forward for our collective efforts. The problem isn’t “coming up with" real data — the data are easily available. The problem is that it’s held by publishers, and publishers don’t want to share it. Richard, you’re the director of a major university press, so you’re in an excellent position to help move us in the direction you propose. Would you be willing to share with the group the title-level sales data for GUP’s 2012 imprints? We don’t need to know the titles; you could simply report them as “Title 1,” “Title 2,” etc., though knowing publication type would help (so we can see the difference between sales for scholarly monographs and other types of book), as would some indication of at least the broad disciplinary area of each title. For what it’s worth, I’m currently working with another UP on some data that I think will help shed a more rigorous light on the question of what percentage of UP publications are purchased by libraries, with breakdowns by book type and by discipline. Watch for something in the Scholarly Kitchen within the next few weeks, fingers crossed. --- Rick Anderson Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library, University of Utah [log in to unmask]