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 [log in to unmask]