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