From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2016 19:06:10 -0500

How many students actually need a whole book to do an assignment? It's
likely a chapter or two would suffice. If chapters in all books were given
DOIs, then a service like Get It Now could readily fill this need, as it
does for journal articles now, at much less cost and with much greater
speed and efficiency than ILL.

Sandy Thatcher


From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2016 07:14:42 -0400
>
> I had a discussion recently with a colleague working for a major
> regional library consortium and we were thinking about alternatives to
> ILL that might have a lower cost. I pointed out to her that two major
> players in POD had very large plants in our state, and that perhaps an
> alternative to ILL could involve printing and drop shipping direct to
> the patron, perhaps even direct to their home or campus office. The
> ILL editions could be discouraged from returning to the marketplace
> (as an incentive for publishers to participate) by creating blank
> template paperback covers that would be completed by metadata, and
> rather than using the four color design used on the commercial edition
> of the paperback, the POD vendor would print a simple black and white
> cover, with the title and author on the cover and the spine, the name
> of the library that triggered the purchase on the front or back, the
> call number on the spine, barcode on the back, and anything else a
> library might want to potentially return the print book to the
> collection after the patron is finished with it.
>
> It's kind of a pie in the sky -maybe a print version of DDA- but there
> are POD vendors with print files for millions of books on their POD
> servers, it would seem you'd only need to connect a few more dots to
> get that platform to start efficiently serving our ILL audiences.
> Maybe we could call it ILL Prime. Of course, this wouldn't exactly
> help with the mailroom crisis.
>
> Best,
> Tony Sanfilippo
>
>
> Tony Sanfilippo, Director
> Ohio State University Press
> 180 Pressey Hall
> 1070 Carmack Road
> Columbus, OH 43210-1002
> ohiostatepress.org
>