Date: Fri, 18 May 2018 11:18:41 -0400

Jim,

I think you are conflating two issues: inclusive access and textbook aggregations.

Inclusive access (I dislike the term) is just as you say. Students pay for texts when they sign up for courses. They get lower prices (on digital texts), while publishers get a near-guarantee that every student will buy a copy of the book. Publishers can make more money with this model than they can from the traditional model, where students independently choose whether or not to purchase a book. I wrote about this here:

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/03/27/reduce-cost-college-textbooks/

What Cengage is doing is trying out the "Netflix for books" model and marrying it to inclusive access. In "Netflix for books" you pay one price for a large collection. You may use one book or dozens, but the price is the same. Cengage is attempting to get their aggregation to be accepted in an institution's inclusive access program.

The gripe the authors have with Cengage is that they claim Cengage never negotiated with them on the royalties for books that are included in aggregations. How would that royalty be determined? For the sale of a single copy of a book, an author might receive 10% of the publisher's net receipts. But for an aggregation? How is usage of the aggregation to be allocated to all the authors? Can Cengage include an author's work in such an aggregation without the author's express permission?

The not surprising fact is that publishers could make more from inclusive access than they do with legacy models, but authors may make less. Time will tell.

I do believe that libraries will increasingly lead institutional negotiations for inclusive access. I am involved with such a project now, and I don't believe it will be my last.

Joe Esposito

Joseph J. Esposito
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On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 11:14 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2018 20:06:44 -0700

The price of textbooks and the consequent burden on students is a hot topic in higher education, leading both to initiatives to expand the usage of Open Educational Resources (OERs – roughly open-access textbooks) and to experiments in different pricing models by which publishers offer e-textbooks. One commonly discussed model is a ‘subscription’ or ‘site license’ to attain ‘inclusive access’ by charging a single price to an institution for access to all the students in a given course. This usually leads to lower cost-per-student and (and this is what academics like) much broader access to textbooks by students where now many choose not to buy textbooks they find too expensive.

So now a publisher is facing blowback from textbook authors:

https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2018/05/16/textbook-authors-sue-cengage-over-subscription-model#.Wvx3HR7yzeA.twitter

Without knowing anywhere near enough facts of the case, I think it’s permitted to wonder whether a lower price guaranteed for a larger number of students might not in some cases bring equal revenue to publishers and authors over a current situation where non-purchase, reliance on second-hand texts, and the like already brings less than the notional maximum revenue that would come from 100% of students paying retail price.

My view is that libraries will be increasingly pressed to engage in this space, whatever models emerge as preferable.

Jim O’Donnell

Arizona State University