Very good information.
Two caveats:
1) DDA Records delivered to library catalogues should be counted (in one way or another) as 'acquisitions' - authors call publishers asking about royalties because their books ‘sold’ so many copies based on WorldCat holdings, which turn out to be in many cases 'DDA Records', not real acquisitions. DDA Records (not purchases) are an important category to count and is related in some way to declining book sales.
2) DDA, Standing orders, Orders, and more and more eCollections, are underpinned by Approval Plans (how do you think those billions of DDA Records are identified and shipped to libraries?). Saying that just a tiny % of acquisitions are via ‘Approval Plan’ misrepresents the acquisitions process. It would be more accurate to describe the category as 'automatically-shipped books' or something similar.
Another (related) question is how do Evidence-Based Acquisition collections fit into the puzzle in terms of content available vs content acquired vs declining publisher sales?
One thing rarely mentioned, but absolutely true, is that there are more books 'available' in libraries than ever before (count the DDA Records!). This reflects a fundamental change in how libraries are supplying content to their institutions.
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 19:27:00 -0700
Every library will have its own acquisition practices, evolved in some isolation in response to local circumstances and opportunities. A new Ithaka S-R report uses the statistical possibilities of a common LSP system to take a first look at what can be known of current book-buying by a broad but thin sample of libraries (54 institutions of widely varying sizes and missions).
Everything about the report is necessarily preliminary and subject to change when the authors (Esposito and Schonfeld) go on to a larger data set. Do Gobi (ex-YBP) and Amazon really hold 71% of the market share? (The top 10 vendors include ones whose shares go down to under 1% -- which makes me ask, how big is this market?) Are firm orders still really the order of the day? And is DDA intrinsically hard to track? The questions are interesting and important and whet the appetite for what can be learned from a much deeper dive. The URL (short report, read online or download PDF):http://www.sr.ithaka.org/publi
cations/library-acquisition- patterns-preliminary-findings/
Jim O'DonnellASU