It is, of course, a milestone that Knowledge Unlatched (KU) reached over one million downloads in 2018, but does anyone know what these figures mean? A download is a crude metric, comparable to the page view in consumer Web advertising. No one in the advertising industry uses anything so primitive any more. It is perplexing to me that the scholarly community would use measures less sophisticated than those used to try to sell us a Pez dispenser or a trip to Las Vegas.
It is an article of faith in the OA community that the high price of scholarly materials (invoke Elsevier's 40% margins here) deny access to researchers and the general public. This must be at least partly true, as we read all the time about monographs priced at $40 or $90 and even, last week, a college textbook priced at $1,000. But going from a high price to no price at all--OA is free to the end-user, after all--is an odd bit of methodology. When we measure downloads instead of sales, we move from the demand economy to the supply economy. This is apples and oranges.
The question I have is how many downloads KU or any other OA book service would have if there were a charge of $1 per download, thus marrying the demand and supply-side economies. Would the number of downloads drop to 900,000? 500,000? 15? We won't know until we try.
It will be argued that even $1 is too much for some people. This is true. But where does the assumption that everyone is penniless come from? Surely there are some people who have downloaded books from KU who have a Netflix subscription, drive a Honda, and stopped off at Starbucks in the past month? A price of $1 download would help us find out what needs KU and other OA book publishers are serving and begin the hard task of measuring the real value these services provide.
Joe Esposito