Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 12:27:15 -0500
From: Vince Jenkins (Maricopa County Community Coll. District)
<vince.jenkins_at_domail.maricopa.edu>
Subject: Traditional vendors vs. local bookstores
I need a quick overview of academic acquisitions depts.' use of local
bookstores and online vendors vs. traditional book jobbers. (And
please bear with me for just a couple of minutes.)
We're a district of 10 community college libraries and a centralized
tech. services center, including an acquisitions unit that processes the
colleges' purchase orders. We use a variety of established vendors
(some for many years) who give us discounts of up to ca. 30%, but
average about 12%, in accordance with their responses to invitations to
bid for our business. We are located in a urban area (Phoenix, Ariz.).
Our annual expenditures are in 7 figures.
When our libraries see how inexpensive local bookstores or online
suppliers *can* be for certain current or popular materials, they
compare (however unfairly) those prices with the discounts from our
traditional vendors for academic and hard-to-find titles and conclude
that our traditional vendors' discounts are unsatisfactory. Local
bookstores cannot fulfill all the needs of a community college library,
but it's hard to find accounts of other libraries' discounts from
traditional vendors--we're never sure that the discount structures we
get are as good as possible. And they do suffer when compared, solely
by cost, to local prices.
Are we following archaic acquisitions practices in sticking with our
traditional vendors? Should we ask them for significantly better deals
even though they already operate on slender margins?
I would appreciate your suggestions or experiences concerning the mix of
established book vendors and local or online interests used for your
acquisitions.
Thanks.
***********************************************************************
Vince Jenkins
Coordinator, Library Technical Services
Information Technology Services
Maricopa County Community College District
Tempe, Ariz. 85281-6942
(ph) 480.731.8774
(fx) 480.731.8787
vince.jenkins_at_domail.maricopa.edu
Received on Tue Nov 26 2002 - 19:52:16 EST