Librarians at my institution experience a great deal of confusion and frustration regarding what print and e-book content will be available, when, and under what conditions. In particular selectors are looking for some guidance that will allow them to predict which university press titles will be available as print and/or e-books and explanations for why some e-titles from the same publisher will be on different platforms or function differently in terms of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions even when they are on the same platform.
Assuming that librarians and patrons elsewhere also are experiencing the same confusions and frustrations, I thought it would useful to share the following overview prepared for UNC Chapel Hill Libraries outlining key factors that influence the what/when/why of e-books for the university press titles that are core to academic library collections.
Given the low and declining levels of traditional scholarly monograph sales, university presses increasing depend on the following publishing streams in order to remain economically viable:
* Trade titles, which are scholarly works that appeal to larger audiences and thereby generate significant sales beyond the academy;
* Regional titles, which often are books that are less scholarly and even non-scholarly but appeal to a larger audience interested in topics related to the state or region where the presses are located;
* Mass market titles, which are not scholarly and generate large sales to individuals, e.g. UNC Press Mama Dips Family Cookbook;
* Course-adoption titles, which are scholarly books that are regularly assigned in classes and generate significant and ongoing sales;
* Textbooks, which are regularly assigned in classes and generate significant and ongoing sales;
* Reference titles and reference-type publications such as Oxford Handbooks that cost more than the typical scholarly monograph.
As a rule the categories of university presses titles indicated above:
* Are not available as e-books;
* Are not released as e-books until much later, after print sales decline;
* Are released only as single simultaneous user titles and are available only as leased titles via aggregators such as ebrary, with the press retaining the right to withdraw them upon demand;
* Are sold to libraries but only as single simultaneous user titles with many digital rights management (DRM) restrictions that limit what users can do with them so as not the endanger print sales; or
* Are vended only outside the main e-books publishing model and often at much higher prices than their print analogs, e.g., the major Oxford reference series and Cambridge multi-volume histories.
Because of the complexity of e-book publishing economics, the library relies on its major vendors to define these streams of print and e-book output in terms of profiling capabilities, including those titles not available as e-books or those that must be purchased outside normal channels so as to ensure complete monographic output coverage and keep unintended duplication to a minimum. At the same time, at this stage in the evolution of e-publishing no vendor consistently is able to identify which specific title will be available as an e-books or when as soon as selectors would like.
Luke Swindler
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Luke Swindler Coordinator of General Collections
Davis Library CB #3918 swindler_at_email.unc.edu<mailto:swindler_at_email.unc.edu>
University of North Carolina TEL (919-962-1095)
Chapel Hill, NC 27514 USA FAX (919-962-4450)
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"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. Charles Darwin
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Received on Tue Aug 28 2012 - 14:10:10 EDT