Subject: Decisions on acquiring books, especially university press
monographs
From: Mary Summerfield <mcs_at_press.uchicago.edu>
For the last five years I have been director of business development
and planning for the University of Chicago Press. Previously I worked
with the Columbia University Libraries, Academic Information Systems,
and Press on a variety of scholarly communications issues, including
strategic planning for the digital library of the future, the Columbia
Online Books Evaluation Project, and related issues as well as
exploring how better to serve the scholarly community.
I would like to hear from the members of this list how you think about
collection development re scholarly monographs of the sort university
presses produce. I'm sure you've all heard our laments about the
falling sales for such books. We need to understand how we can serve
the scholarly community and break even on such books.
For several years we have noted that some libraries will purchase the
paperback version of a book if hardcover and paper are issues
simultaneously and the price differential is even modestly greater
than the cost of a rebind. How commonly is that the practice?
At a university press meeting earlier this month one of the
participants reported that he had heard at the recent MLA meeting that
libraries were now telling their vendors that they would wait to buy
the paperback edition even if it were coming out a year or more later
than the hardcover. I would like to understand how widely this is the
practice now and if it is seen to be a likely strategy in the future.
Any other thoughts on how the scholarly community can work in concert
to publish scholarly monographs, especially first books, would be
greatly appreciated.
Mary Summerfield
Director of Business Development and Planning
University of Chicago Press
Received on Thu Mar 23 2006 - 02:24:20 EST