Speakers: Michael Levine-Clark & Christopher C. Brown, University of Denver
If someone checks out a physical book, do you know if they really read it? If someone accesses an ebook, do you know if they really read it? If a faculty member has a print book checked out for a year, is it more valuable to them than an ebook they access several times?
Sometimes, the title format in the catalog record can influence what is found and used. Vendor records can sometimes have series names in the beginning of the title, which the cataloger would not do with print.
ISBNs don’t match/merge easily. His solution was to remove the check digit and the prefix, and match on the “ISBN 9”. This works, mostly, but another solution was needed. Ended up having to do a lot of matching to pull together useful comparison of circulation and download data to compare e versus p use.
They found that when both formats were available, a little over half of the print books were used, and less than half of the ebooks were used. Of the titles used in both formats, there was higher use all around. The lowest level of use came from ebooks where the print was not checked out at all.
Use of electronic books may lead to print, but use of print doesn’t seem to lead to electronic. It may be that if dual format is higher it may be that good books get used no matter what format they are in. It may also be that e-discovery drives p-use.
Future considerations: the role of discovery and the role of ILL in a demand for print when electronic is available.
This year I participated in the “set your own challenge” book reading thinger on Goodreads. Initially, I set mine at 25, as a little stretch goal from my average of 19 books per year over the past four years. But, I was doing so well in the early part of the year that I increased it to 30. The final total was 27, but I’m part-way through several books that I just didn’t have time to finish as the clocked ticked down to the end of the year.
What worked well for me this time: audiobooks. I read more of them than paper books this year, and it forced me to expand to a variety of topics and styles I would not have patience for in print.
What failed me this time: getting hung up on a book I felt obligated to finish, but did not excite me to continue on it, so I kept avoiding it. To be fair, part of what turned me off was on disc two, I accidentally set my car’s CD player to shuffle. This is great for adding some variety to music listening, but it made for confusing and abrupt transitions from one topic/focus to another.
I read a lot of non-fiction, because that works better in audio format for me, and I read more audio than printed (either in paper or electronic) books. For 2013, I’d like to read more fiction, which means reading more in print. Which means making time for my “must read the whole book cover to cover” method of reading fiction.
“One size fits all. Welcome to the 80’s” by Stephan van Es
Speaker: Anne McKee, GWLA
SERU was heavily involved in putting this session together. SERU hopes to put away with the madness of licensing and come up with mutually agreeable terms.
Most libraries purchase ebooks in order to make them available 24/7 to their users. While they haven’t grown to proportion sizes larger than print in library collections, they are heading there.
Researchers like ebooks because they don’t have to return them, and are more accessible than print books in the developing world. Students appreciate the ease of accessibility, particularly distance learnings, but given the choice they would take print over e every time. Libraries like them because there are easier/better ways of assessing usage and value to their users, but there are licensing and DRM headaches.
Speaker: Adam Chesler, Business Expert Press / Momentum Press
He has worked for large publishers, but now works for a small, new publisher.
What’s hard for a new publisher to break into the library market? Creating awareness, providing value — acquisition librarians are already overwhelmed with sales pitches via email. Authors may be wary of working with an unknown outlet when there are so many other options. They have to figure out ways to do this creatively.
Gaining budget shares in library materials budgets is challenging, where established publishers have long-standing space. Setting up trials for libraries and following up on them is challenging when one person is responsible for every business/science library in North America. “If you set up a trial, it would be much better to tell me to go to hell than ignore me.”
What’s easy? Nothing.
Well, being an e-only publisher means they don’t have responsibility for a print legacy that needs to be converted to online. That’s easy. They also have more freedom to experiment, particularly with pricing models. And SERU. That’s easy. They also don’t have their own platform, so they make the books available on established providers libraries are already comfortable using.
Speaker: Kimberly Steinle, Duke University Press
When they created the ebook side of the press, they modeled it after the ejournal side, with similar tiered pricing. They also work with the other ebook platforms and their pricing and licensing models.
While the ejournal collection sales are significant, they were surprised to find that ebook collections were not as popular as individual title sales.
They thought selling ebooks would be easy, since they already had existing relationships. MARC records, pricing, technology — not as easy as they thought. Squeezing the ebook model into the ejournal model doesn’t quite fit.
It’s easy to set up multiple sales models, but harder to get information about who the customers are and using that to make business decisions.
They’re a little worried that if they give up DRM it will impact print sales, but it’s obviously pretty unpopular and they do want the books to be used. They’re thinking about future formats — EPUB3, HTML5 — they need to keep up. They’re thinking about new ways to sell the content, and increasing the number of platforms and partners they work with.
Speaker: Bob Boissey, Springer
Serials come first at Springer (because they’re 80% of your materials budget). But, he’ll talk about ebooks today.
The STM publisher’s preference is to sell ebooks in packages directly to libraries, but there are other models based on library or patron selection that have some appeal. Eventually, market forces will probably mean they’ll have to do something with PDA.
In the post-PDA world, maybe we stop selecting and make sure that our systems are solid for allowing our users to find the best, most relevant content in an un-scoped collection. Might also mean giving up some of our concepts about what librarianship is.
The easy stuff: Libraries are the traditional purchasers of scholarly books, and publishers know how many print books we’ve purchased from them in the past. Many eresource issues were resolved with ejournals. SERU. The volume discount approach to selling ebook packages can work if the per unit cost is low, the percentage of portfolio used is high, and the spend is commensurate with print spend, but with more titles. Include textbooks and reference books in the package. Remove DRM, pair with liberal use and ILL permissions.
The not so easy, but not so hard stuff: Editors and authors have not had an easy time coming to terms with ebooks, much like print on demand. Discovery layer for ebooks is still the catalog, and it’s not down to the full text quite yet. Tablets are great for ebooks, and as they get more popular on campuses, ebooks get used more. Might have to give up the concept of book as a full thing and be okay with chapter-level reading. Most scholarly books outside of the humanities and social sciences are not read as a whole.
Hypothesis: Rapid publishing output and a wide disparity of publishing sources and formats has made finding the right content at the right time harder for librarians.
Old model of publishing was based on scarcity, with publishers as mediators for everything. Publishers aren’t in the business of publishing books, they are in the business of selling books, so they really focus more on what books they think readers want to read. Ebook self publishing overcomes many of the limitations of traditional publishing.
Users want flexibility. Authors want readers. Libraries want books accessible to anyone, and they deliver readership.
The tools for self publishing are now free and available to anyone around the world. The printing press is now in the cloud. Smashwords will release about 100,000 new books in 2012, and they are hitting best seller lists at major retailers and the New York Times.
How do you curate this flood? Get involved at the beginning. Libraries need to also promote a culture of authorship. Connect local writers with local readers. Give users the option to publish to the library. Emulate the best practices of the major retailers. Readers are the new curators, not publishers.
Smashwords Library Direct is a new service they are offering.
[Missed the first part as I sought a more comfortable seat.]
They look for zero margin distribution solutions by connecting publishers and libraries. They do it by running crowd-funded pledge drive for every book offer, much like Kickstarter. They’ve been around since May 2012.
For example, Oral Literature in Africa was published by Oxford UP in 1970, and it’s now out of print with the rights reverted to the author. The rights holder set a target amount needed to make the ebook available free to anyone. The successful book is published with a Creative Commons license and made available to anyone via archive.org.
Unglue.it verifies that the rights holder really has the rights and that they can create an ebook. The rights holder retains copyright, and the ebook format is neutral. Books are distributed globally, and distribution rights are not restricted to anyone. No DRM is allowed, so the library ebook vendors are having trouble adopting these books.
This is going to take a lot of work to make it happen, if we just sit and watch it won’t. Get involved.
Why would a library want to become a publisher? It incentivizes the open access model. It provides services that scholars need and value. It builds collaborations with partners around the world. It improves efficiencies and encourages innovation in scholarly communications.
Began by collaborating with the university press, but it focuses more on books and monographs than journals. The library manages several self-archiving repositories, and they got into journal publishing because the OJS platform looked like something they could handle.
They targeted diminishing circulation journals that the university was already invested in (authors, researchers, etc.) and helped them get online to increase their circulation. They did not charge the editors/publishers of the journals to do it, and encouraged them to move to open access.
“Holbeach e-book marker [old photo]” by Paul StainthorpSpeaker: Ken Roberts
Background: Canadian Urban Libraries Council (CULC) member libraries serve 70% of the Canadian population, and 98% of the circulation of materials. eBound is the Canadian eContent distribution arm for more than 100 Canadian publishers.
Publishers really needed a purchase model, not a licensing model, because their contracts with authors talked about sales. Libraries, on the other hand, preferred a license model. There was also some concern from the publishers that rights would be implemented in the way they were intended. And, they needed a third party partner to find a vendor who could handle the responsibility of housing and mediating the circulation of the ebooks, which is where eBound came in.
The purchase model seems a bit complex, and focuses primarily on the publisher’s back catalog at a very low rate per title ($10) sold in large blocks to the entire system. This addresses the publisher’s concern that the midlist authors aren’t getting exposure in libraries. And, if the circulation is low, the price drops after a period of time. The titles have a “worn out” rate of approximately 40 circulations. Some titles can be purchased at a higher rate for preservation purposes and would be DRM-free.
They expect to roll out the vendor side systems next spring, and once that is settled, then it would be rolled out to CULC members.
Speakers: Michael Levine-Clark & Christopher C. Brown
In Dec 2008, they added all the print and ebooks for university press publisher A, and the duplication is primarily in the frontlist. They did the same for an STM publisher B in Jan 2009.
The have gathered circ data that is compiled annually. Comparing ebooks and print books is like comparing apples and oranges. pBook checkouts are for an extended period of time, and we have no way of knowing how many times they view a chapter or copy a page, the measures of ebook uses.
What a cataloger thinks a title is and what a vendor thinks a title is are two different things. How do you merge use and circ data if the comparison points may vary? Solution was to create an ISBN9, by stripping away the first three numbers of ISBN13 and the last number of the ISBN10, which worked pretty well.
Publisher A had about a third of the ebook titles used, but publisher B had only about 2% used. For print, two thirds of Publisher A titles were used and a little over a third of Publisher B were used.
The two most heavily used ebooks from the UP were probably used for a course. The print books were only checked out a few times, but there were thousands of uses for the e. For publisher B, they were used less but with no print circ. For the top two print, the UP ebook was used some, but not even as many as the checkouts, and for the STM print books, the e wasn’t touched. Overall, there was a high rate of use for both formats of a single title, I think (need to study the slides a little more).
They saw increased checkouts of print books over the time period, but it is inconclusive and could be related to the volume of titles purchased. There isn’t a clear impact of e on p or p on e use, but there does seem to be a connection, since when both formats are used, the rate is higher.
Might there be differences by subject or date? What sort of measure of time in a book can we look at? How does discovery play in?
Questions/Comments:
Date & time of usage rather than one year might tell more of a story.
Agree about the discoverability challenge, and have encouraged them to put in chapter level data in their catalog records to create their own discovery with the MARC record. Full text searching in eBrary is great, but get it in the catalog along with the pbooks.
Did you consider the format of the ebook? Some publishers give PDF chapter downloads, which may account for lower use of Publisher B.
What about ILLs? They get included in the circ stats and aren’t separated.
How much of Chris’s time was spent on this? Hard to tell. Was ongoing over time as other things took priority.
How will this affect your collection development practices moving forward? Trying to give users a choice of format.
The consortia TRLN began in the 1930’s as a shared collection development strategy for print materials. They share a catalog, print repository, approval vendor database, and they collaborate on large and individual purchases. This was really easy in the print world. As of 2006, only 8% of print books were duplicated across all three schools (Duke, NCSU, & UNC-CH).
Then ebooks arrived. And duplication began to grow exponentially. Many of the collections can’t be lent to the consortia libraries, and as a result, everyone is having to buy copies rather than relying on the shared collections of the past.
Speaker: Michael Zeoli, YBP
YBP has seen a small increase in ebooks purchased by academic libraries, and a much larger decrease in the purchase of print books, despite acquiring Blackwell last year. This is true of the TRLN consoritum as well.
About 20% of the top 24 publishers are not working with PDA or consortia, and about half that do are not doing both. Zeoli tries to meet with publishers and show them the data that it’s in their best interest to make ebooks available at the same time as print, and that they need to also be include in PDA and consortia arrangements.
Consortias want PDA, but not all the content is available. Ebook aggregators have some solutions, but missing the workflow components. Publisher role is focused on content, not workflow. PDA alone for consortia is a disincentive for publishers, it ignores practical integration of appropriate strategies and tools, and it’s a headache for technical staff.
A hybrid model might look like Oxford University Press. There are digital collections, but not everything is available that way, so you need options for single-title purchases through several models. This requires the consortium, the book seller, and the publisher to work together.
Speaker: Rebecca Seger, OUP
The publishers see many challenges, not the least of which is the continued reliance on print books in the humanities and social sciences, although there is a demand for both formats. Platforms are not set up to enable sharing of ebooks, and would require a significant investment in time and resources to implement.
They have done a pilot program with MARLI to provide access to both the OUP platform and the books they do not host but make available through eBrary. [Sorry — not sure how this turned out — got distracted by a work email query. They’ll be presenting results at Charleston.]
Questions:
How do MARLI institutions represent access for the one copy housed at NYU? Can download through Oxford site. YBP can provide them. The challenge is for the books that appear on eBrary a month later, so they are using a match number to connect the new URL with the old record.
And more questions. I keep zoning out during this part of the presentations. Sorry.
They did an analysis of their circulating print collection to see what areas or books would have the equivalent uses to trigger a purchase if it were electronic. Only 2% of their entire circulating collection met the trigger point to where it would be more cost effective to purchase than to go with a short term loan option.
They announced the DDA trial, but deliberately did not tell the users that it would incur cost, just that it was there. They would pay short term loans up to the sixth use, and then they would purchase the title. The year of usage gave them an idea of what adjustments needed to be made to the trigger point. Eventually, the cost flattens out at the sixth use, and the difference between continuing to pay STLs and buying the book is small.
They were able to identify if the triggered purchase book was used by a single person (repeatedly), by a class (several people), or a mix of both, and it was split in almost even thirds.
They determined that 6 was a good trigger. The STL cost ended up being an average of 10.5% of the list cost. DDA doesn’t have to break the bank, and was lower than expected. The number of titles in the catalog didn’t have as much to do with the amount spent as the FTE. It also lead to questioning the value of firm ordering ebooks rather than letting DDA cover it
However, this is only 11 months of data, and more longitudinal studies are needed.
Speaker: Lea Currie
They loaded records for slip books, and then the users have the option to request them at various levels of speed. The users are notified when the print book arrives, and the full MARC record is not loaded until the book is returned.
They saved quit a bit of money per month using this method, and 88% of the titles purchased circulated. Only about 75% of their ILL titles will circulate, to put that into perspective.
Of course, librarians still had some concerns. First, the library catalog is not an adequate tool for discovering titles. Faculty were concerned about individuals doing massive requests for personal research topics. Also, faculty do not want to be selectors for the libraries. [ORLY? They want the books they want when they want them — how is that different?]
The next DDA project was for ebooks, using the typical trigger points. They convinced the Social Science and Sci/Tech librarians to put a price cap for DDA titles. Up to a certain price, the book would be included in the approval plan, between a range it would go in DDA, and then above that range it would require the librarian’s approval. These were written into their YBP profile.
For the pDDA, they discovered that as the books aged, it was harder to do rush orders since they were going out of print. They also modified their language to indicate that the books may not be available if they are out of print.
They have not done DDA for humanities or area studies. They based their decisions on the YBP profile on retrospective reports, which allowed them to get an idea of the average cost.
For FY12, they expect that the breakdown will be 23% eDDA, 50% pDDA, 20% approval, and 7% selected by subject bibliographers. They’ve also given the subject librarians the options to review the automatic approval ebooks — they have a week to reject or shift to DDA each title if they want. They can also shift the expensive titles to DDA if they want to see if anyone would use it before choosing to purchase it.
Questions:
Are you putting the records in your discovery service if you have one, and can you tell if the uses are coming from that or your catalog? Not yet. Implementing a discovery service. Some find resources through Google Scholar.
It’s a mashup of two of my favorite things — data visualization and social media. Of course I’m going to make one.
The interesting thing is that for some reason I come across as a gamer according to the algorithms. Unless you count solitaire, sudoku, and Words with Friends, I’m not really a gamer at all. The PS2, games, and accessories I bought from my sister last November that is are sitting in a corner unassembled are also a testament to how little I game.
Anyway, click on the image to get the full-sized view, and if you make your own, be sure to share the link in the comments.
They are sending bib records to their book supplier weekly in order to eliminate duplication of format and other ebook packages. This might be helpful for libraries that purchase ebooks through publisher platforms in addition to through their vendor.
One of the challenges of ebook acquisition is that publishers are delaying publication or embargoing access on aggregators in order to support the print book sales. Fortunately the delay between print and ebook publication is diminishing — the average delay has gone down from 185 days to 21 since 2008.
For certain profiles in the approval plan, Coutts will set aside books that match for a certain period of time until the ebook is available. If the ebook is not available in that time, they will ship the print. If the librarian does not want to wait for the ebook, they can stop the wait process and move forward with the print purchase right away.
Part of the profile setup for e-preferred or print-preferred not only includes the subject areas, but also content type. For example, some reference works are more useful in electronic format.
Oh, my! They have their PDA set up so that two uses trigger a purchase. I should find out what constitutes a use.
![Holbeach e-book marker [old photo]](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5294/5395846994_860625a0b7_n_d.jpg "Holbeach e-book marker [old photo]")
