Double Booked: When Does p/e Price Bundling Make Sense?
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Discussion of why libraries generally say they do not wish to buy print and eBook versions of the same title, with evidence that they in fact often do, and a discussion of why by doing that a library might benefit many usersl. Presents p/e pilot project with Oxford University Press, Coutts Information Services, and the University of Toronto libraries.
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Double Booked: When Does p/e Price Bundling Make Sense?
- 1. Double-Booked: When Does e-Book/p-Book Bundling Make Sense? Lenny Allen, Oxford University Press Bob Nardini, Coutts Information Services Charleston Conference, 2010 C
- 5. Format proliferation Space issues Usage patterns Budget issues Format policy
- 6. Format Policy “Do libraries intentionally duplicate print and electronic titles?” No: 60% Yes but working to eliminate: 14% Yes for certain subject areas: 20% Yes: 6% Ebrary. “Global eBook,” Survey. 2007
- 7. Meant to Be Broken “Mean Percentage of the Library’s E-book Collection for Which the Library Has a Corresponding Print Copy" Large libraries: 43.36% Medium libraries: 23% Primary Research Group. “Library Use of E-books,” Survey. 2008
- 8. Meant to Be Broken, cont. Libraries Buying an eBook also buying Same Print Title: 13.6% Coutts MyiLibrary sales, January-June 2010
- 11. Having Both “Results from the student survey show that many students would be comfortable using both print and digital books, so the best format for some students might be a combination of the two.” “A Cover to Cover Solution,” Student PIRGs, 2010
- 12. Paying for One “… over 50 percent of students end up buying at least one product.” Referring to associated print and other purchases from free online open textbooks by Flat World Knowledge. “A Cover to Cover Solution,” Student PIRGs, 2010
- 13. They Go Out and Buy It “Some professors use e-books to help generate interest in print books amongst their students. ‘I’ve often seen students … they look at it online … a couple weeks later you see they’ve gone out and bought it to add to their personal collections.” From a faculty focus group at Arizona State University. Danielle M. Carlock and Anali Maughan Perry, “Exploring Faculty Experiences with e-books,” Library Hi Tech, Spring 2008
- 14. Using Both “Of the 7,880 titles that were available in print and e- book, 3,158 e-book titles were accessed and 2,799 print titles were circulated during the study period.” Used in print, but not e-book: 27% Used in e-book, but not print: 34% Used in print and e-book: 39% At Duke University. Justin Littman and Lynn Silipigni Connaway, “A Circulation Analysis of Print Books and E-Books in an Academic Research Library,” LRTS, 2004
- 15. Owning Both “Of the 347 total titles purchased … ” 163 were not owned in print: 860 e-book sessions 184 had print equivalents: 1005 e-book sessions Also at Duke University, referring to an e-book patron-driven acquisitions pilot program. Nancy Gibbs, “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and Don’t Let the Patrons Buy the Books,” presentation at the June 2010 Annual Meeting, American Library Association, Washington, DC
- 16. No Substitution “Thus there is no evidence of substitution of one kind of use for another … it is the heavy physical users of the library who use electronic resources the most, and the heavy electronic users who use physical resources the most.” At the University of Chicago. Andrew Abbott, “The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research,” College & Research Libraries, November 2008)
- 17. Reading Has a History
- 19. Rarely Reading Through “This is reading, but reading of a particular kind: goal- oriented, focused with laser-like intensity on particular bits of information, rather than on the larger nature of the text or problem under consideration.” Referring to websites, e-journals, and e-books. Anthony Grafton, “Apocalypse in the Stacks? The Research Library in the Age of Google,” Daedalus, Winter 2009 “Reading … Skimming … Browsing …. Even at the single text level, library researchers read straight through only rarely.” Referring to print books. Abbott, “The Traditional Future”
- 20. Do I need this book? E-book as index to print Checking facts and citations Searching for terms or phrases Not checked out Distance learners
- 21. For book vendors and publishers— Most of the time, it’s still a print world List price Customer discount ISBN
- 22. All Are Possible Packages User buys Library buys Bought at same time, or at different times Print-on-demand
- 24. YES, But … NO When It Makes Sense: High usage title At a sensible price Mainstreamed acquisition
Notas do Editor
- Lenny and I are going to talk about three things in this presentation. First, why a library might want to consider buying print and eBook versions of the same title, and why they might not want to. Then, how and why a vendor and publisher might help to make this more routinely possible, and desirable, through bundled pricing. And finally, we’ll look at a pilot project we’re both engaged in with our mutual customer, the library of the University of Toronto. I will do most of the talking for those first two parts, and Lenny for the third.
- I don’t believe there’s anything I can say to a librarian that more quickly and reliably produces this answer than by asking, “Would you be interested in buying eBook and print versions of the same title?”
- I am sure that nightmare visions of miles of stack space filled with little-used bound periodicals is one reason why. Not to mention the next format in which the library bought this same content, microfilm. And let’s not forget CD-ROM. Nor, of course, the database—or possibly multiple databases for any given title—where nearly all of the usage by today’s patrons actually takes place.
- It’s no wonder that my suggestion of buying a book twice so often elicit such a clear answer from librarians.
- They want to resist one more instance of format proliferation. They are thinking of space. They are thinking of how the usage of library materials is changing. And of course they are thinking of their hard-pressed materials budget. Sometimes the result is a formal policy.
- This question was part of a 2007 survey to which over 500 libraries responded. As you can see, 74 percent think buying both formats is a bad idea. Only 6 percent seem to think it’s a really good idea.
- Rules and policies, however, as we all know, are written so that they can be broken. Here, a 2008 survey showed that very often, libraries ignore any format policy they might have in place.
- This is from our own data at Coutts. For the first six months of 2010, whenever a library bought a MyiLibrary title from us, 13.6% of the time they also bought or already had, the same title in print. And this figure certainly understates the case for a variety of reasons, e.g., libraries who bought the print somewhere else, or who will buy the print at some point in the future. So our figures would probably end up much closer to what we saw in the prior slide.
- So, now let’s turn to why a library might want to own both formats, and why breaking all those policies wasn’t necessarily a such bad thing.
- Not a bad thing for users, is what I mostly mean to say, and everything I say from this point on is going to focus on users, not libraries.
- This was one finding of a survey about textbooks published recently, sponsored by an organization of student groups. Over 1400 students on 10 campuses responded.
- The report came out in favor of open textbooks, a model whereby students have free online access to a course textbook, but have the option of buying reasonably priced print versions for themselves. Flat World Knowledge, a company based on this business model, reports that over 50 percent of students with access to free open textbooks do in fact buy these optional supplementary materials.
- And apparently it’s not only course textbooks students are willing to buy in print, even though they already have eBook access. This quotation was gathered by Arizona State University librarians at a 2008 focus group.
- Then, among a group of eBooks also owned in print at Duke University, in a 2004 study, usage of both formats was the most common usage pattern (although here we aren’t necessarily referring to the same user).
- A more recent Duke study found that eBooks saw more usage when the library also owned the print version, so that owning the print reinforced usage of the eBook equivalent.
- Maybe there’s something to owning both versions. For some insight into how print and electronic library resources are used at one research library, I’d recommend this article by University of Chicago sociologist Andrew Abbott. Abbott’s research identified a type of library user who used both formats heavily.
- I think what’s happening at Chicago, and at those 10 campuses of the student survey, might be good material for a new chapter for Alberto Manguel, if he ever decided to bring out a new edition of his “A History of Reading,” a book I recommend, and where his overarching point is that reading has a history.
- Over the centuries the experience of reading has changed. Reading aloud, silent reading, reading to memorize, critical reading, reading in groups, and being read to all are examples of ways to read that have been predominant in one era or another, with none of them ever disappearing.
- I think we might all agree that reading is changing again. The experience of reading in extended texts is giving way to reading for just what you need, something resembling foraging, grazing, scavenging, or shopping. Anthony Grafton is a Princeton University historian. In the two quotations above, he and Anthony Abbott are saying something similar, although Grafton was referring to electronic texts and meant his remark as a criticism, while Abbott was referring to print books and was merely describing how humanities scholars operate today. Both of them are describing how readers take what they need, when they need it, from whichever type of text they are using, whether electronic or print. I am sure that the students and scholars at Princeton and Chicago and likely most everywhere else sometimes read intensively too, reading long bodies of text, even whole books. The point is that they are still doing both today and sometimes one format will serve them better than another, even for the very same book.
- For extended reading, for having multiple texts open at once, and for easy and familiar navigation and use, readers will often prefer a print book. But I think we would agree that for many other purposes, an eBook would serve our user better, or would complement her use of a print book she might engage with. Having access to the text of an eBook would help her know how useful the print book would be to her. If she were reading the print book, the eBook version could be her index, and she could much more easily do whatever quick checking she might need to do. For a heavily used print book, having the eBook available would be a godsend. And the same of course if her coursework is in a distance education program.
- Why can’t she have both? Among librarians’ objections to buying both formats, I think the price issue is strongest. Buying both formats to any extent at full price would certainly press a library’s budget. But for most vendors and publishers, it’s still a print world. I mean that in two senses. One, despite the fact that eBooks receive far more attention in the press and at Charleston and every other forum today than print books do, our sales are still heavily on the print side. That means that the systems we operate to run our businesses were devised for traditional print-based situations such as the one shown above. That central gear is the ISBN, which our systems associate with a list price, which is then associated with a customer. Changing all of this by introducing at the transaction level new pricing dependent on something else the customer has bought or might buy is not a simple thing. In fact it’s a complex thing.
- But it is certainly a possible thing, one that we think deserves our attention at Coutts, and it’s exactly what we have done to our systems in order to support our arrangement with Oxford University Press and the University of Toronto. That arrangement is based on U of T having bought a large eBook package, which now makes them eligible to buy the corresponding print books at a substantial discount. This arrangement based on package buying is one possible way bundled pricing and print/e combinations could go in the future, but it’s not the only possible way, and in fact just may not be realistic at all for many libraries. Users might like the option to buy their own print copy, as we saw at Arizona State. Springer, as I am sure many of you know, operates such a program through their ‘MyCopy’ service. Or it might be the library buying one-off titles in both formats, as the circumstance warrants it. I think it would often make sense, as the studies I’ve cited today suggest. That purchase might be both formats bought at the same time, or bought at different times. Our systems would have to support both ways.
- One supporting system is already highly developed. That’s print-on-demand, which should help to put these possibilities within reach. Springer’s MyCopy program, in fact, is run on the back-end by Ingram’s Lightning Source. This is a photo of the Lightning operation in La Vergne,Tennessee, one of two operations in the US, and of five around the world.
- So I am hoping that our answer of ‘No,’ can become ‘Yes,’ whenever it makes sense for the patron, and whenever vendors and publishers have made sure the price is right, and that for a library taking advantage of the price is easy and can be made routine.
- This screen capture from our OASIS system shows what the University of Toronto library now sees when they call up an eligible Oxford title. The library will enjoy their special price whether they acquire a title as a firm order, ‘slip order,’ or automatic approval shipment. So, taking advantage of the price couldn’t be more routine. Now Lenny will talk about how Oxford, from its vantage point, has approached the University of Toronto arrangement.