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Gettysburg College 2012 by Tomwsulcer
There was a lot of chatter in the book community a couple of weeks ago over an announcement that Len Riggio, Chairman of Barnes & Noble, made about his interest in buying back his company. Riggio has done this more than once since he first purchased the company back in 1971. But what I’ve found most interesting about the announcement is a detail I haven’t seen anyone else mention. It’s what Mr. Riggio doesn’t want to include in the deal. In what he doesn’t want, everyone seems focused on his exclusion of the nook platform, but what’s of much greater interest to me is the other thing he doesn’t want, the college bookstore division.
Now in thinking about this, let’s review specifically just what we’re talking about. Barnes and Noble currently has about 689 “regular” bookstores, but it also runs 674 college bookstores. Note that it doesn’t own 674 college stores, it manages them and in most cases the building the store is located in is part of the college or university, usually right on campus. Typically, Barnes and Noble won the concession in a bidding process from the home institutions, like Pepsi did at the stadium, and now it has exclusive rights to sell textbooks and t-shirts on the campuses of those institutions. If you’re talking about a large institution with a successful and popular sports program, like the one I work for here at Penn State, then the t-shirt piece of that can be as lucrative as the bookstore/textbook piece of it, probably more so, and it is very unlikely that we’re going to see that change anytime soon.
But there’s one thing Len Riggio correctly identified a couple of years ago which is that the textbook market is changing rapidly. Last year, at the George Washington Conference on Ethics and Publishing, Dr. Al Greco, Professor of Marketing at Fordham who specializes in the book market, predicted that the market for print textbooks would go from a $4 Billion market in 2012 to $173 million by 2017, about a 95% drop in the next five years. That trend toward digital learning materials combined with the end of what was once a captive customer base forced by geography and proprietary adoption lists to purchase their textbooks from the campus store, has led to an amazing decline in the profitability of college bookstores. This is why, understandably, Len wants out. He saw the coming boom in campus stores back in the Seventies when he bought the chain, and I think he now sees what Al Greco sees.
So what does this mean for those of us at an institution with a B&N managed campus store? Well, probably nothing right away, but eventually those concession contracts will come up for renewal, and if what’s left of B&N after Riggio buys back the brick and mortar bookstores is nook and B&N College, well I can’t possibly imagine the nook division wanting anything to do with selling team hoodies, art supplies, and Blue Books. So when those agreements come up for renewal, what should happen? Well, if you’ll indulge me for a minute, I actually have an idea about this.
If we could start from scratch with a campus bookstore, what would we want it to do? Well, who are the affected constituents? It would seem students, faculty, and authors. If you’re a student, your answer might include doing something about textbook prices. If you’re a scholar it would probably include access, typically to the most recent scholarship. If you’re a writer, and not surprisingly colleges and universities are filled with those, both in the guise of publishing faculty and paper-writing students, you might want tools and expertise. But above all, I don’t think any of these constituencies wants to see the books go away. Instead, perhaps it’s high time something else left the building, the t-shirts.
If we are to reimagine the campus bookstore let’s first talk about what it doesn’t need to be. It doesn’t need to be a clothing outlet. Take the shirts and such out of the store and find a new home for it. It shouldn’t be difficult, there are probably already seven or fifteen or thirty other places on and near campus that can handle the distribution of officially licensed goods. Instead, let’s radically recommend that the bookstore handle what it says it does right in the name, books.
Next, let’s think about where else on campus books are a focus. Hmmmm. Wait, what’s that across the street? Is that the library? Might it be useful for the library to partner here? Are there efficiencies to be had? They both receive large quantities of books on a daily basis, process those arrivals, and then shelve them for browsing. They both collect course texts for students and distribute them at the request of faculty. They both purchase brand new material for their faculty and graduate students, so that they might have access to the latest scholarship being published. Well, yes, on the surface it does look like there are efficiencies to be had. But could this new kind of campus book place do more than just a bookstore or a library by combining some of what they each do? I think it probably could.
So let’s say for a moment that over the weekend I destroyed a giant, evil, purple, crystal Gorgon that had been tormenting a peaceable valley kingdom, and that as a reward for saving them, the people of the kingdom gave me this really cool golden magical wishing sword. (Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t just use it themselves against the Gorgon, but whatever) So what would I do with it? Well, first I would ask for a million more wishes. It would then, of course, be pointed out to me that’s against magic wishing sword rules. I only get three wishes, and, oh yeah, they can only be used for good.
Okay, three wishes, and only for good. Hmm. What good could I do… Wait, how about those students and those high textbook prices? Can I use my magic sword to make things better for them? Well, now that I think about it, yeah, that would be kind of easy. And I might not even need to waste a wish on it. Under the current textbook paradigm, most textbooks are created and sold primarily by those with strong motivations to get the highest possible margin out of the sale those materials. What if we flipped that? What if we brought the librarian ethos to the textbook problem? Should libraries lend textbooks? In some cases that makes excellent sense, but ultimately why couldn’t students be offered both options, purchase or borrow? And if we take the profit incentive out of the retail sale of textbooks, and put librarians in charge of distributing these materials, might librarians have more incentive than B&N to help faculty find lower cost (or free) alternatives to higher priced learning materials? Might they even be willing to help faculty create those materials? Wait, libraries publishing? Who ever heard of such a silly thing?
So what else might I wish for that could help people on campus… How about the faculty, how can we help them? What if we offered them all of the latest books in their field at this bookstore? Imagine walking into a campus bookstore and actually finding books there, relevant books. That’s how I’d spend my second wish. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the university for new scholarship to be offered to faculty for browsing before either they or the library purchased it? As a bookstore, this could occur. The practice of returns in the book industry is a problematic one, though one that ebooks and POD are addressing, but in this instance, the ability to return an unwanted book makes a lot of sense. If publisher X University Press (XUP for short) publishes a book about say reliquaries, wouldn’t it make sense for XUP to send a copy to every campus with faculty who would be interested in that topic? If no one on campus needed the book, it could be returned, but if a faculty member wanted to read it, they might really like having the option to either borrow the book, or to purchase it. Either way, the campus bookstore would purchase the book from XUP, and if the faculty member wanted to borrow it, the library would own it after it was returned, and if the faculty member wanted to keep it, the faculty member could pay the bookstore/library for that copy. At which point the bookstore/library could decide if they’d like another copy, or not.
I suppose what I’m proposing is a little like the Patron-Driven Acquisitions model that a lot of ebook aggregators and wholesalers are experimenting with, but this would be done with physical books. And like the Lookstore model I wrote about last year, this one might make more sense on a consignment basis, with the onus put on the publishers to find which campuses, or more specifically which departments would be most interested in a new book in a particular field, and then sending the campus stores serving those departments a copy of the relevant book, on consignment for 9 months, after which it is either paid for and shelved, or returned to XUP.
Now, I’ve got one more wish left, and the last constituency on campus worth considering when rethinking the campus bookstore is writers—both students and faculty. So how might I use that last wish to help them. Well perhaps the most important thing we can do is keep the store open. Most writers seem to recognize that the recent disappearance of bookstores on the American landscape isn’t really a good development for them. Not only does it reduce the number of outlets where their work can be found, it diminishes book culture and reduces the overall number of commons devoted to books. Beyond just having books available though, I think a better use for some of the space might be for a writing and publishing center. Not only could it offer expertise for students, maybe it could also offer services to faculty. In fact, if libraries are serious about publishing and about Open Access, having a place on campus dedicated to offering publishing services specifically to their own faculty might be a way to ensure faculty are aware of alternatives to commercial publishing, are negotiating the best terms for the content, and using Institutional Depositories.
I realize that little if any of this is actually going to happen. I guess it’s the risk one takes when one’s call for reform is entirely dependent on a magical wishing sword. Nonetheless, Gorgon excluded, it probably should happen. I don’t know how many of those almost 700 campuses are going to find themselves without a campus bookstore next year, but I’m finding it hard to imagine a scenario where, like the independents before them, they aren’t going to start to close. When talking about what we’re going to do with those empty book buildings on our campuses, I hope administrators will at least be thinking beyond the concession contract and seriously consider the role that books play in the life and work of their community. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with textbook prices, perhaps all faculty already see all the new scholarship in their respective fields at conferences, and maybe writing and publishing centers aren’t something campus communities need. Maybe. But it seems much more likely that what most folks on campuses don’t need is another opportunity to purchase a t-shirt.
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First posted at Content Storage Unit. I would like to point out that before 9pm EDT on May 2nd, this post linked to a service that B&N offered call PubIt, which was a self-publishing platform aimed at both faculty and students for general self-publishing and customized textbooks using B&N distribution. Since I first posted that B&N has redirected that link to their general self-publishing platform and I assume will end the PubIt program. For that reason I removed the original reference to that service in the 2nd to last paragraph.
The other morning I read an interesting essay by William H. Weitzer in Inside Higher Ed that explored the campus as a “place”, and extolled some of the benefits real campuses offered over online education. The essay went on to suggest that these “places” and their associated experiences should be exploited when recruiting students, especially since they are absent in the online equivalent. Apparently colleges and universities are beginning to feel pressure from the third fastest growing industry in America, for-profit universities, where the majority of the educational experience occurs online.
And then later in the week I read another IHE piece about the importance of place, this time by Scott McLemee and concerning the New York Public Library’s plan to move about 1.5 million books out of the main library and to a storage facility in New Jersey. The reason the library has given for the move is to make room for people working on their computers.
It seems there have been a lot of discussions about “place” these days, and in our business, the focus has been on the disappearance of places that sell books.
Last year the Borders chain folded, closing 800 bookstores and removing millions of books from our communities, and so far this year not a week has gone by without the announcement that an indie that’s been around for over a decade is either closing or up for sale. Important stores like R.J. Julia and University Press Books are both looking for new owners, and if new owners aren’t found, University Press Books is likely to close. The downward spiral of the bookstore in America seems to be increasing in speed. With ebooks, pirating, and predatory online booksellers, it seems only an idiot would suggest bookstores even have a future. Well, my friends, that is precisely what this idiot is about to propose.
It seems clear at this point that the relationship that publishers have with indies has to change. Last year, right before Christmas, Amazon urged customers to go to brick and mortar stores and compare the physical store prices to Amazon’s prices. Amazon even paid people for reporting those store prices back to Amazon. Bookstores called the practice “Showrooming” and noted the inherent unfairness in providing an important service for the book community without receiving the actual sustaining sale. But it got me thinking. With bookstores closing and libraries cutting staff, hours, and even the number of books actually in a library, perhaps a new approach is in order. Maybe if we can’t beat them, we ought to join them.
If I had any capital (which I don’t, I have children instead) and I lived in a town without a great Book Place (which I do, if you don’t count the libraries), here’s what I’d do…
Imagine you’re walking downtown and you see a sign for a new business, THAT BOOK PLACE. Cool, you think to yourself, an idiot with money they apparently don’t need has opened a new bookstore in my community. I’m going to go check that out before it goes out of business. So you cross the street and walk in. In front is what you might expect, big stacks of The Hunger Games trilogy, a book of erotica for moms that appears to have something to do with the Pantone variations between PMS 400 and PMS 450, and a new cookbook teaching the virtues of artisanal water boiling.
After venturing a little farther into the store you come across a machine that looks like a copier. The only reason you’re pretty sure it isn’t a copier is because of the Plexiglas chamber in the middle with robot parts that seem to be making something. At first you’re a bit excited and hope that it’s one of those Mold-a-Ramas you remember from childhood visits to the natural history museum and that a warm, wax dinosaur will pop out of the chute. But no, instead a warm Stephen King paperback pops out. And as you look closer at the Plexiglas chamber you see that the machinery inside is making books, paperback books, one at a time.
Curious, you go to the counter and ask about the machine.
“Oh that. That’s our Espresso Book Machine. With that we can print you a copy of one of over 7,000,000 titles in the EspressNet system. Anything in the public domain can be printed and bound for you at roughly the printing cost, and many in copyright books can be printed here as well. So if you don’t find what you’re looking for, we can easily see if the book can be printed for you in a couple of minutes.”
Cool, you think to yourself, as you head into the stacks. I’ve been meaning to get a copy of Lea’s History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages. I’ll have them crank one out before I leave.
Approaching the literature section first, you notice that some of the books look used. You suppose that’s not all that unusual these days. Lots of stores sell new and used mixed together. In the Vs you see an unfamiliar Vonnegut title, Slapstick; or, Lonesome No More!, and you pull it off the shelf, and on the cover is a sticker, and it says:
Display/Used/Lending copy
- New, shipped next day: $24.95
- Used: $8.99
- Rental: $ 3.99/week
- Ask about the DRM-free e-book: $9.95 for Members
Confused about this, you head back to the counter to ask what it’s all about.
“Yes, many of the books on the shelves are available under those options. We can have the publisher drop ship a brand new copy anywhere you like, or you can purchase this used copy. You can also rent the book, but you might want to consider a membership because then the rental is free. Members don’t pay for rentals, though like non-members, if they don’t return the book eventually, the cost of the book is charged to their credit card and we order another.”
“How much is membership?” you ask.
“For an individual, it’s $49.95 a year. But with that membership you can borrow any book in the store for free. In most cases you can also request that we acquire a book for you to borrow and we will, or we’ll print it for you using our Espresso Book Machine.”
“Interesting,” you say, “Tell me more about that DRM-free ebook.”
“Well, if you invest in a membership and thus in this store, then we can sell you a DRM-free ebook edition for many of the titles in the store. Many of the publishers we work with have been convinced that if you have a stake in the store, you will have a stake in its continuance and your access to the books we offer. And that, they hope, would be enough for you to use the file only in legal ways. They also get a cut of the membership fee, which they don’t have to pay royalties on, or any other costs for that matter.”
“So they’re willing to trust me, if I become a member?”
“Yes,” replies the clerk, “the publishers are willing to trust you, and so are we.”
“Well, what kind of file is it?” you ask.
“You get both a PDF and an ePub file,” replies the clerk.
“Well, this is pretty cool. Sign me up,” you say. “Oh, and could you please print me a copy of History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages by Henry Lea?”
So maybe publishers should treat indies like showrooms, and send their books to indies on consignment. That means that only if and when a book sells is money paid to the publisher. The books in the store shouldn’t be the focus of the revenue. Instead, the revenue might come from membership fees, book rentals, and referral fees for drop shipped new copies or ebook sales. Members of this store/library then would have a stake in keeping the store/library open, so presumably they would have little motivation to misuse ebook files. Then I as a publisher might have a reason to trust the store and those members with DRM free files. I would offer DRM free files in a store like that, where there is a relationship between the file and the store and the customer/patron. We are all shareholders in that scenario. I think other publishers might consider offering DRM free files in such a scenario too, but perhaps I’m too pie in the sky. If your local bookstore/library depended on the revenue ebook sales and rentals generated, you would have a stake in that revenue. I would hope that that could be an environment where publishers might be willing experiment with trust. But then again, I’ve been known to believe in lost causes before, and have been absolutely wrong.
So if I were to open a new store today, that’s the model I’d try to sell to publishers. Treat me like a community library/showroom, whose mission is both dissemination and access, and book ownership, maybe even a non-profit. For a publishing community like ours that has a similar mission, this might be very fruitful. But it would depend a lot on the store, and particularly where it was. Which “place” are we talking about?
This brings me back to University Press Books. No, not our product, instead the store in Berkeley, California. I have been in conversation with the owner, William McClung, and I shared some of these ideas. He’s willing to experiment. We also discussed practical ways we might transition to such a model and one thing we both decided had to be the first step was books had to be sent on consignment. If the point is to display the books, why would we charge the store for the display copies? You might ask why we would want to display our books there. Why wouldn’t we? Just between Stanford and UC Berkeley there is an enormous audience of scholars I want to look at our books. It’s like a year round conference where scholars are continually visiting. This is not to say they shouldn’t be allowed to sell that display copy, but if they do, they will probably have to sell it below the retail price, as it won’t be in pristine condition. So, we ought to consider allowing them to set the price of the display copy. Yes, if it does sell, we’ll still get the majority of the revenue, but it will be based on a price that the store sets. I also told them that I would pay them a commission on anything they sold using that display copy. And I promised that I would pay to drop ship a brand new book to a customer, if the customer preferred that to getting it at the store.
So, I’ve put my money where my mouth is and I’ve sent them 200 of our books, on consignment, and I’m giving them the flexibility to price those books. When our business manager asked how we would know what they sold it for, I told her we would trust them. And I pointed out that if we can trust POD and ebook platforms selling our content when we really have no way of knowing how much they’ve really sold, I think I can trust a bookseller.
Another advantage to this approach is since they are display copies, I don’t have to send still-in-the-shrink-wrap copies. I can send slightly damaged copies, or left over exhibit copies. The important thing however is my books are now in front of one of the largest academic audiences in the country. With that in mind the books I chose weren’t necessarily all of our latest titles. Instead, I was sure to include all of our perennial adoption titles, some of our best sellers (non-regional, of course) and some of our most impressive new books. I also did a search of our author database and was sure to include all of the authors who live in the vicinity, though they also typically taught at UC or Stanford.
It’s at this point in the post that I make the pitch. Unless something really radical happens, University Press Books is going to close. Would you consider doing what I’m suggesting? The McClungs think that this model has the potential to keep them open. Simply moving to a consignment basis makes a major difference in cash flow for them. Will you consider doing the same? I’m not asking anyone to sell DRM free files, or to allow their titles to be rented, at least not yet, but I am challenging our community to do something, anything, to keep that store open. Would you consider sending books you’ve chosen to University Press Books on a consignment basis? If this works in Berkeley, perhaps it’s a model that could also help St. Mark’s at NYU, or any of a number of bookstores that specialize in our books. Please consider this. And if you’re not convinced it’s worth trying, consider the alternative—one less book place—one less university press book place.
One of the things we’ve tried to do at the Digital Digest is to address best practices on topics that are in the news. With the upcoming launch of Windows 8 and its new approach to passwords we thought it would be a good time to talk about password and pass-phrase options as they relate to the overall security of information on any network.
As computer systems are more important to business and pleasure, more hackers are trying to exploit those systems. Unfortunately the weakest link in security is often the human one – people still use simple passwords that are easy to guess, or when forced to pick a “complex” password they resort to writing them down or storing them in non-encrypted files.
There are many reasons for this, but the biggest one is that it’s very hard to remember things like “Xy3<$8yHl7@1”. Is that a capital “I” or a lower case “l”? These cryptic collections of letters, numbers and symbols are increasingly difficult to remember and to keep straight, so in order for someone to access the systems, they defeat the entire purpose of a password and write them down.
It’s good practice to have a separate password for your email and your financial accounts, another for your network, yet another for your work email, your work network, and so on… One way to avoid having to commit to memory so many cryptic confusing passwords is to use a pass-phrase for each system instead. A “pass-phrase” is a series of letters and numbers that mean something: “l3tMeln” for “let me in,” for example. Another example might be “TheSunWillComeOutTomorrow!” or “I<3MyDog”. Each of these pass-phrases is more memorable because it means something to us. It’s not just a cryptic string of random characters.
Software security guru Robert Hensing said the following in 2004:
So why are these pass-phrases so great?
- They meet all password complexity requirements due to the use of upper / lowercase letters and punctuation (you don’t HAVE to use numbers to meet password complexity requirements)
- They are so freaking easy for me to remember it’s not even funny. For me, I find it MUCH easier to remember a sentence from a favorite song or a funny quote than to remember ‘xYaQxrz!’ (which b.t.w. is long enough and complex enough to meet our internal complexity requirements, but is weak enough to not survive any kind of brute-force password grinding attack with say LC5, let alone a lookup table attack). That password would not survive sustained attack with LC5 long enough to matter so in my mind it’s pointless to use a password like that. You may as well just leave your password blank.
- I dare say that even with the most advanced hardware you are not going to guess, crack, brute-force or pre-compute these passwords in the 70 days or so that they were around (remember you only need the password to survive attack long enough for you to change the password).
As more of us become reliant on computers and the cloud it seems more important than ever to guard your passwords and maintain separate passwords between systems. What better way to do it than using quotes from your favorite songs, tributes to your kids, or a shout out to your favorite movie monster – “I<3Godzilla!”? I should have listened to Hensing sooner and I’d have locked myself out of various websites a lot less.
Now, a friend or a hacker armed with one of those ubiquitous email “surveys” could still compromise the phrases discussed above. For even more security you can try a system like Diceware. Diceware gives you the ability to create random strings of words that are even harder to crack than a general pass-phrase.
Diceware™ is a method for picking passphrases that uses dice to select words at random from a special list called the Diceware Word List. A five-digit number precedes each word in the list. All the digits are between one and six, allowing you to use the outcomes of five dice rolls to select one unique word from the list.
All you need is five dice and the Diceware word list to have an almost uncrackable password.
Ultimately we’re all responsible for the security of the data we touch, whether it’s ours or it belongs to others. We must find better ways to secure this data and to eliminate the temptation to write passwords down, or to use passwords that are too easy to crack.
By Peter Givler
Every time I see the acronyms SOPA and PIPA I think they should be characters in a Swedish children’s book, but in fact they are, respectively, the Stop Online Piracy Act (HR 3261) and the Protect IP Act (S 968), two bills in Congress with the aim of giving the Department of Justice tools to take action against offshore “rogue” websites — websites whose sole purpose is trafficking in pirated intellectual property. Think Pirate Bay.
The primary tool for doing so would be to put U.S. companies that do business with such websites — advertisers, credit card companies, etc. — on notice that they were facilitating online piracy, with the aim of drying up revenue and so eliminating the commercial motive for building and maintaining rogue websites. The bills have become the target of a spirited internet campaign seeking to block their passage over fears that they would stifle innovation and interfere with freedom of speech.
SOPA has been the primary target of this campaign, and its most controversial feature, domain name blocking for rogue websites, has now been withdrawn so that the issue can be further studied (see Lamar Smith link below). The White House weighed in on Saturday expressing the Administration’s concerns about the bills, while at the same time urging all parties to come together and seek a solution to the serious problem of offshore online piracy.
AAUP did not take a position on SOPA. Last December, with the Board’s approval, I did send a letter to Senators Reid, Schumer and Gillebrand supporting PIPA; the text of that letter has been distributed to the AAUP membership via e-mail.
To help AAUP members evaluate the controversy surrounding these bills here are links to the SOPA and PIPA bills themselves, to the White House statement, and to statements from Senator Leahy about PIPA, Representative Smith about SOPA, and from six Republican Senators urging Senator Reid to allow consideration of PIPA to go forward without a motion for cloture. (Cloture would not only limit the time for debate on the bill, but would also restrict consideration of amendments to those filed before cloture was invoked.)
Happy reading!
Peter Givler is the Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses
When you think of standards, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s a few bars of “Autumn Leaves” or “Star Eyes” or any number of other great jazz compositions from the early 20th century.
However, in the coming weeks I’ll try to put a new spin on standards in the AAUP’s Digital Digest. Starting in the next couple of weeks, The Digital Digest will feature a new series of blog postings that will present overviews of standards for digital content and metadata. As our businesses move increasingly online, university presses are being required to become conversant with the standards for both digital content and metadata that are currently driving the growth of the various digital sales channels. Our colleagues who work (or have worked) for presses that have journals businesses may have already had to dip into the arcane language of digital standards and the acronyms that accompany them. (NLM, DOI, MARC, COUNTER—where does the alphabet soup end?!) But, for books, the current situation is still somewhat unsettled.
The first of these posts will be an interview with Carol Anne Meyer, the Director of Business Development for CrossRef, which is the DOI (digital object identifier) registration agency in the United States. For future entries, I plan to focus on ISBNs (with particular emphasis on digital ISBNs) and the newly unveiled EPUB 3 standard for e-book content. The aim of these articles is to give a manageable overview of some of these complicated issues for those with passing familiarity and to give those who at least know what the acronym standards for a little bit of a deeper understanding. I will try to do each of these in a Q&A fashion with members of other industry associations, outside vendors, and our trading partners.
While digital standards are admittedly not the sexiest topic in the whole world, they have a deep impact on the discoverability and marketability of our content. While many of our partners are still using a mix of proprietary and standards-based mechanisms for ingesting and distributing content and metadata, many have either adapted current standards or are migrating towards a standards-based approach. Digital standards issues have fairly broad implications for publishers. They can impact everything from how contracts are worded to how you run your royalty systems to how you manage your production workflows. So, it’s absolutely critical that we all become conversant in the language of standards. I hope you all find this series useful, and please leave a comment, if you have suggestions for future topics and/or interview subjects.
Also, thanks to the Digital Publishing Committee for allowing me to use this blog as the forum for this series.
One the eve of its annual conference, the Association of American University Presses has launched a redesigned website and released the results of its second digital book publishing survey in as many years. The press release announcing the report can be read here, and the report itself is available for download.
In addition to providing interesting statistical breakdown as to the number of presses participating in a wide variety of digital publication efforts, it also reveals the widespread (unavoidable?) use of digital technology in traditional print publishing, particularly print-on-demand.
For most presses (53 of 71 who participated in the survey) revenue from sales of electronic editions remains below 3%. It will be interesting to see how/if that changes in the coming year, particularly since the percentage of presses now reporting as participating in site licenses to libraries has nearly doubled (from 34% in the 2009-2010 survey to 65% in the Spring 2011 survey).
Overall, finding a working business model and creating systems to best allocate limited resources remain the biggest obstacles faced by university presses when it comes to digital publishing. As the report clearly demonstrates, despite these concerns, AAUP member presses are actively and enthusiastically embracing the possibilities. And if history is any indicator, following this weekend’s annual conference, “The Next Wave: Toward a Culture of Collaboration,” that enthusiasm will be redoubled throughout the summer.
I find it quite appropriate that, in the week we launch the AAUP e-publishing blog, there is more media coverage of ebook pricing. On Monday the New York Times included an article on the proposed $12.99 to $14.99 prices for ebooks within the iPad iBookstore and future Kindle agreements. Of most significance, it presents a simplified breakdown of the profit margin on both physical and electronic books.
This article includes something for everyone to dislike. Shelf Awareness takes issue (as do I) with the presumptive 50% discount. This skews all the resulting math, and precludes consideration of anything but trade releases. While at the other end of the spectrum The Atlantic chooses to present its own, tongue-in-cheek presentation of the same calculations.
While some of you may think this is a mild irritant, a mere diversion from our scholarly path, these mainstream portrayals of ebooks as so significantly cheaper to produce are likely to set the stage for much of the future development of pricing models. Most of us can easily see where our own corner of the industry diverges from this trade model, but I doubt much of our author or customer base is as well informed.
Copyediting and typesetting for 80 cents a copy? I don’t think I’ve seen those prices in 20 years. And why do these same tasks cost 50 cents for a digital copy? And if we were only to spend $1 per copy on marketing each new title, we wouldn’t be able to afford a single ad. I’m looking forward to negotiating 15% list price royalties, as well.
References to this article have already started to pop up in blogs and news sites everywhere. With the current focus on the business model for the iPad , and the public fracas between MacMillan and Amazon, this will spread for a few more weeks. And the “presumptions” will very soon be viewed as “truths”.
So let me contrast this with a few recent posts by Mike Shatzkin on his blog. Mike is unapologetic in his belief that the digital transition is here and that you will be left behind if you are not already managing it. But he is equally forthright in statements that publishers have good reason to try to slow things down. Mike always presents careful, and informed, analysis. His blog is well worth following.
You’ll see our blogroll on the left. As they come and go, we’ll update the list. We’ll also include direct links to articles of interest in posts such as this.
