Print & E-Books Use in Tandem – Dialogue on the Implications for Library Collections and Publisher Programs
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Presented at the 2015 Charleston Conference by Rebecca Seger, Senior Director, Institutional Sales, Oxford University Press, and Luke Swindler, Collections Management Officer, Univeristy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
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Print & E-Books Use in Tandem – Dialogue on the Implications for Library Collections and Publisher Programs
- 1. Print & E-Books Use in Tandem – Dialogue on the Implications for Library Collections and Publisher Programs Rebecca Seger Senior Director of Institutional Sales, Oxford University Press Luke Swindler Collections Management Officer, UNC Chapel Hill Libraries
- 2. OUP print book sales to academic libraries 2012-2015
- 3. UNC Print Book Circulation Trends 836,031 771,473 730,659 684,837 597,197 - 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 700,000 800,000 900,000 2009/2010 2010/2011 2011/2012 2012/2013 2013/2014 Print Book Circulation
- 4. Print Books Circulation Trends Implications • As libraries buy more print books, their aggregate circulation declines • Increasing print acquisitions will not change this situation • Print inevitably becoming marginal niche, especially with the growing acceptance of e-books • E-book availability further depresses circulation of print counterparts, especially when they become accessible before print • UNC’s e-books strategy accelerates the print decline & marginalization
- 5. OUP Reactions/Responses to Print Books Trends & Implications • We currently publish more than 6,000 titles a year worldwide, in a variety of formats. • Our range includes dictionaries, English language teaching materials, children's books, journals, scholarly monographs, printed music, higher education textbooks, and schoolbooks. • Monographs make up 1/6 of our publishing output
- 6. E-books Usage Trends • As libraries buy more e-books, their aggregate usage increases • E-book usage growth exceeds increase in the number of e-books UNC acquires • E-books now greatly exceeds print circulation at UNC—a trend that not only will continue but also probably accelerate
- 7. UNC E-Books vs. Print Books Use Comparisons • 8 publishers/vendors representing the e-book platforms with the largest number of titles in UNC collections alone registered 881,682 uses—or more than all print circulation for all publishers • When standardized for total monographic titles available, the relative levels of use are even greater: • 3,915,878 print titles as of 6/1/2015 registered 597,197 circulations in FY2013/2014, for a ratio of .15 • 245,442 e-books for these 8 publishers/vendors registered 881,682 uses in 2014, for a ratio of 3.6—or >23X than print books
- 8. Median Requests Per Title Jan ’13 – Sep ’15, All Titles 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 DUKE NCCU NCSU UNC
- 9. Titles Used Per Term Year 1 Usage (May12- Apr13)* Year 2 Usage (May13- Apr14) Year 3 Usage (May14- Apr15) All Owned Titles 22462 56742 75769 25% increase
- 10. Top Used Titles, Jan ’13 – Sep ’15 All Titles Module Press Uses Jan13- Sep15 Tomorrow's Table Biology Oxford Scholarship Online 2236 A Reformation Debate Religion Fordham University Press 1370 Rose's Strategy of Preventive Medicine Public Health and Epidemiology Oxford Scholarship Online 1109 Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis Public Health and Epidemiology Oxford Scholarship Online 928 Europe Undivided Political Science Oxford Scholarship Online 782 How Congress Evolves Political Science Oxford Scholarship Online 596 Brain–Computer Interfaces Neuroscience Oxford Scholarship Online 591 Buddha Is Hiding Sociology University of California Press 570 Black Magic Religion University of California Press 556 Nutritional Epidemiology Public Health and Epidemiology Oxford Scholarship Online 546
- 11. Changing Library Collections Contexts • Shift of collections from predominance to prominence • Shift from finite collections towards infinity and the leveling affect • Shift from book scarcity to abundance, if not ubiquity • Shift from collections of record to collections of use • Shift in answering the question of “how good are the collections?”
- 12. Changing Book Publishing Contexts • Adapting to a world where quantity of use is measured more importantly than quality of use – how do you publish/should you publish for that and not for the advancement of scholarship, even in a niche field?
- 13. Changing Library Book Collecting Strategies • Print books title-by-title acquisitions as a loser proposition & strategies for cutting losses • E-books en bloc acquisitions as a value proposition & strategies for maximizing academic support • Moving from an overall quantitative to qualitative approach to building library collections—and its negative impact on print circulation
- 14. Achieving Quantitative Excellence Qualitatively • UNC e-books from specific core publishers—the top 100K holdings • UNC e-books from categorical core publishers
- 15. Changing Book Publisher Strategies • Find better and cheaper production processes • Price rises in the most niche areas if fewer will continue to buy – whether in print or digital to cover the costs • Publish more non-monographic content and reduce monograph production • Create better tools to enable readers to buy their own print/digital copies when reading a library licensed ebook
- 16. Conclusions
- 17. Thank you!
Editor's Notes
- INTRODUCTION Rebecca: Introduction Points to make verbally: Tit-for-tat/he-said-she-said structured dialog provide extended nuance Reveal organically the changing strategies and what factors have influenced their evolution—providing data when appropriate/available Let the audience “behind the scenes” in terms of both new perspectives and rationales that deviate from the “public norm”, along with presenting data that they do not ordinarily come across Indicate that will periodically respond to audience questions to create a shared conversation, typically after PowerPoint slides N.B. PowerPoint slides provide the background for the conversation Luke: Truth in telling background: OUP and UNC have learned much over nearly a decade of talking about how to create a model for moving publishers and libraries from print to e-books when appropriate and acceptable to readers With the programmatic expansion to the TRLN library consortium, the primary focus of our partnership has been to create a new vending environment for both print and e-books that is affordable, equitable, and sustainable Secondary but equally important focus was to use this program as an experiment to understand how readers use tangible and digital monographs in tandem in a shared ecosystem in general and the dynamics of inter-related changes between changing monographic collections and reader behavior What OUP and TRLN learned about how print and e-books are used in tandem is not simply dichotomy of one format versus another; rather involves differentials, complementarities, and interactions, that have influenced the changing nature of this program—and forms part of core of this presentation
- Rebecca: Publishers and libraries have had a symbiotic relationship for centuries: that is, presses publish books and libraries buy as many of them as possible Luke: Yes, with the traditional rationale being the best library collections are the biggest—and piles of print books answering the question of “how good” with “how much” Rebecca: Increasingly this is breaking down, with book sales declining in the aggregate and at the title level, especially in the monographic area of publishing, and decades-long public discussions moaning the “plight of the monograph” Here is the OUP profile of print book sales to academic libraries through one major academic library vendor. This is sales to academic libraries over the last four years – I can’t share the specific numbers, but this is probably an unsurprising path. This probably matches the monograph budget movement.
- Luke: While the traditional symbiotic publisher/library nexus is broken, the library response may very well be quite rationale—and a good thing to boot! During this 5-year period the print collections grew by 405,534 volumes while their total circulation decreased by 238,839 or 29% During this 5-year period print circulation declines accelerated, falling from 64,558 between FY2009/2010 & FY2010/2011 to 87,640 between FY2012/2013 & FY2013/2014
- Rebecca: Publisher reactions/responses ? As a global publisher of a diverse range of content, OUP publishes approximately 6k titles annually over a multitude of types of publishing including dictionaries, children’s books, printed music, textbooks and schoolbooks. Of that publishing, the titles we refer to as strictly the traditional monograph with low potential for adoption or retail sales, we really hold steady at about 1000 titles a year (our fiscal year ends in March). Per the previous sales graph, this means we are selling fewer copies of these titles while publishing the same amount. You may ask what happened in our 2013/2014 year? Every 5 years the UK has research funding exercise that allocates research funds based on quality of output and we see a vast increase in proposals about 2 years ahead of that, so we have a surge about every five years as a result. One of the implications of producing the same number of books but selling less print mean we have to be more efficient in producing a smaller print run of books. We are increasingly moving to a print on demand model for monographs – printing just enough to cover first orders through a different printing process that allows us to produce higher quality products in a first run and not have to carry large amounts of stock. Large amounts of unsold stock are a direct negative on the bottom line of a publisher’s annual performance. According to accounting rules, all unsold stock more than a year’s worth of the last sales, are a loss to the publishing performance. So if we sell 50 copies of a book in a year, and at the end of the year, we have 100 in stock, and the book’s printing costs were $8 per book, we would have a hit to our bottom line of $8 x 50 excess stock titles, or $400. Multiply that across the 50,000 live titles we sell, and these figures can get into the millions. So we have to look to new technologies for supply management to manage our business.
- Luke: PowerPoint e-books usage trends PowerPoint UNC E-books vs. Print Books Use Comparisons
- Luke
- So all four institutions with TRLN have access to all new publishing from OUP and our partner presses on the OUP platform. With median requests per title of nearly 4 uses, that’s fantastic use of our content in digital form, way exceeding the use of print. And we are thrilled with the usage at NC Central, who through the ability to have consortial ownership of digital, now have access to a huge amount of content they didn’t or couldn’t afford before, they are seeing use of content just not possible in print.
- Usage of UPSO ebooks continues to grow over time. We add roughly 2000 new titles to the agreement every year, but usage is growing at a faster rate. We know, thought, that there is utility in both formats, print and digital. We envisioned UPSO as the ultimate discovery tool for monographic content – giving users completely new ways into the insides of books to find and discover what wonderful content has been hiding in the locked container of the print book on the shelf. But we do also know that there is sometimes a logical journey from the ebook to the printed book, particularly when it’s being used for research, not just course readings.
- We also know that maybe we have dramatically impacted our former course adoption sales. What you see here is extensive use of books in the last three years at these four institutions, indicating it was picked up for course use. But do we know if it’s only been possible because the faculty had access, unlimited use, on these campuses that they felt they could assign these works. As a mission based organization, we absolutely love to see the reach of our content expanding, but also that the use of monographs can be much more than it ever was in the print world. On the flip side of that though, we know monographs are just not an area that generates surplus for a press – it’s mostly subsidized and money losing, but important work that needs to be done. Publishers rely on course adoption type works to help support the low sales monograph. Once we sell it unlimited access on a campus, we lose nearly all future potential for increasing income outside of the library market. It’s a risk
- Luke
- Rebecca
- Luke
- Luke
- Rebecca How are publishers reaction strategically to this new print and digital world There is still a demand for print as we have demonstrated, and it’s likely to be here for the long haul. So what will publishers do to balance this Will find better and cheaper production processes as digital printing continues to evolve and improve. As print sales decline and usage of e doesn’t make up for the print loss, it may well be necessary for price increases in the most niche areas where it is known up front that there is a limited audience, but there is a good reason to publish for that limited audience. And most of the costs associated with a monograph are not the actual printing costs. An opportunity, because libraries aren’t buying as much print as we have shown, is to do what we can to enable individuals to buy their own copy. I just sat in three libraries in Ohio last week with faculty, graduate students and librarians, talking about monograph use today in teaching and research and the majority of the faculty and grad students that when they find the books they need for their research (usually via the library or via the book reviews/literature) they buy the book for themselves, and we need to be good at enabling that. So we need to think more about how to do this.
- Luke What does the above mean for the future of books, with emphasis on the implications for small/medium size libraries, and how can the salient conclusions be conveyed without PowerPoint slides? We are going to be switching hats to perhaps provide new and different perspectives: Rebecca will speculate about/advise libraries. So for libraries, I would urge you to think about the importance of monographs to the academic enterprise – whether it is about tenure and credentialization or it’s about research, and to understand the value of good research that only appeals to a limited audience. And how best we can work together to support it. Luke will speculate about/advise publishers Also whereas we worked closely to create a structured dialog thus far, these concluding observations will be as new to both of us as to this audience.