Levine-Clark, Michael and Rebecca Seger, “Reaching Sustainable Models for E-Book Purchasing,” Charleston Seminar – Being Earnest with our Collections: Determining Key Challenges and Best Practices, Charleston Conference, Charleston, S.C. November 8, 2014.

1. eBooks: Key Challenges, Future
Possibilities
Charleston Seminar
November 8, 2014
Michael Levine-Clark
University of Denver
Rebecca Seger
Oxford University Press

2. Five Key Challenges
• Developing sustainable, flexible, and
predictable models
• Preservation of content
• Resource sharing
• Course adoption
• Future of the monograph

3. 1. Developing sustainable, flexible,
and predictable business models
• Budget crises - libraries
• (Un)predictable revenue – publishers
• STL challenges – everyone
• Multiple models
– Subscription, purchase, DDA (with or without STL)

4. 2. Preservation of Content
• Sustainability of platforms
• Long term preservation/access to
– Aggregator-hosted ebooks
– Leased ebooks
– Not-yet-owned ebooks (the DDA pool)

5. 3. Resource Sharing
• Librarians want ILL rights for ebooks
– A core value in the print world
– eBooks should be more portable than print
books, not less

6. 4. Course Adoption
• Publishers worry about loss of revenue when
books normally purchased by dozens or hundreds
of students on a campus become available
campus-wide as ebooks
• Libraries don’t normally pay for textbooks for
students
• Libraries want books in their collections
regardless of use in a particular class; publishers
want to be able to replicate the course reserve
shelf without undermining their additional
market

7. 5. The Future of the Scholarly
Monograph
• Sustainability – shrinking budgets,
shrinking purchases
• New models – STL, DDA, Open Access,
what else?
• Allowing this form of scholarship to
thrive in a digital world

8. Future Possibilities
Oh, the possibilities……

9. Sustainability
• Should libraries pay a fee for DDA that goes to
publishers?
– An annual fee? A micro charge per title? Some other
factor?
– Fees for profiling, record loads?
– Fees to support archiving, preservation?
– A small fee for browsing?
• Can we experiment with models that vary
depending on book type, age, sales projections?

10. Sustainability
• Publishing long form scholarship ceases in
certain disciplines and reduces in others
• Publishers embargo content from STL until
costs are recouped
• Experiment with models that vary
depending on book type, age, sales
projections

11. Long-Term Preservation
• Dual Hosting:
– Aggregator for:
• Access across a range of publishers
• Management of discovery, DDA process, invoicing
– Publisher for
• Post-purchase access
• Collectively, we need to ensure that all published
scholarly monographs are preserved in a trusted
repository

12. Long-Term Preservation
• Publishers and Aggregators become “the
shelves”
• Hosting content that may or may not be
purchased
• Any models for ensuring unpurchased
content gets preserved?

13. Resource Sharing
• ILL is a means to an end
– More costly, less effective than STL
– Perhaps means no access at owning library during
loan
• We should work with publishers to develop an
STL model that allows immediate access to
everything
– Cheaper than ILL
– Less staff disruption
– Faster delivery to end user

14. Resource Sharing
• From a author and publisher perspective,
replacing ILL with STL was a positive development
• Libraries have asked publishers not to pay until
content is used – so we need that use to drive any
purchasing
• Would borrowing libraries consider new payment
models for ILL of ebooks (assuming lower cost
than traditional print ILL)?

15. Course Adoption
• Allow us full access under a single-user license
– Printing, copying, etc.
• Build a system that allows unmediated
temporary access during the term
– Some additional cost
• Based on usage, not on the book being assigned
– Some barriers to usage (read only?)

16. Course Adoption
• Course adoption is to an extent what sustains
unprofitable monograph publishing
• Cooperate on models that work for all parties
– restricted access
– administration funding as a student benefit

17. The Future
• Hybrid models?
– Content for libraries, bells & whistles for end user
• Library buys the text, user pays for added features
• Not really sure I like this idea…
• Put up or shut up
– We need to work with publishers to find solutions
– Our institutions may need to ante up
• More publisher and library communication
– Economics of book publishing; impacts of purchasing models
on ability to publish; effects on academic ecosystem discussed