Issues in Vendor/Library Relations-Air Show
Issues in Vendor/Librar y Relations-Air Show
Bob Nardini
Ingram Library Services
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Issues in Vendor/Library Relations — Air Show
Lof a price index for eBooks. Journals
ast week a librarian asked me if I knew
price indexes are not only a
budgeting tool of long standing, but became annual
news in their own right over the course of the
everlasting “serials crisis.” You can also find
price indexes for print books, and we book
vendors are often asked for one-off price
projections. But since this librarian was asking
for an index, not a forecast, I couldn’t help. If
there’s anything like a price index for academic
eBooks, I’ve never seen it.
I’ve offered those projections myself and
have sometimes felt a little like a highwire
walker in making them. What if I fall? If
you know what you’re doing, though, a fall is
unlikely, as Nik Wallenda proved on the wire
to everyone this summer, right here in Niagara
Falls. What a budgeting librarian really needs
in a price forecast is for it to be plausible. For
plausibility, there’s nothing like leaning if you
can on years of data from an ongoing price
index. If a forecast turns out to be accurate
too, so much the better; but the truth is, no one
is likely to go back later to check on that, and
push you off the wire.
The way publishers, aggregators, vendors,
and libraries interact with one another to
agree on a price for eBooks is so specific to
any number of particular situations, I’m not
sure an index would ever be easy to devise or
use. The eBook transaction is such a
localized event, in fact, I’m not so sure there’d be
a consensus price to index in the first place.
When you look at buying from a publisher vs.
buying from an aggregator; buying a package
vs. buying a title; buying in a consortium vs.
buying alone; licensing for a single user vs.
licensing for any number of concurrent users;
buying “in perpetuity” vs. not “buying” at all
but instead subscribing, or renting, or opening
a short-term loan, or paying for a fixed number
of user sessions, you end up with an equation
The National Media Market ...
from page 82
— discuss current media issues, best practices,
guidelines and copyright concerns. All of the
professional development sessions offered at
the NMM focus on technologies, collections,
and issues specific to media professionals.
This year, the NMM coincides with the
Consortium of College and University Media
Centers (CCUMC) conference, also being held
in Las Vegas
(http://ccumc.unlv.edu/conference/). Ever vigilant in providing opportunity
to connect with other media professionals, the
NMM and CCUMC are partnering up for a
couple of days and offering access to key
workshops like “Copyright and Fair Use: Matching
that’s unlike anything applicable to print books.
It would be as if someone asked you to create
a price index for cars, and to take into account
buying new and buying used, leasing, renting,
taxi rides, car sharing, and whatever else is
out there.
I doubt it would take long for any of us to
think of academic libraries using all the above
methods at once, and no time at all to think
of libraries using more than one of them. If a
library, say, bought one eBook at a certain price;
bought another following several short-term
loans whose fees were apart from the sale price;
subscribed to several dozen titles in a publisher
subject package for the year; bought a few dozen
titles outright in an another subject package; and
licensed an aggregator package too, what was
the average price they paid for an eBook?
Beats me. Unless we decide to make the
print book transaction a lot more complicated
than it’s been in the past, it looks as if eBooks
and print books, which as we know sometimes
are as alike as twins but sometimes are more
like first cousins, here are starting to resemble
more distant relations, part monograph, part
serial, part database, and even part inter-library
loan. The ways we’ve become used to thinking
about book prices no longer work in the world
we’re all moving into.
In fact, the ways we’ve become used to
looking at a lot of things don’t seem to fit so
well any longer. Libraries have time-tested
ways to buy print books, but what not long ago
seemed routine — firm orders, approval plans
— now can seem reckless, like gambling. This
book will leap off the shelf, will beat the odds.
Won’t it? Each one is ordered and received
in that hope, anyway, as card and slot players
know there’s hope for them to beat the house
in a casino. For library selectors, while at least
it’s not their own money, comfort levels were
considerably higher before their odds were
published so regularly.
Policy with Mission” led by Pat Aufderheide
and Brandon Butler. I am looking forward to
attending this CCUMC workshop along with
a host of NMM break out sessions including
Allen Chou’s talk on Social Media. I plan to
leav (...truncated)