Bet You Missed It-What do Apple, Amazon and the French have in common?

Against the Grain, Aug 2014

By Bruce Strauch, Published on 08/14/14

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Bet You Missed It-What do Apple, Amazon and the French have in common?

Bet You Missed It-W hat do Apple, Amazon and the French have in common? - notes from Mosier from page 10 prehensive a level of approval coverage as possible. So, in addition to the sci-tech houses and university presses, vendors included trade publishers, museums, small presses, societies and associations, importers and distributors, and other publishing bodies. Usually exempted were mass market publishers, children’s books (outside of awards plans), and books from publishers who would only sell direct. This effort to be comprehensive had to satisfy some commercial and business realities, though. In order to justify the cost of providing approval coverage, vendors generally needed at least some discount, some degree of return privilege, and a sufficient customer base to warrant keeping a publisher on the “core list.” One rule of thumb was this: you needed at least five “hits” against customer profiles to cover the costs of having approval editors assign the subject and non-subject parameters used in the profiling process. Back in those pre-Web days vendors issued publisher lists to show prospective customers which presses were included on their approval plan (and there were also lists of publishers not covered). I put out those lists for a major approval vendor in the 1980s, and I began to notice one of our largest competitors always seemed to match our coverage. So, just for the fun of it, I started adding a fake press to my list each year. Without fail the competitor included them the following year. This was highly gratifying, although I wonder how many acquisitions modules ended up populated with fake publisher names. Some vendors also sought to inflate their coverage numbers by augmenting the titles they actually processed with data obtained from third-party sources. This seems pointless to us today — what library could afford to buy all those titles anyway, even if they were germane Bet You Missed It and represented sound scholarship? Nonetheless, there were libraries that used coverage as a criterion for vendor evaluation. This fact influenced vendor behavior. In fact, one vendor (now long gone, and for reasons at least in part about to become apparent) had a flagship customer who demanded coverage of a very extensive list of publishers. The vendor complied and for years provided slips for thousands of books. However, the library’s expenditures fell every year. After several years the vendor appealed to the library, asking to suspend coverage of publishers the library was not buying (or at least buying from the vendor in question). No one, it turned out, was buying these books from the vendor — they were simply incurring the cost of locating, acquiring, profiling, and stocking books that didn’t sell. The library threatened to drop the vendor if coverage wasn’t sustained. The vendor gave in, for a time — but eventually went out of business. Approval vendors also developed valueadded services which were initially targeted at their core audience, but which in time grew to become much more. In the early 1980s Don Stave, the head of Blackwell North America’s approval program, sought to provide a tool to help customers answer some basic questions: has a given title been published? If not, what’s the expected date of publication? If so, what action, if any, has been taken on behalf of my library (approval book, notification form or slip, standing order)? The original product, known as the New Book Status Report, was a monthly catalog distributed on microfiche. For free. NBSR became Blackwell’s New Titles Online, or NTO. NTO was a telnet-accessed, character-based service that enabled libraries to see these same approval-related data, but also additional information — most notably, the Table of Contents. Blackwell attempted to break with the established precedent of free access by charging a nominal annual subscription for the TOC features but met with limited success. NTO eventually morphed into Blackwell’s Collection Manager, which was expanded to include several firm-order-only features as well as out-of-print (OP) and other records beyond the scope of the approval plan. Yankee’s GOBI, Coutt’s OASIS, and similar vendor offering were brought to market to address the same library expectations and demands. And almost always, for free. So, fast-forward to 2010. Fewer libraries get books on approval. Fewer libraries get fewer books, period. Do the remaining vendors still endeavor to facilitate some level of comprehensive coverage? Some do, but have changed the game in that they no longer support across-the-board discounts, but instead provide some books at list price and others at list plus a handling charge. Some publishers have been dropped because of low activity. How long will this gradual shifting of vendor offerings go on? What then is the future of the approval plan? How reasonable is it to expect vendors to continue to invest in systems upgrades, new features, and ongoing support for a s (...truncated)


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Bruce Strauch. Bet You Missed It-What do Apple, Amazon and the French have in common?, Against the Grain, 2014, Volume 22, Issue 5,