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?
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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)