Alcts Acq. Section: Are We Ready for E-Book Approval Plans?

ALCTS ACQ. SECTION: ARE WE READY FOR E-BOOK APPROVAL PLANS?

Mon. Jan. 26, Colorado Convention Center, Korbel Ballroom 3-B

Intro: Lynda Fuller Clendenning, IU Bloomington moderated and introduced the speakers John Elliott YBP, Carolyn Morris, Coutts; Ron Boehn, ABC CLIO; Jay Henry, Blackwell; Steven Bosch, University of Arizona.

Linda posed the question “Are we ready? Maybe we’re past ready.” The idea of this forum is to put the notion of e-book approvals into the larger context of e-book acquisitions. Some general issues include: how are e-books different than print? The same? What are the pricing models? Building print and e collections. How to profile e-book plans? How can we prevent duplicates? What’s the future of e-books?

Can we handle e-book plans the same as we do print? There are lots of new service models, including delivery to mobile devices? Will there be a discount? Will P&E business models be different? Whole concept of collection building seems to be on the table (Presentations on patron initiated acquisitions for ebooks and print circulation (or non-circulation) studies.)

Ron Boehn, ABC-CLIO

Ron, when notified of the focus of the panel, said that he was tempted to limit his comments to words like “hooray!” and “finally!” He noted that he’s glad this is finally coming, but also struggled with context: how many people will be focused on acquisitions broadly, focused on print or e? He suspected the audience might approach the topic with varying levels of detail in the process.

To begin, he mentioned that there are two traditional ways libraries get materials: direct from the publisher and non-direct from a vendor.

Direct from the publisher is a common way to acquire materials, and is a typical model for books and ebooks. Publishers offer selection and ordering assistance, shipping and order authentication, hosting (for e) billing, and can provide OPAC data.

For non-direct orders, a publisher supplies metadata about a title to a vendor who decides whether or not to pick it up. He noted that most vendors use a just in time inventory plan. The publisher ships books, confirms orders, and the vendor, for example, may be stocking a warehouse from which the vendor fulfills order, they bill libraries and provide customer service.

Ebooks tend to mess this up. Nondirect ebook orders involve files, metadata and a third party ebook host (EBL, MyiLibrary, etc.) which loads files, has selection tools, and assists with authentication and troubleshooting. Orders can be placed either with distributer (YBP, Coutts) or third party host, and whichever is chosen then must work out all the details. Both publishers and third party vendors provide technical, administrative and usage stats.

An important related question: why aren’t all ebooks on all platforms?

Ron noted this is largely due to economic reasons. Distributors/vendors choose a business model which allows a range of commissions, AKA a piece of the profit. Publishers may not be willing to give up as much of the price as the distributor wants. Sometimes it can take years for the two parties to agree.

Sometimes the reason an ebook isn’t available on a particular platform has to do with logistics and timing: takes time to work through a contract, to do file transfers and loading the ebooks onto the platform. The reason may also be strategic: a publisher doesn’t want their ebooks on a particular platform for whatever reason.

There are also a couple of business models: buy and lease. Pros to buying include ownership (long-term access guaranteed) cons: fewer titles for users for a given cash outlay. Furthermore, while ownership is certain over the long term, access is not.

Pros for a leasing model include: libraries get more titles for a given annual cost – sometimes as many as 4-5 times more than under a purchase model. Collection development is simplified to a degree, since if collection grows in numbers, lease per title declines each year. Cons: collection may include titles the library might not have bought; future budgets are uncertain which may lead to a sudden loss of access.

In Ron’s opinion, the long-term impact of buy vs. lease favors leasing: given the same cash outlay, an institution generally has more books and content available to users through leasing than through purchase. The real problem is the uncertainly of budgets from year to year.

Another publishing model is the e-book database. These are carefully crafted and defined sets of materials on a specific subject with few, if any, gaps. New content is added regularly and the sets often include discovery tools. Libraries can have more confidence in the buying decision because they’ve studied the scope of the database.

He noted that publishers tend to prefer ebook collections; where there is a cross searchable selection of books which can approach database levels of comprehensiveness. Such collections may be static or have a growing number of titles, but the number of titles matters. Fewer platforms with a larger numbers of titles may facilitate the success of future federated search tools. But he noted that choosing only one platform isn’t necessary. He did mention that the collection may include purchased titles, leased titles, or a mix, and that publishers often choose a mix. He noted that a future option should include ease to buy: X years of lease = purchase.

So the question, are we ready for ebook approval plans? Of course. Ron believes that all available platforms should be captured by the distributor and that they should be selectable in the approval plan setup.

John Elliott YBP

Through their GOBI online selection tool, YBP offers ebooks from aggregators NetLibrary, ebrary, and EBL John noted that there were 392,744 aggregator ebooks in GOBI as of 1/15/09 and the number is rapidly growing. Although these are from aggregators, they are usually listed as individual titles in GOBI. There are also publisher-direct ebooks in GOBI from publishers such as IGI, SAGE, Springer, etc. ABC-CLIO and Greenwood will be available soon.

YBP has E-slip plans available; can mirror a customer’s printed books approval plan or not, although they are auto-profiled from the matching printed book plan. In other words, the work they do on print books approval profiles informs the profiling process for ebooks and the slips delivered via GOBI. YBP offers current publications and or older titles and John mentioned that a library’s existing aggregator ebook holdings can be loaded into GOBI as a duplicate control measure.

Options for an ebook slip plan include sending slips for all aggregators, which allows libraries to pick and choose, or sending slips for specific pubs. GOBI slips show if an item is an ebook, and GOBI will also show if a print edition of the same title was already shipped to the library, thus allowing duplicate control across formats. This is similar to functionality with print books. Right now YBP is working to integrate both p & e approval plans for a summer ‘09 rollout. This, John noted, is a huge project for YBP, touching all aspects of the business and includes changes to GOBI, changes to the profiling system as well as management systems. Their goal is to match the service level of the print plans, while integrating electronic titles. Services will include giving libraries the option of buying the first available format, or print, or electronic. Titles will be profiled as they are now, with the book “in hand.” Substitution rules will determine the appropriate format/binding/aggregator, etc. Titles will be profiled only once, when first available, whether that’s an e or p edition.

John mentioned that YBP profiled more print books than ebooks, because of the tendency for ebooks to lag the availability of print.

YBP is doing a great deal of preparation, both in terms of development and programming, and they are also working with buyers, catalogers, and profilers to revamp YBP’s internal processes. This will eventually include account structures, vendor relationships, editing existing approval plans and setting up new ones, and of course, GOBI training.

Carolyn Morris, Director of New Business Development, Coutts

Carolyn started off by giving some brief background details about MyiLibrary, the aggregator purchased by Ingram (Coutts’ corporate parent) in 2006. Previous to this, MyiLibrary and Coutts took a different approach to e materials in academic libraries. Coutts chose to create a proprietary platform because they wanted to control the customer experience with ebooks rather than relying on another vendor, and she reported that they learned from the paths blazed by other companies. At this time, Coutts/MyiLibrary aggregates ebooks online to simultaneous users, licensed in perpetuity. MyiLibrary is browser based (no platform) and contains 175,000 titles, 20,000 audio ebooks, and presently serves 1000+ customers.

Coutts has integrated ebooks into Oasis, their online selection interface. Their print book approval plans inc. e books as well. Libraries choose a format preference by subject or publisher. Essentially, Coutts treats ebooks as just another binding, and workflows mimic those for print.

Their biggest discovery: libraries didn’t exactly line up for ebooks and there hasn’t been high demand yet. She expects that part of this is availability, with the aforementioned between p and e. She believes libraries are not only waiting for more e content -- the lag is often 60 days for big pubs – but that price is coming into play. Specifically, the lack of discounts for ebooks: libraries pay list plus. Academic libraries have also expressed concern that their most important patrons (faculty) may not accept the format. Obviously, multiple things in play, but the availability concern is slowly going away. Coutts/MyiLibrary hasn’t sold a lot of ebooks on approval, but has sold lots thru packages including deals from Cambridge University Press, Oxford, Elsevier, and Springer, to name a few. There’s a significant and growing number of new academic titles from these presses available as ebooks each year. A substantial percent of approval sales come from these publishers, but package sales have also been noteworthy. However, she noted that publishers sold some packages directly, and this raises issues. If libraries are getting core collections via pub packages, will approval plans still have value? Will vendors be able to support labor intensive approval operations? Approvals require a lot of manual processes and are not cheap for vendors to manage. If publishers take revenue by selling packages on their own, it could affect approvals in the future.

In traditional collection development the future is always a gamble in terms of correctly selecting what patrons will use and results have never been more than mixed, at best. The odds of getting it right worsen as patrons become increasingly aware of resources available outside of libraries such as Google. Coutts can use their approval plans structures to load files of bibliographic records into a library’s OPAC and allow patrons to select and purchase titles they discover. Libraries only pay for the titles that get used. This offers access to the patron-driven universe via the OPAC.

Will the future of ebook purchases be title by title? This is the norm in the UK where libraries buy titles in multiple copies to support classroom instruction. In this situation, ebooks are cheaper. On the other hand, in Canada, many ebook packages are negotiated via consortia.

Morris noted that in the US there has been more caution and felt that economics will drive the future. Increasingly patrons are more demanding, while budgets and staff numbers are shrinking. This may tip the balance towards package purchases simply because they’re more efficient than buying title by title. Indeed, title-by-title ebook selection may go by the wayside.

It’s just all getting more complex: publication on demand, p, e and p, p and e on demand, etc. Libraries are likely to look for support from vendors for aggregation, simplified licensing and invoicing, duplicate control, streamlined metadata, bundled p and e, as well as e-only and print on demand. All of this will make libraries more reliant on vendors for collection development assistance.

Jay Henry, Manager of Online Products, Blackwell

Jay started off noting that Blackwell differentiates between ebooks and other print and e products. Why is e different than print? Ebooks are treated like monographs, can be profiled, they can notify libraries of availability, accomplishing the same mission as print, but they can also save expense of cost and time opposed to delivering a physical book. Ebooks can be presented for review upon loading into the OPAC.

Jay thinks timing is the real challenge. The lifecycle of the book from a vendor perspective: when publication of a print title is announced, the book is purchased by vendor, which creates a profile, book gets into approval flow, is announced to a library. The ebook is typically re-released later – there’s always a lag behind print, but there’s a great deal of variation in how long. He would encourage publishers to move to a point where the e-version is available earlier in publication cycle. Sometimes publishers (and thus Blackwell) can announce print and e titles at same time, but as noted there’s usually an e lag. In approvals, Blackwell makes a link from the e to the p profile. In a perfect world it would be preferable to start with e and link to other editions, and thus notifying libraries of availability only one time. Right now p drives the process because it comes out first. With e first, an item loaded to aggregators right away and vendors can do more with the content. This also would allow vendors to consolidate workflows, which translates to better value for libraries. It would also make previews available for e-editions, rather than the traditional shipping of print approval titles. The work can then be evaluated by selectors, and possibly even by patrons. If a print version is desired, it could be delivered later. Ultimately, this could be an attempt for real-time content delivery. Jay predicts libraries will see more and more input from patrons in regard to ebooks.