Academic libraries seem to have a fatal attraction for e-book package deals. These very expensive packages eat up budgets and threaten to shrink collections. Having looked at how these deal don’t work for readers I thought I’d look in more detail at how they don’t work for libraries either.
E-book packages, where publishers sell libraries all their titles at once rather than allowing them to purchase title by title, make money from more than just the obvious way. Not only can providers inflate sales of obscure titles by adding them to packages, they can also inflate prices by charging for the amount of use their e-books are predicted to get. They do this through charging by “concurrent users” (cc users); that is, the number of people who can view an e-book at the same time. For example, a charge of 5 cc users would mean that five readers could access the same ebook at the same time.
This method makes a certain sense for popular titles. After all, when a print book gets popular we have to buy more than one copy to meet the demand. But content providers exploit this charge by setting all the titles in an e-book package at the same cc user level – you must pay for the same number of cc users regardless of how obscure a title may be. So, not only do you not get to choose which e-books to buy, you don’t get to choose what cc user level to limit each title at either.
Unlimited use = New head tax
Knowing cc user limits are unpopular with libraries, many providers now sell packages with “unlimited” cc use. But they use a neat trick to inflate prices here too. The trick is to charge each university by its size (so called “tiered pricing”), so that the larger the university, the higher the price. Again this makes a certain sense for heavily used e-books. But for all the others in the package big universities end up being penalized— paying a premium for e-books that are used much less frequently (if at all). In the print world we would only ever buy one copy of lesser used books, regardless of how big the university. Now we’re charged as if we were going to buy multiple copies of everything.
A much better e-book scenario for academic libraries is the one that public libraries have already seized upon: the downloadable ebook (the Overdrive model). Rather than sitting on a server these e-books are downloaded onto ereaders (and perhaps iPhones and iPods in time)! They come with DRM that limits the amount of time they can be used. Libraries can buy e-books by the copy this way, just like they do for print books (that is, one copy for most, multiple copies for heavily used). And better yet, it’s one price per one copy of an e-book, regardless of the size of the university that buys it. This is building an e-book collection using the same method that libraries used to build the great print collections that have driven scholarship for centuries.
Big packages have their fans
So, what’s with academic libraries? Why aren’t they waking up and demanding that publishers provide them with this model of ebook ownership? One reason may simply be that many library directors don’t realize that the Overdrive scenario is possible and that it works (you don’t have to have an e-reader to download these – a regular pc will do). But surely another reason big packages suit library directors just fine is that they enable them to build big e-book collections quickly, and having a big ebook collection looks great on paper! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) It helps you the library directory, and your library, look cutting edge.
A hidden bonus from the library director point of view is that they enable reduction of staff complements since packages don’t have to be selected by professionals on a title by title basis— providers simply do away with the selection altogether by selling you everything. And, since you’ve blown your budget on big packages, you don’t have to worry about selecting anything else either.
(The gradual deprofessionalization of academic librarians as a way of reducing staff is already underway—see this).
Should you care about this? Only if you care about universities, because good scholarship requires a wide range of sources of information and these big packages do the opposite by tying down budgets. The more money devoted to these packages the less there is available to buy books (e or otherwise) by smaller publishers. Anyone publishing outside the major publishers gets shut out of the conversation. I’ve actually heard library administrators rationalize this by saying that times have changed and that scholars don’t require the same breadth of information today. Perhaps, I’ve been told, scholars don’t need research libraries any more.
Well, whether they do or not, the continued addiction to package deals for e-books will certainly make sure they never get to use one. The logical end of tying down budgets this way will be a world where all big libraries have the same, homogenous e-book collection, composed of the same limited number of big packages, from the same limited number of big publishers. Not a great scenario if you care about universities. On the plus side though, it’s a pretty efficient way to run a library.
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