Interesting interview from
Scholarly Kitchen with Tim Collins. Here's a clip:
Many libraries are starting to see that, while they may spend less on
ebooks for a couple of year by using STLs, they are often left with
lower annual budgets (if they spend less in one year their budget
declines the next) and a much less robust ebook collection to offer
their users (as they don’t own as many books). While some libraries may
feel like this is okay as they can enable their patrons to search ‘all’
ebooks via Demand Driven Acquisition (DDA) models without actually
buying them, we worry about this logic as it assumes that publishers
will continue to make all of their content available for searching via
DDA at no cost to users. We don’t see this as a valid assumption as, if
DDA results in reducing ebook budgets even further, we wonder whether
publishers will be able to afford to make their ebooks available under
this model.
We can see why book publishers worked with these models as they
wanted to support their customers. But, if these models result in budget
reductions, which result in publishers not being able to fulfill their
mission of publishing the world’s research so that it can be consumed,
we don’t see them being sustainable. We understand that this view may
not be welcomed or shared by all libraries, but we see the logic being
sound. Business models need to work for both customers and vendors in
order for them to be sustainable. There was much great discussion on
this subject at the recent Charleston Conference and in related articles published in Against the Grain by both publishers and librarians.
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