Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Tracy Bergstrom. Tracy is a program manager for libraries, scholarly communication, and museums within Ithaka S+R.
The past decade in scholarly publishing has been one of continuous change. While print remains significant, technological advances — in combination with cultural and economic imperatives to produce more accessible and sustainable content — have driven publishers to develop a spectrum of business models for e-books. This week, we are pleased to announce a new report that assesses the current state of scholarly monograph publishing in humanities and social sciences disciplines in order to understand how current business models are functioning for their consumer base, namely libraries and authors. To guide this research, we considered how academic libraries, authors, and readers are being served by the e-books market; the current and future role of print; and the impact of variant business and acquisitions models on both cost and service.
Questions around the fit of e-books within the academic library have long been central to our research; the first iteration of Ithaka S+R’s library directors’ survey, administered in 2010, asked respondents to indicate their agreement to the following:
‘Within the next five years, the use of electronic versions of scholarly monographs will be so prevalent among faculty and students that it will not be necessary to maintain library collections of hard copy books.’
In 2010, only 3 percent of directors of doctoral institutions and 6 percent of directors of baccalaureate institutions strongly agreed with this statement. This question has remained in the survey, and the longitudinal data shows that the needle has not moved much in the past decade; in the most recent iteration of the survey administered in 2022, 12 percent of directors of doctoral institutions and 6 percent of directors of baccalaureate institutions strongly agreed with this statement.
While the issue above explores how scholars access information, recent work at Ithaka S+R has also investigated the shared infrastructure necessary to transition scholarly publishing into a fully digital age. This increasingly includes the question of how generative AI will transform the processes of scholarly publishing.
Our new research on this topic, conducted via interviews with publishers, librarians, and authors, indicated both areas of alignment and disconnect between the library and publisher communities on the topic of academic monograph publishing. While the two communities have come together on a variety of important initiatives, including within new models for open access publications, there are very different conceptualizations of a shared reality.
Selected key findings of this research project include:
- There are enormous disconnects between the library and publisher communities on academic monograph publishing. For example, while university presses and other academic book publishers are experiencing an enormous squeeze in the transition to digital production and distribution, libraries are concerned that digital distribution is resulting in acquisition models that are unsustainable or unreliable to manage.
- For some libraries, a major challenge to acquiring e-monographs is having experienced staff who understand how to navigate the complexities of acquisitions across publishers and aggregators. Some librarians expressed interest in a level of standardization across publisher contracts and licenses to help streamline the acquisitions processes and reduce the amount of staff capacity required to facilitate acquisitions. Libraries have not invested in the kind of talent development for monograph strategy as they have for journals under the banner of scholarly communication.
- New business models introduce new challenges – both pragmatic and ideological–for publishers and libraries. In the course of this research, Clarivate announced that it was moving away from transactional sales and towards a bundled subscription model for e-book sales, with myriad changes for libraries. It is clear that the business models for how books will be distributed going forward will have an enormous effect on the sustainability of scholarly publishers and their ability to continue producing monographs of the type that this report examines.
We appreciate the opportunity to continue to explore how this evolution manifests within the scholarly communication ecosystem and thank the Mellon Foundation for their support of this project.
Discussion
8 Thoughts on "Guest Post — What is the Current State of Academic e-book Business Models? "
I was surprised to not see the word “readers” in the headline and only mentioned once in the article. They should be the main focus of everyone in this marketplace.
“Readers”, when surveyed, always say they prefer print books because they like to highlight and annotate in them. You can imagine we librarians are not swayed by that justification, more the opposite.
Tracy, I’d be interested to know what the relative timing was of when your survey was being run compared to the Clarivate announcement. So many librarians were incredibly upset about that, that if they were just about to answer your survey, it could have significantly impacted the results. Once things settled, they might have given different answers. I know it’s just awful to have events out of your control totally mess up hard work and planning (Covid messed up a huge amount of field work), but you might need to redo it to have the most meaningful results.
The interviews for this project, as originally scoped, were completed prior to Clarivate’s announcement in February. At that time, we did decide to conduct additional interviews to contextualize this information within the overall report.
Thanks Tracy. I’m just pausing on your statement: “Libraries have not invested in the kind of talent development for monograph strategy as they have for journals under the banner of scholarly communication.”
In the scholarly communication space (where I have lurked for over two decades) libraries expend huge amount of staff time and development creating work arounds for poor publisher systems and processes. This is an example of universities paying yet again, on top of paying for publications and paying for subscriptions to material generated by their institutions in the first place. Libraries are funded by the public purse (in Australia). May I suggest that rather than them ‘investing’ in staff to manage the labryrinth of publishers and aggregators, publishers could offer – as part of the product we pay huge amounts for – a system that works?
Danny: I take your point about poor publisher systems and processes—although I’d just add that it is less relevant in this instance given that the focus of Ithaka’s report is on scholarly (HSS) monograph publishing—and not the big business of STEM journal publishing, which no doubt is more responsible for the “huge amounts” you’re speaking of. As Roger Schonfeld and many others of SK have pointed out, the SHH publishing sector is small by comparison and has seen much less commercial consolidation than STEM journal publishing. Many of the key players are university presses, which aren’t making enough money selling books to libraries to be investing in publisher systems.
What I find more interesting, and more promising, in the Ithaka report is its finding that there is growing agreement among publishers and librarians about the value of open monograph initiatives. The report notes that “librarians see real promise in these models to increase access to open scholarship, support small and university presses, acquire diverse content, open content to broader readership, and promote responsible financial models.” If we can focus more on developing viable funding models for OA monograph publishing, university presses would undoubtedly be able to publish more OA monographs, and libraries would be able to spend less on “talent development for monograph strategy.”
I’d echo Peter’s point and say it’s not just the university presses but small independent academic publishers (and presumably societies too) who have been dedicated to their fields of study for decades who simply don’t have the resources – and presumably would not be thanked by librarians either – to invest in our own systems for delivering ebooks to libraries. We rely on 3rd parties in the same was as we’ve always relied on booksellers and library suppliers to be the facilitators. As a small publisher I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that I too would appreciate more simplicity and standardisation amongst sales models and contracts to understand.
Tangential to OA, but I have many, many times in my academic librarian career reached out to small book publishers who were print-only to suggest to them that they work with the aggregators (I explain about EBSCO and until recently Proquest) to make their books purchaseable as ebooks. So very often, ebook is the only option we can consider, so they leave themselves entirely out of a significant scholarly book sales market.
