Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Foreword

Since it was first conceived five years ago as part of a consulting project for a not-for-profit organization operating in the area of scholarly [End Page 385] communications, ScholarsCatalog (originally Academilogue) has had the same aim: to help academic publishers, and university presses in particular, sell more books. Much has changed in the publishing environment since that time, of course, and ScholarsCatalog has evolved with those changes; it will continue to evolve, as publishing is nothing if not dynamic. It is worth remembering that today's investments may be tomorrow's legacy systems, potentially weighing down future generations of innovation. ScholarsCatalog's 'cloud computing' architecture is a hedge against such situations, as it outsources the burden of keeping up with new technology onto the service provider, GiantChair, creator and manager of the ScholarsCatalog service.

An important change to the original plan for ScholarsCatalog is that e-books, initially something that was mostly on the horizon, are now an established and rapidly growing part of the book business. ScholarsCatalog will be hosting e-books at launch, just as GiantChair now hosts e-books for its other clients and services, including the French model for ScholarsCatalog, Le Comptoir des presses d'universités.¹ ScholarsCatalog already hosts Google Previews and will participate in the Google Editions program as soon as that program launches. PDF and MP3 are already supported, and other e-book formats will be added to the roster soon. Thus, any press participating in ScholarsCatalog will enter the e-book business rapidly and without having to develop much technical expertise.

One area that has not progressed markedly over the years is the quality and availability of book metadata. This is a complicated and exasperating problem, the implications of which may not be fully understood by many publishers. In the online world, a book's metadata are its principal marketing support, and incomplete or poorly formatted metadata lead to low search-engine rankings and lost sales. As part of the development of ScholarsCatalog, GiantChair has been working with a number of publishers to put their metadata into the ONIX format, creating automated tools to streamline the process. ScholarsCatalog and all publishers would benefit from participation in the Book Industry Study Group's ONIX certification program.²

Publishers working with ScholarsCatalog have recommended a great number of additional features. We are getting close to imposing a 'feature freeze' so that we can set a date for opening ScholarsCatalog to the public. But most of the suggestions are very good ones, and we don't want to leave all of them to Version 2.0. We are working now, for [End Page 386] example, on making the GiantChair 'BackOffice' metadata management tool available to more publishers; identifying ways to strengthen individual publishers' branding on the site; and probing the issues surrounding fulfilment of print book orders for titles from more than one publisher. It appears doubtful that ScholarsCatalog will ever be 'finished'; Internet marketing is a work in progress, and ScholarsCatalog will be adapting to the new circumstances of the online environment as they appear.

I. Background and Scope

This project has its roots in a series of discussions concerning the fate of university press publishing. The press world is under a great deal of strain at this time, strain that is worsening under the collapse of the economy. The presses' problems are being addressed by many people in a variety of ways, the most common being to identify ways to rein in expenses. This project is taking a different tack: rather than seeking a means to reduce costs or scale back programs (both of which may be appropriate actions in some instances), the aim of this report is to identify ways for the presses to sell more books. Since the presses almost always make a gross profit on every copy of every book sold (typically $0.58 on every sales dollar, an extrapolation from AAUP data), selling more copies would generate a greater contribution to the presses' overhead. In effect, the goal of this project is to identify a means by which the presses can market their way out of their financial problems.

The presses are involved in a number of activities, the chief of which is publishing books. Among the other activities are the publishing of journals and the provision of various services (e.g., warehousing) for third parties. Other activities are also beginning to appear; at least one press, for example, is exploring the possibility of publishing scientific data sets. The scope of this project, however, is books alone.

Press books themselves come in a variety of packages: different formats (hardcover, paperback); different media (print or electronic); and different marketing offerings (books sold on a stand-alone basis or books as part of digital aggregations). The primary focus here is the printed book, though much of the discussion applies (or will come to apply) to e-books and, to some extent, to aggregations. The reason for this focus is simply that that is what the presses sell today, and that is what most customers prefer. Of course, this is now changing, and as those changes occur, an online catalogue will evolve with them. [End Page 387]

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) lists 126 member presses in its Directory 2008: Information on 126 Scholarly Presses in the U.S., Canada, and Overseas. These presses include publishers formally linked to parent universities (e.g., Harvard University Press, The University of California Press), presses headquartered outside the U.S. (e.g., Oxford University Press or OUP), and scholarly publishers not affiliated with a university (e.g., The Minnesota Historical Society, The Jewish Publication Society). For purposes of this project, this is a useful typology, which I will return to below. Beyond these not-for-profit (NFP) academic book publishers are commercial firms (e.g., Palgrave/Macmillan) whose publications are of interest to the research community and often individual titles (e.g., a political memoir by Henry Kissinger) published by trade houses (e.g., Random House). Taken together, all these publications, from a university press monograph at the centre to a stray book from Random House on the perimeter, constitute the relevant field for an online catalogue for academic books, but it was only a subset of the AAUP's extended membership that participated in this study.

The questions put to the interviewees essentially came down to these three:

• • What are your press's current marketing practices, especially insofar as online marketing is concerned? How do other entities (e.g., vendors) fit into these practices?

• • What is on your wish list for marketing? If you had extra money, how would you spend it?

• • What are your thoughts about the utility of a comprehensive online catalogue for academic books? Would you participate in such a venture were it to be launched?

The organization of this memorandum pretty much tracks these three questions.

I do wish to emphasize that this project began with a hypothesis (A consolidated online catalogue would help to sell more academic books) and all the research was conducted to test that hypothesis. Someone simply determined to expose more data about the press world would have asked different questions. Indeed, there are many such questions that I was tempted to probe while working on this project, especially with regard to the publishing programs themselves (what books are the presses [End Page 388] publishing and why), but the focus here has been narrow: On the basis of what can be determined about the presses, is there a case to recommend an investment to build a consolidated online catalogue?

I have coined the term 'Academilogue,' a compression of 'academic' and 'catalogue,' to use as the name of the prospective online catalogue. This name is a placeholder. No one likes it, but there was a need to call it something. (A prototype site is now under construction, with the name ScholarsCatalog.)

II. Statistical Snapshot

How big is the university press sector? At what scale would an online catalogue have to be built to accommodate all the press titles?

The statistics on the book industry in general are not very reliable. This is because the industry's sheer diversity and the highly specialized character of some book programs make it hard to track down all the participants. The figures for the university press world are, if anything, better than the average, in large part because the AAUP has put a great deal of effort into this in recent years. But nonetheless, there are problems with the data and also some exceptional situations that must be kept in mind.

The largest of the exceptional situations is the scope of the programs at OUP and Cambridge, which skew all the figures. In the interviews OUP reported publishing 2500 new books each year, Cambridge 1500. Between these two publishers alone the total number of titles in print is about 46,000. And here we encounter our first statistical conundrum, in that the total for OUP and Cambridge cited in the AAUP directory is only about 34,000, a discrepancy I will not try to reconcile. OUP and Cambridge are also profitable, OUP immensely so, and are significant contributors to the finances of their parent institutions, and thus the case to 'help' them is much harder to make. The programs of these presses are also diverse and go far beyond the scope of this report. For example, OUP's ESL program is a money machine; and were they to be auctioned off, the journals programs of both of these presses would attract many bidders from the commercial sector.

Putting OUP and Cambridge to the side, the press world is fragmented and diverse. The six largest American presses all cluster around $20 million in books sales (Yale is a bit larger); a reasonable estimate is that each ships around 1 million units a year at an average price received [End Page 389] of about $20. The status and fortunes of these presses are very different from presses that publish, say, 50-100 titles each year, a size too small to permit a press to make meaningful investments in business development and technology.

Overall, the presses publish approximately 12,000 new titles each year. I have tried to derive the total number of press titles in print from the AAUP directory, which gives us a rough idea but is not definitive. Adding up all the presses formally attached to a university, but excluding OUP and Cambridge, yields a total figure of just under 90,000 titles. The problems with this estimate are that there are university presses that don't belong to the AAUP, we don't know if the presses all report figures the same way (I suspect that they don't), and we don't know if by 'in print' a press includes POD titles (I would). Nevertheless, 90,000 is a useful working number for press titles in print. And if we add in OUP and Cambridge, an estimate of around 125,000 titles in print is defensible.

When we get to the academic publishers that are not formally attached to a university, the figures are much less useful. The AAUP's affiliates cite figures that, when added together, come to just over 10,000 titles in print. This does not include the numbers for the RAND Corporation, which lists 18,000 titles, a figure too high to be for books alone, but which may include other media and white papers. The bigger problem with non-aligned academic publishers is that very few of them belong to the AAUP and hence their output is not listed in the directory. As one press director remarked to me, Washington, DC, is swarming with not-for-profit publishers of books of intellectual merit. If we could get them all into the online catalogue, the number of titles would be much larger. And this is before we begin to count the academic titles from commercial publishers, who may be invited to participate on a title-by-title basis.

So our working figure is 125,000 press titles in print—and growing. This is a very significant number in that the total number of titles in Amazon's catalogue is believed to be around 2.5 million, and Ingram, the leading wholesaler, actively warehouses about 1.25 million titles. (An Ingram executive told me that the total number of books in print is probably 1.5 million. One wonders how Amazon derives its figures.) Barnes & Noble keeps just over 1 million titles in inventory, with a declared policy of entering into its systems at least one copy of any [End Page 390] book a publisher submits to it. (Who would not want to be part of B&N's distribution system?) However small the overall sales figures of the presses may be, in terms of title output and their impact on the overall infrastructure of the publishing industry, the presses constitute a sizable segment.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that it would be very handy to be able to say what percentage of all new books are published by university presses (that is, 12,000 new titles is what percentage of the total?). The problem is that estimates of new book output are all over the place. Ten years ago the number of new books published in the US was thought by some observers to be about 60,000 (probably based on the number of registered ISBNs and Bowker's Books in Print). Some analysts still quote figures in that range today, but there are also estimates that reach to 250,000 titles a year and more. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. The figure of 60,000 probably understated the total by overlooking all the niche publishers that did not bother to register their books with Books in Print. The larger number almost certainly includes multiple editions of the same title (hardcover and paperback, British and American editions of the same book, etc.) and a huge and growing number of books that are self-published, an outgrowth of low-cost digital publishing technologies and the 'Long Tail' marketing capability of Amazon.

It is therefore probably not unreasonable to say that university presses constitute 5-10 per cent of the total new book output in the US, provided that we don't push at that figure too hard. That figure is important when one considers what a comprehensive online press catalogue would look like. And when we add backlist to the mix, the presses' role looms even larger, since the presses have a much deeper commitment to keeping books in print than do commercial publishers.

When we move to revenues, the presses' share of the total book industry is, of course, much smaller. In 2007 the AAUP surveyed its membership and concluded that the total book revenues of the 63 participating presses were $277 million; these figures did not include OUP and Cambridge, but presumably did include all of the large American presses. Extrapolating these figures to allow for the presses that did not participate in the survey, a reasonable estimate for American press book revenue is around $310 million. Adding OUP and Cambridge [End Page 391] in, the total in 2007 came to $530 million. That's out of an industry of about $30 billion.

On the bottom line the participating presses in 2007 reported parental subsidies of about 8 per cent of net revenue. They also reported receiving just over 4 per cent of net revenue in philanthropic support and income from endowments. With these various subventions added to revenue, the participating presses generated a surplus of 3 per cent. Allowing for extrapolations, back-of-the-envelope adjustments, and so forth, it's not unfair to say that the presses 'lose' about 10 per cent or $31 million a year on operations (at least in 2007), without factoring in the large surpluses at OUP and Cambridge.

I suspect that the subsidy is larger than that, however, in that sometimes support for a press sneaks in without acknowledgment on the income statement. For example, some presses get warehouse space from their parents at no charge; others do not have to pay interest on working capital. Or there might be an income statement where the plant cost (the cost for creating the master copy, which includes typesetting, copyediting, etc.) has been reduced by a grant from the author's university; a press might use this money to offset plant rather than show the subvention 'below the line' in order to make the numbers look good. One truly bizarre situation is at an institution that puts all the cost of employees' medical benefits on a separate, university-wide account, removing this cost from the press's income statement (and all departmental budgets). This is a terrible business decision in that it corrupts decisions concerning insourcing and outsourcing certain tasks (e.g., copy-editing) by making in-house staff seem less expensive. Consider the arithmetic: a press staff of twenty-five people, medical insurance of $10,000/employee, an unacknowledged subsidy of $250,000. For this particular institution's press, the hidden subsidy comes to around 7 per cent of revenue.

I would therefore gross up the estimate of the total subsidy to the presses' book programs to around $35 million a year (leaving OUP and Cambridge out), a bit more than 10 per cent of net sales. To put this in perspective: the ARL lists eighteen libraries with total budgets of this size or larger—but we should not have to choose between operating a library and running the entire university press system. The subsidy for presses goes toward a sizeable slice of the total US book output each year, and an even larger piece of the academic book market. For all the gnashing of teeth about the woes of the presses, the conclusion seems [End Page 392] inescapable to me that the university press segment provides the most efficient use of capital of any part of the world of scholarly communications today.

III. Results of the Survey of University Presses

Data for this project was gathered by distributing a questionnaire to the presses. In most instances the presses filled out the questionnaires in advance of phone interviews. The aim of the questionnaire was to explore what capabilities the presses would bring to a shared online marketing project. As expected, the presses' resources varied considerably in this regard, with one press, for example, noting that it had several people on staff whose job was to perfect the metadata that was sent to marketing partners, while another press had no expertise in the ONIX standard and relied on sending out information in Excel spreadsheets, with the hope that the marketing partners would transform this information judiciously. Simply averaging all these responses together does not tell us much about the ability to launch a new service.

In this section I will summarize in a highly compressed form what the presses said in response to the questionnaire. There is, of course, no 'average' press.

I should note that there was no attempt to survey editorial programs. The point of this project was not to persuade presses to adjust their editorial programs so that they would publish books that were more saleable, but to help the presses sell more copies of books that they already publish.

IV. Libraries

The research for this particular section of the report was supplemented by interviews with librarians and members of my professional network.

The role—the diminishing role—of academic libraries in the fortunes of university presses has been much discussed. The question for the presses today is, what, precisely, is the economic relationship with libraries and how might that arrangement be improved? I am not investigating here other arrangements with libraries—for example, the provision of IT services or drawing on library collections for editorial projects—but focusing entirely on the library as press customer.

The presses sell books to libraries through wholesalers: Baker & Taylor, Ingram, and Blackwell. Amazon has also entered this market, but the size of its library segment has not been made public. The preferred way to sell books to libraries is through standing-order and approval plans such as those managed by the Yankee Book Peddler division of Baker & Taylor. A standing-order plan, for example, might consist of a library's profile ('Send us all books that support our research program in Continental philosophy, but do not include titles from these publishers [list follows]'), and a set of terms (pricing, etc.). These plans have dropped off considerably over the years (an artefact of 'the serials crisis'), but are still in use by the large ARL institutions. Other library sales result from libraries' review of wholesaler and publisher's marketing materials, [End Page 410] including print and online catalogues. Books that are needed quickly, perhaps in response to a faculty request, may be ordered from Amazon.

Libraries now account for about 25 per cent of the presses' total sales, measured in dollars. The percentage would be lower if measured in units because libraries often buy books with more expensive bindings, though the trend is for even libraries to opt for less expensive formats. This was a hard number to derive from my research, and some press directors would argue strongly that the figure is lower, though most press staff are comfortable with expressing this as a range: 15-25 per cent. For some presses, the percentage is higher, sometimes much higher. With the exceptions of the two largest presses (OUP and Cambridge), generally speaking the larger presses report lower library sales than the smaller presses. It is the structure of this market segment, where sales go almost entirely through wholesalers, that makes it hard to get precise figures, since the wholesalers sell to multiple segments.

Sales to libraries continue to drop, and in the current economic climate, things could get very bad. It is not known, however, what the figures were like in 'the good old days,' say, twenty years ago. No one has sales records that go that far back, but there is anecdotal support for the estimate that library sales were once 40-50 per cent of press volume. Could they have been higher? I suspect they were, but there is no evidence one way or the other. It is clear that the number of bricks-and-mortar stores that stocked short-discount books (that is, books sold at a discount of around 32 per cent of list price instead of about 46 per cent for trade titles) has fallen off considerably, from around 750 twenty years ago to under 100 today—victims of online competition. But professional books stores are not libraries, even if they sometimes stocked books with library bindings.

So, without having firm evidence of how strong academic library sales once were, we have reasonable, useful information on how strong they are now. We also know that the trend line is not favourable, but there may be some offsetting good news buried in Amazon's internal sales reports.

How could the presses sell more books to libraries? Even if we accept the hypothesis of this report, that increased discovery will lead to greater sales, there are at least two areas where even the most robust marketing is not likely to have any effect. The first of these is with the larger ARL institutions, which already collect much of what the presses publish [End Page 411] every year through standing-order and approval plans. We could hardly expect that these libraries would begin to collect books in areas where there is no support from research faculty. Thus the larger ARLs do not represent a market for potential growth for the presses.

The second area where the growth opportunity is negligible is in highly specialized fields where the current marketing venues already saturate the market. One press shared an anecdote with me about an author of a linguistics monograph, who appeared on the Charlie Rose public-television show. Despite the exposure, the sales of that author's book did not rise at all. That press's view is that their current marketing activity already reaches all the prospective purchasers of that book, libraries and individual scholars alike, and no amount of augmented online marketing is going to boost sales.

The press with the Charlie Rose author appearance has a point (and a number of presses made the same point in less dramatic ways), but will that point hold forever? That press has saturated the market for linguistics monographs with outstanding marketing in existing channels. Professors in the field receive mailings; they advise librarians on what to purchase; they see reviews in linguistics journals; they may receive e-mail alerts of new titles in their field; they attend conferences where all the new publications are discussed; and so on. Times change, however, and marketing venues with them. Five years from now the environmentally unsound mailings may decline in number or disappear altogether; librarians may rely more on algorithmically generated online recommendations; the linguistics journals will increasingly focus on their online editions and be susceptible to new online marketing services, including enhanced search-engine discovery; e-mail alerts may have given way to RSS feeds, which are influenced by the many manifestations of Web 2.0 marketing; conferences may become Webinars; and so on. The question of what constitutes market saturation ultimately hinges as much on foresight on the future structure of the marketplace as it does on a hard-nosed analysis of the number of prospects for the purchase of highly specialized literature. Enhanced online marketing may be necessary just to maintain a market, if not to increase its overall size.

Where many of the presses believe they will find growth in the library sector is in the sale of digital aggregations of books. I agree with this, with some hedging and caveats. But let's summarize the opportunity first. [End Page 412]

The idea of digital aggregations is built largely on a JSTOR-like marketing plan. A large collection of material is put together, typically assembled by subject area. The material is in digital form and made searchable (and the forms of search keep expanding—e.g., the advent of Google Scholar). Every year new material is added to each collection. The collections are marketed directly to libraries, though sometimes intermediaries and consortia get involved. Sales are on a subscription basis, with the publisher having the obligation of maintaining a reliable data centre. Terms and pricing vary, but within a fairly narrow range. (New issues keep arising, of course. For example, what is the publisher's policy on preservation?) Oxford Scholarship Online is an example of a successful program in this area.

Part of the motivation for developing programs like these is that it changes the way librarians think about book purchases. Currently librarians purchase books on a one-time 'firm' basis—that is, once purchased the library owns the copy outright and the press has no further obligations to the customer concerning that title. With digital aggregations, the subscription model becomes operative (libraries may or may not have access to the titles permanently and publishers have an obligation to service the collection on an ongoing basis). Aggregations can thus be sold as serials and draw on a different library budget line, not necessarily a literally different 'pool' of money, but funds that a librarian thinks about differently. The benefit of this for the presses (the benefit for libraries is arguable) is that the ongoing nature of a subscription make it less likely that the sale will be cancelled in a coming year. A digital aggregation thus may become part of a library's 'standing' or ongoing budget, like subscriptions for STM journals.

There are many challenges for the presses in putting together a program like this, not least being that few have a sufficiently large list of titles in any one subject area. With a few exceptions, it is likely that presses wishing to pursue this strategy will band together to form large collections organized by subject. (Duke has just launched such a program by itself, but Duke's list is fairly narrowly focused; thus a Duke aggregation is something of a proxy for a topical aggregation.) Assuming the presses are available to deal with the considerable technical and operational issues, they still must contend with the following: [End Page 413]

1. 1. As noted above, 75 per cent of press sales go to individuals. It is probable that most of these individuals are affiliated with universities. Thus a digital collection, coupled with remote access, may serve to cannibalize sales to individuals. This is precisely what happened to many society journals when libraries began offering remote access to digital collections; many of the society members dropped their print subscriptions in favour of the electronic (and free) edition. Thus growth in library digital aggregation sales may be offset to some degree by a decline in print individual sales. This creates a challenging situation for setting prices.

2. 2. Where are the libraries going to find the money to pay for these aggregations? It may be that the first presses that offer such collections will be successful, but subsequent offers may be rebuffed by budget-strapped librarians.

3. 3. The competition in this area is likely to be keen, and it may arise quickly. It is probable that in addition to collections prepared by clusters of presses, we will see new initiatives by such organizations as Ebrary, NetLibrary, ALPSP, and JSTOR. And hovering in the background is Google's entry into this market.

There is another dimension to selling to libraries that warrants discussion; I would characterize it as an 'elephant in the room' matter. The widespread belief is that libraries would buy more press titles if they had the money and that the presses have been squeezed out of library budgets by soaring prices of STM journals. I am sure there is some degree of truth to this, but what concerns me is the anecdotal reports that press titles circulate poorly. I do not have definitive information on this topic, but I have heard remarks like '40 per cent of university press books never circulate' and '25 per cent of all the books in our collection have not circulated once in the past ten years.' If this is true, what is the likelihood that libraries will support digital aggregations?

It would be useful to study the actual circulation of press titles, but in the absence of such a study, we may infer that there is limited circulation from reports that libraries are increasingly contemplating moving to comprehensive just-in-time or on-demand book purchases. One scenario for this is that a library would cancel all its standing-order plans. Then a catalogue of some kind would be made available on the library's resource site. Authorized members of the library's community would [End Page 414] go to the site and request purchases. Subject to guidelines on purchasing ('Your department has overspent its allotment this month'), books would be ordered from a wholesaler and entered into the library's collection. Consider a major research library's purchase of 10,000 new press titles every year on a just-in-case basis and then reflect on how that figure will be adjusted if that institution moves to on-demand. One likely unintended consequence is that fewer books will be purchased, fewer press titles will get published, and those titles that do get published will carry higher prices.

If the presses begin to migrate their library business to online aggregations, they will find their books and collections evaluated pretty much as journals are—that is, by various usage metrics. This means that the presses will have to become increasingly sophisticated about online marketing, a difficult task for the smaller presses. It also means that a comprehensive online catalogue of academic titles could be useful as one component of a broad suite of marketing services in maintaining and even building presses' library sales.

V. Utility of a Consolidated Online Catalogue

Despite the fact that all the presses have some degree of online marketing activity and almost all cite Amazon as their largest customer, in my view the bulk of the presses continue to underestimate the flexibility and potential of the online medium. There is a widely held view that the Internet is a static thing, that once you mount a Web site, you have 'figured out the Web.' One example of this was the comment that a combined press catalogue was tried ten years ago; it didn't work then, so why should it work now? I tracked that project down; it was started by Michael Jensen, Chuck Creesey, and Bruce Barton (and may have been funded by Mellon).⁶ In interviews with Jensen and Creesey I learned that that earlier project was literally pre-Web (it was built on Gopher) and was handicapped by the absence of an efficient means for the presses to transmit data (this was also pre-ONIX). Both Jensen and Creesey are eager to help out with a new catalogue project. The changing nature of the Internet is an invitation to rethink our marketing aspirations. (See Appendix A for the text of a blog post that previews some of these ideas in the context of POD.)

A consolidated catalogue will introduce scale to Web marketing, which is a very important thing for search-engine marketing (bigger sites [End Page 415] get a higher ranking in Google, though the world of search-engine optimization is Byzantine and ever-changing). Thus titles listed in the catalogue will more likely be discovered by users; and one assumes that greater discovery will lead to more sales. (Note exceptions to this in the section on libraries above.) A consolidated catalogue will also introduce scale to technical development, as a larger organization will be able to recruit top-notch engineering talent (or inspire that recruitment by a vendor) and distribute their work to the press community at large. And a consolidated catalogue will increase leverage with vendors: it is one thing for Duke University Press to negotiate with eBrary (as it did, and from what I have heard, apparently with great success), but it would be another matter entirely if eBrary were to be approached by over 100 academic publishers. Indeed, the scale of the operation could entice other vendors to enter the field at various points along the value chain.

What is the benchmark for the service's utility? As one press director astutely put it, the challenge for the service is that it has to add something to Amazon and Google. If the service can provide an offset to Amazon and Google, that's a good thing in its own right—because all publishers want multiple avenues to the ultimate customers. If the service adds sales for the presses, or enables sales at a higher margin, that would make virtually all the presses want to participate. Thus the metrics: sales channel diversification, increased volume, enhanced margin, and lower costs (through outsourcing). Any combination of these items is a good thing.

VI. The Evolution of the Idea

The initial idea for a consolidated online catalogue changed as this project developed. In part this was because of changes in the environment (e.g., commentary on the Google-publisher legal settlement, the explosive growth of certain e-book readers such as the Stanza for the iPhone), and in part this was in response to the many comments and suggestions made by the interviewees. So, for example, at the start of the research, the assumption was that an online catalogue would increase sales, lower individual presses' internal IT costs, and reduce print catalogue costs. I now see little short-term opportunity to reduce presses' IT costs, since there are so few personnel dedicated to online marketing to begin with. And no press so much as nibbled at the idea of creating print catalogues [End Page 416] with tools provided by Academilogue. I will summarize a revised feature set below, but first let's review some of the comments from the presses.

A key issue is that many of the presses simply want a project that does more. They want not only a catalogue, but full online transaction capability as well. They want the ability to create e-books. They want the ability to develop and market aggregations of e-books to libraries. And they want a resource that assists them in targeting undergraduate instructors for course adoptions. There is great pent-up demand for doing more things digitally. The problem the presses have is that they lack the resources to create these things on their own, and sometimes those absent resources include hard-headed strategic thinking.

On the issue of stand-alone e-books, I am sceptical about the presses' involvement at this time and do not see this as a useful activity for Academilogue. E-books are under 1 per cent of the book business today. In any event, e-book publishing is a problem that must and will be solved, but other publishers have a bigger stake in finding a solution. For the presses this is an opportunity to work with other people's money: Have Random House and Simon & Schuster create a consensus around e-book technologies and conventions, and then the presses can join the parade. Having said that, insofar as Academilogue increases demand for press titles, e-books would benefit.

For digital aggregations the opportunity is clearer and shorter-term. Libraries are purchasing such collections now. Creating and marketing such aggregations, however, is a very different matter from managing the marketing services that Academilogue proposes to provide; it will require different infrastructure from that of an online catalogue. But once again, if Academilogue increases discovery, it should increase demand, and thus even digital book aggregations should benefit.

The most interesting idea to come out of the press comments was to think of Academilogue as a platform, that is, a baseline of content onto which other services (including more content) could be layered. Once we have a catalogue in place, we could add a list of all college courses, with their instructors' names, schedule, and title selections. Presses would then mine this information and make recommendations to instructors as to appropriate press titles for required and recommended reading. The course list would also assist presses in identifying trends for new acquisitions. This layered service, in other words, would provide the kind of information about actual classroom adoptions that [End Page 417] at this time only the five leading commercial textbook publishes have access to in their proprietary databases. (There are vendors that provide some portion of this information, but these vendors do not have a faculty-facing service, and in any event, their listings are incomplete.) For this example, Academilogue provides only a piece of the solution, but it is an essential piece, as it is not possible to map books to courses unless there is a list of all the books.

Finally, many of the presses want to sell books, or sell more books, from their own Web sites in order to improve their margins. I resisted this idea until I began to hear reports of successful direct Web sales. I don't think anybody believes Academilogue could become a rival to Amazon, but the possibility of creating transaction capability now seems to me to have merit. There are complex issues here (the technology of e-commerce, the integration of fulfilment systems), but there also are benefits (e.g., Academilogue could help finance its operations in part by taking a percentage of sales, though less than Amazon does).

A press-wide online catalogue thus could evolve into a part of the infrastructure of the academy, assisting the presses themselves in strengthening their financial condition, enabling scholars and librarians to discover and purchase books, and helping teachers identify the best books for use in the classroom.

VII. Snapshot of the Feature Set

This is not the place to design a Web service, but it is useful to consider what features such a service should aim to provide.

VIII. Organizational Model

If one imagines fifty or more presses on one side, and a large technology company on the other, what structure would best facilitate a working relationship? BioOne may provide a useful model.

BioOne was founded to be something of a Project Muse for the life sciences. It is a unit tucked inside ARL, with a three-person professional staff. BioOne is responsible to its publishers—just under 100, publishing over 100 journals cumulatively. The services for these publishers, both print and electronic, are provided by Allen Press, one of the founders of BioOne. The BioOne staff essentially mediates between its members and Allen Press. Allen Press thus gets to deal with only a single set of contacts, and the publishers themselves, all small professional societies, get expertise from BioOne that none of them could afford on its own.

BioOne does not cover all the bases, of course. It is not creating software, for example; it is essentially a management operation. But the basic structure is sensible and worthy of emulation.

Another interesting model is that used in France by the French university presses. All of the French presses now participate in a consolidated online catalogue, Le Comptoir, mentioned above. The French presses work with a vendor named GiantChair,⁸ which has offices in Paris, New York, and San Francisco. GC provides the tools for the participating presses to enter and upload metadata about their books. The metadata then appears on the Le Comptoir Web site. The online catalogue has been carefully designed to optimize search-engine indexing, bringing a large amount of traffic to the site. Users who come to the site buy directly from it, bypassing other online booksellers; and this of course is good for the margins of the presses. Le Comptoir [End Page 422] works directly with its vendor (that is, GC), a structure I would not recommend, as it potentially diminishes the presses' long-term control of the consolidated site.

IX. Next Steps

For Academilogue to proceed, the next step (beyond coming up with a better name for it) is to identify a host institution, where a proposal for start-up funding can be developed. Such funding would then lead to a small BioOne-like organization, whose initial task would be to survey and select vendors. Once a principal vendor had been chosen, the new organization would seek to enlist the presses to participate and to establish the various review boards for such things as membership, policy, and technology.

X. Acknowledgments and Disclosures

This essay recapitulates in abbreviated form the findings in a study prepared for the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education. I would like to thank Gary Lopez and Nancy Cook of MITE for their support for this project. The study itself was made possible through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

A number of people assisted in the study and the documents derived from it—including, of course, over fifty interviewees who gave considerable time and effort to this project. In particular I would like to thank Philip Pochoda, Marlie Wasserman, Lynne Withey, and Ellen Faran, the directors of the university presses of Michigan, Rutgers, California, and MIT respectively. Karen Barch, COO of CDC (the distribution arm of the University of Chicago Press) assisted me in formulating the key operational requirements. Michael Jensen of the National Academies Press has been a reliable and creative partner throughout. Finally, my special thanks to Terry Ehling of Cornell University, who volunteered to begin the implementation of the project. [End Page 423]