FEATURE Feature Ebooks and aggregators
Adapting in line with content consumption
Sam Bruinsma of Brill, Tommy Doyle of Elsevier, and Chris Bennett of Cambridge University Press discuss the latest trends in
ebook publishing. Robert Roe asks the questions
What developments have you seen over the last two years, in terms of the products you are offering and the customers that are buying them? Have ebook budgets grown?
Bruinsma: At Brill we see a steady double- digit growth of our ebook sales over the last couple of years. Annually we publish almost 1,000 new titles.
Our own offering to academic libraries is centred around more than a dozen subject collections of 20 to 100 titles each. These collections are exclusively sold by Brill and are marketed as one-offs but are also used to fuel our PDA and DDA (pick and choose) models. We do not have signals that total acquisition budgets for books are growing overall; on the contrary, what we are witnessing with our ebooks is mainly substitution of print sales. We would like to see some extra growth in budgets of course, especially in HSS, but we are content agnostic and have no problem with cannibalising print.
The advantages of ebooks over print books for authors (larger readership), customers (larger readership), and users (discoverability, accessibility, usability) are evident. With ebooks publishers have the advantage of lower unit costs and therefore slightly better margins, which helps to continue their book programme. However, do not underestimate the costs
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of setting up and maintaining the digital infrastructure necessary to support an ebook programme fully. And the share of the physical production costs in the print price of specialised scholarly books has fallen constantly over the past decade. Doyle: We see a continued shift from print to electronic and growth of ebooks. The pace and scale of transition varies significantly by region, by customer segment, by content type and use-case. Globally the market still has a long way to go; approximately 70 to 80 per cent of revenues are still driven by print sales, depending on what study you look at and which competitor you see reporting. For Elsevier S&T Books, the majority of our revenue is now from ebooks. The biggest shift within electronic revenues over the past two years has been the move from back list, one-off, and big deals due to catalogue digitisations to more front-list focused. We see more evidence- based, flexible, and recurring business models. Our recurring and evidenced-based models now represent about one third of electronic revenues and this continues to grow. Ebooks purchasing has become much more strategic in nature and we have seen a large growth in the use of data and analytics by leading librarians.
For the last five years, we have been using data and analytics from our own tools such as Scopus and SciVal, as well as usage analytics on ScienceDirect to drive our publishing and product decisions. We have
found these portfolio planning tools derived from the above are also incredibly useful for librarians with data that is cut and organised at their institution’s level. With this information at hand and a wide range of purchasing and access options available, we help librarians build a plan that is predictable, affordable and sustainable over time. It also allows the librarian to hold us, as their solutions provider, accountable and it helps libraries demonstrate the value of the crucial service they provide to their stakeholders. Bennett: The last two years have seen continued growth in global demand for Cambridge ebooks. However, this has not been the rapid, almost unconditional expansion experienced over much of the preceding decade, which was from a low base and with relatively little impact on other revenue streams.
Acquisition of ebooks has become steadily more granular, not only to the title level but within it to the consumption
‘With ebooks publishers have the advantage of lower unit costs’
of chapters through pay-per-access models. Open educational resources (OERs) are the OA manifestation of this development and, coupled with fully online course provision (whether open or closed), it presents a threat to the traditional sector, and a great opportunity to develop new publishing forms.
In the UK particularly (though the indications are that Australia and the US may follow) the research universities are setting a greater emphasis on teaching and learning than ever before, and tutors must manage the demands this places upon them
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