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provide libraries and research institutions with a choice of purchasing options, including full ebook collection and single title models, when accessing digital book content. Different models can be combined, and as van der Velde highlights: ‘These changes may seem recent but we’ve been working with libraries on different iterations of this business model, and piloting various models over the years. ‘Bundling of content had been our core business model for quite a few years, and being able to sell and grant access to single titles required quite a different operational set-up,’ he added. ‘But the constant feedback from librarians made us decide to have this complete review of how we were selling our ebooks and collections, so we’ve completely overhauled our business, which has resulted in Flexible eBook Solutions.’ Chris Bennett, global sales director


for academic publishing at Cambridge University Press, also believes that his company’s pricing models are relatively straightforward, flexible and fair. In response to the pandemic, CUP developed a higher education website to quickly


“The important outcome is these digital resources get into users’ hands. There’s no use offering content a library can’t afford”


deliver textbooks. Here, institutions acquire books through an annual lease that allows for an unlimited number of concurrent users. ‘[The website provides] very, very low


price points per student and a fraction of the book price – we’re talking about discounts of more than 90 per cent against the price of an individual book,’ he said. ‘The point of all of our mechanisms is librarians are not being over-charged and not having to buy volumes they don’t want. This has revolutionised our ebook sales – this year 40 per cent of our book sales were digital, that’s the most we’ve ever achieved.’ Given falling librarian budgets and ebook pricing issues, a move towards more flexibility makes sense. Van der Velde said that the pandemic certainly fast-tracked Springer Nature’s decision to implement single-title purchases. However, he also suspects that the pandemic, and sudden surge in ebook demand, may have taken


some publishers by surprise, exacerbating issues such as pricing. ‘We’ve been working in ebook publishing


for many years, and had noticed a growing awareness and demand before the pandemic came,’ he said. ‘So we were ready for this situation and could react right away... and have priced and built ebook models that are sustainable for us and users.’


CUP’s Bennett also believes some publishers have yet to truly adapt to both the different world of ebooks and declining budgets. ‘The use-case for consuming something digitally is very different to print... and if you look at the period from the financial crash to pandemic, library budgets have been on a slow downward slide from one crisis to another,’ he said. ‘Budget decreases have now sharply


accelerated and next year we’re hearing of cuts from 15 to 40 per cent… what some publishers didn’t do quickly enough was react to this, and provide a different set of business models,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to build [our models] around digital content and services – publishing has always been a service industry, and now the delivery mechanisms are catching up with the market – there’s a gap that needs closing.’


Surprise demand Unsurprisingly aggregators, as well as publishers, also witnessed rising ebook demand come the pandemic. As Oren Beit-Arie, president of ProQuest Books and chief strategy officer points out, ProQuest Ebook Central saw double-digit growth in user engagement, as well as a strong uptick in library acquisitions. ‘We’ve been seeing shifts towards


ebooks for some time now – in the past few years this has been taking place pretty slowly, but certainly accelerated since the pandemic,’ he said. ‘To quote one of our librarians, the pandemic drove a shift in two weeks that we hadn’t seen in two years.’ At the time, ProQuest saw strong demand for its Title Matching Fast service, which aims to swiftly match print holdings with electronic titles. And the aggregator also partnered with publishers to offer discounts on ebooks to libraries that already owned the print version. But in a similar vein to Van der Velde and Bennett, Beit-Arie believes the pandemic-induced surge in demand was a shock to the system for many. ‘The pandemic clearly drove the market shift in the availability and use of text books, particularly in high-demand collections, or course reserve,’ he said. ‘And because this sudden shift was forced upon us by the pandemic, quite frankly nobody was


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