Feature: Ebooks
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Recognising value As well as finding models that provide access, it is also important that they should reflect the value of the work. While demand-driven acquisition and short-term loans have enabled a lot of access to content with no upfront fees, for Ashcroft they risk creating the wrong expectations about the content: “The models can lead to us eroding the value of the content, and that’s a very slippery slope; we’re creating a problem for ourselves in the future. It’s obviously potentially good for authors, publishers and users to have content more easily discoverable out there, and those models do provide that, but they do raise the issue of how to ensure that content is remunerated equitably and that publishers’ books programmes in the end are actually sustainable. “If you put lots of content out there for
free and are not actually earning money with it, particularly for monographs and
8 Research Information Spring 2023
‘Eventually, sustainable and equitable models will emerge that everyone can live with’
low usage titles, that can become a real issue. We and other publishers are looking at how we participate in those models, what sort of pricing we should be expecting for that, whether we restrict content out of usage-based models, just to make sure that the whole ecosystem remains financially sustainable for us. “Evidence-based acquisition, for
example, does have a role to play in the market longer term. It is an exciting way of making backlist titles available to libraries that are at a sustainable cost, and
ensuring that they have a sustainable way of purchasing them, but we are having to look at ways of doing this for the front list that are more financially sustainable.”
More than a ‘book’ Part of the problem is that ebook models have been tied to the traditional concept of the book for too long, which has failed to recognise the potential added value of both ebooks and textbooks. As Ashcroft puts it: “We’ve always had a policy of pricing our ebooks for institutional use at the same price as our print books. So, a PDF licence to an institution for use by everybody with no limits to usage or downloads, simultaneous usage, has always cost the same as a print book. We asked ourselves whether that was actually the right approach and came to the conclusion that an electronic format made available in that way does actually deliver an additional value versus the print book, so for our
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