Feature: Ebooks
The rapid adoption of ebooks in recent years has led to greater scrutiny of pricing models, writes David Stuart
Searching for the right ebook business models
For a long time, the adoption of ebooks by libraries lagged behind the adoption of ejournals, but the Covid-19 pandemic brought a seismic change. According to Jack Macdonald, Director
of Library Sales at Cambridge University Press, it accelerated many of the trends that were already there, as librarians tried to ensure all the assigned readings and textbooks were available electronically: “That’s not a new trend, but because of the pandemic, everything flipped to remote, more or less overnight, and that just made that a bigger issue.” This switch to ebooks has also been
accompanied by a lot of changes in the market, says Macdonald: “The other trend in the past couple of years is the amount of experimentation and a lot of momentum behind trying to find business models for open access monographs in particular.” Some of these changes have not
always been welcomed by the library community, especially when it has resulted in higher book prices. In September 2020, a group of academic librarians and researchers wrote an open letter to the UK Government asking it to investigate ebook pricing and licensing practices in the scholarly publishing sector. As Ben Ashcroft, Vice President
(Commercial) at De Gruyter, explains: “Book budgets, whether print or
www.researchinformation.info | @researchinfo g Spring 2023 Research Information 5
‘This switch to ebooks has also been accompanied by a lot of changes in the market’
Roman Samborskyi/
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