2019 Charleston Library Conference

It was 2014 and all looked bleak for libraries that wanted to purchase entire university press frontlist ebook collections with multi-user rights. The availability of university press frontlist ebook titles was inconsistent and dwindling each year. This phenomenon was largely due to university presses’ uncertainty about which titles would become adopted for course use. They feared significant revenue loss through unsustainable collections pricing models and declining print sales.

The solutions tried by the university presses to deal with this fear were counterproductive. When presses removed the potential course adopted titles from DRM-free collections, they denied access to the titles to all institutions, not just those that adopted them for course use. Similarly, when they put a multiplied price for unlimited access on these titles, institutions that did not adopt them for course use were required to pay the same amount for unlimited access rights as those institutions that did adopt them. As a result, academic libraries that wanted to acquire entire collections of university presses were being forced to acquire each press’ ebook titles from multiple vendors, on multiple platforms, with varying usage rights, in multiple formats, on a title by title basis... Libraries were ready to give up._

A pilot project lead by De Gruyter was launched in 2015 in order to test an alternative model for acquisition of university press ebook collections that was fair and mutually agreeable by both the university presses, consortia as well as the libraries. After four years, the pilot is soon coming to a close. What has the data revealed? Did the alternative model deal with all of the challenges both the presses and the libraries were facing? What happens next after the pilot ends? These questions and more will be answered at this session.