From an article in Book Business Magazine comes these tips for libraries. The article was written by George Scotti, channel marketing director for Springer Science+Business Media. Much more in the article, itself.
1. Set your content free. Publish e-books without digital rights management (DRM), and allow concurrent users to access content. “In a database environment, allowing multiple users to access the content provides a better [user] experience … [and] helps to drive usage. Without DRM, users can also share content freely on multiple devices,” says Scotti.
2. Go mobile. To assist in streamlining e-book production across multiple devices, use a universal format like PDF or .epub. “Also, investing in robust XML allows for easy conversion to alternate formats, if necessary,” Scotti adds.
3. Offer a “critical mass” to reduce cost per unit and increase usage/value proposition. “Libraries often are looking to develop a ‘mass’ of titles in a certain subject area. … So offering a ‘critical mass’ of, [for example], biology titles is very attractive to [them]. This lowers cost per unit, and … ensures that the collection will be used. Large collections are indexed by search engines like Google, and listed in the library catalog. When a library gets a lot of usage on content from a single publisher, then there is perceived value and lower cost per use,” he says.
4. You buy it, you own it. Provide institutions perpetual access and ownership of the content they buy. This will make repeat business more attractive and lower total lifetime costs. “If you pay for the content in year one and have access and usage over time, every year the cost per use of that content goes down,” says Sc
I’m sure the tips you listed are ones that libraries will find appealing. I’m just not sure that it’s in the best interest of authors to agree to all of them. They could easily end up being exploited.
That’s not an idle comment. As a writer, I’ve been involved in the legal challenge to the Google settlement and, as a result, I’ve been more than a little disgusted by two aspects of their stance toward the settlement taken by university libraries.
1. First, several major libraries seem to confuse owning a copy of a book with owning the rights to a books content. That’s why they agreed to Google’s original scanning scheme. And yes, much of their attitude was born out of the fact that Google was going to cover the costs of any copyright infringement lawsuit. But that only reinforces my distrust. If these libraries only reason for not infringing copyrights, was the cost of a lawsuit, then they lack respect for an author’s long labors. Such people aren’t too be trusted with loosely protected content.
2. Read the positions taken by university consortiums in the settlement and you’ll see nothing but unalloyed selfishness. Their only real concern seemed to be that a Google monopoly on these violated books might end up costing them more money than they wanted to pay. Again, as in #1, they seemed to have no respect for the labors of authors.
In short, the Google settlement taught me not to trust how university libraries might treat my books. And, although I suspect public libraries are less likely to regard what’s on their shelves as what they own, I’d be a bit careful with them too.
I find the advice being offered to Libraries atrocious. Libraries are on the verge of a coming revolution into the e world. They don’t have a working model for how this is going to operate but are trying desperately to justify their own existence in any way they can think of. The system they are using now is insane and is not going to be fair to readers or writers or publishers in the way that they are delivering eBooks so grossly open to copying.
I am not even sure whether Libraries have any role to play in an e future. In my view there has been little joined up thinking about how it can work in practice.
Are they expecting libraries to remain bricks and mortar establishments in a world of the Internet ? Are they expecting people to pay for books when they can get them for free from online libraries ? The whole thing is a mess.