ALPSP Course – Building Strategies for Managing Partnerships and Institutional eBook Sales

Wednesday, 21 – Thursday, 22 June 2023

The course will be delivered in two sessions on Wednesday 21 June and Thursday 22 June at:

09:00-11:30 (EDT), 14:00-16:30 (BST), 15:00-17:30 (CEST).

In this session we will look at ebook business models and some of the ways a publisher may think about aligning their various vendor partnerships in academic ebook sales channels. We will focus on global institutional ebook sales.

The ecosystem for scholarly books and academic libraries has become continuously more opaque to publishers owing to the rapid evolution of digital technology and the creative destruction, i.e., consolidation and innovation, in the vendor landscape.

Driven by the pandemic, library acqurision of digital content has been exponential, at least for those publishers whose content is well served by digital formats and are positioned to deliver it. At the same time, print sales have continued to decline more and more precipitously in the academic library world (one library recently reported cutting its print acquisitions from $240,000 annually to $60,000, while investing heavily in a variety of digital content collecting strategies). It has never been more important to understand who current academic ebook vendors are, their complex array of ebook access and purchase models, and how the vendors and their models interact with each other and impact a publisher’s business.