A consortium of sixteen university presses has joined hands with the Berlin-based scholarly publishing house, De Gruyter in a bid to push eBook sales between the university libraries and the presses. The central idea behind the move is to ensure the institutions sell all of their latest digital publications to the university libraries.
This will ensure a steady revenue stream for the presses that will know there is going to be demand from the libraries to buy their stuff. That will include not only the books that are among the most sought after but scholarly monographs as well that may not be much in demand but is still important from an academic point of view.
This makes for a win-win situation for both the libraries as well as the presses. While on the one hand, the libraries will have collections of every possible genre of books and content, the press will get paid for each and every title they publish. As of now, De Gruyter said they are working with 43 libraries who’d like to buy all that the presses that the publishing house has teamed up with have to offer.
The above plan couldn’t have come at a better time as well what with many of the university presses going through financially challenging times. Take for instance the Stanford University which happens to be one of the richest in the US but had resorted to cut subsidies of its press by $1.7 million in 2019, only to revert the decision following faculty outrage.
The University Press Library initiative also isn’t without its own set of challenges. Prime among those is of course digital rights. Not only did the presses have varying views on that, but they also didn’t quite like the idea of selling a DRM-free eBook to the library as they suspected such eBooks can be downloaded hundreds of times without they being able to do anything about it.
The damage does not stop there as the publishers also believed they will lose out on print sales if such an eBook is later used as the standard study material for any course later on. In any case, presses always believed eBooks sales might not be consistent enough and even if it is, it might come at the cost of print sales.
Among the presses that have teamed up with De Gruyter include Columbia, Cornell, Fordham, Harvard, New York, Pennsylvania State, Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, and Yale Universities. Similarly, the Universities of California, Chicago, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Toronto, and Texas too are members of the initiative at the moment.
With a keen interest in tech, I make it a point to keep myself updated on the latest developments in technology and gadgets. That includes smartphones or tablet devices but stretches to even AI and self-driven automobiles, the latter being my latest fad. Besides writing, I like watching videos, reading, listening to music, or experimenting with different recipes. The motion picture is another aspect that interests me a lot, and I'll likely make a film sometime in the future.
