What the Heck Does a Book Cost?
The sheer number of new marketing programs for books makes it hard to determine just how much a book costs. This post details all the factors involved with pricing.
Using the Scholarly Kitchen for Research
The Scholarly Kitchen can be a useful research tool for its contributors, as it enables the community to participate in certain kinds of questions. But group blogs don’t work for everyone.
Amazon, PDA, and Library Sales for Books
Amazon’s sales to libraries and patron-driven acquisitions have many interesting marketplace parallels, but Amazon works only with print for libraries, whereas PDA is mostly digital. This could lead Amazon to enter the PDA market through acquisition.
PDA and Inter-library Loan
Patron-driven acquisitions programs may supplant inter-library loans for ebooks, which in turn could get more publishers to support both PDA and ILL.
The Bookstore in the Library
PDA programs set up a kind of bookstore within library OPACs. It is possible to expand the range of these programs to enable the purchase of books by individuals on their own account–a new service for patrons and an income stream for libraries and publishers alike.
The Bookstore of Last Resort
When on-demand systems for bookselling, such as patron-driven acquisitions, are set up, they create an unexpected problem: How do you know the book will still be available when you finally get around to ordering it? The bookstore of last resort is a preservation-based commercial venture to ensure that books are always available.
A Dialogue on Patron-Driven Acquisitions
A dialogue on patron-driven acquisitions by a librarian (Rick Anderson) and a publishing consultant (Joe Esposito). Patron-driven acquisitons may evolve into patron-driven access. But publishers ultimately will have to bless the plans.
The Broader Context of Patron-Driven Acquisitions
A new book edited by David Swords on patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) provides a good background on the topic, but there is a broader context of PDA, which is not fully addressed.
Book Publishers and Patron-Driven Acquisition: Announcing a Research Project
Announcing a Mellon Foundation-funded study of patron-driven acquisition (PDA) and its implications for academic book publishers.