The third presentation in the series on e-books by Mike Walmsley from YBP Yankee Book Pedlar).

Mike starting by saying that as with print, with e-books, vendors don’t just sell the book to a library, but provide many associated services.

Mike mentioning a session (which I’m planning to go to) later in the conference about merging print and electronic workflows for serials – and saying that serials have a huge headstart on books with this. However, he feels we have a chance to tackle this problem right at the start with e-books (I don’t thing he is right, as I think this has already diverged a long way – but I think he is right in the sense that the sooner we tackle the issues, the better)

Mike saying that the current offerings in terms of e-books have limitations, and libraries have had to be creative finding appropriate workflows.

Mike see’s the mission at YBP to integrate print and e-book workflows. He says they want to enable libraries to ‘keep those long established workflows’ – I think we need to be careful here. The world is changing, and e-books are different. I don’t want to keep the same workflows, but I think the workflows need to be closely aligned, and work in a ‘well seamed’ manner – and be carried out by the same systems and staff. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as having a single workflow, and certainly not as keeping the same old workflow.

Mike noting that one of the things people say they like about books is ‘the smell’ – we get a bit obsessed perhaps with all the details – but users have other concerns 🙂 Mike is reflecting on the physical nature of books – showing a slide of his 1 year old daughter – and saying how she interacts with books – i.e. the print book as an interface – so he doesn’t see print books going anywhere. I don’t disagree with this for at least the forseeable future. Whether it is true specifically for academic libraries is a slightly different issue I think – and certainly in terms of the majority of our acquisition – this could change towards ‘e’ much quicker than the general environment.

Mike saying how vendors provide ‘slip plans’ and ‘approval plans’ – selection processes where vendors automatically supply titles on the basis of a profile. This can be done for e-books just as for print (although ‘approval plans’ more complex and will take some development for e-books).

Mike saying that vendors like YBP are about providing access to as much of the ‘universe’ of material as possible – this remains true with ‘e’.

Mike is covering a lot of the similarities between print and e-books, and where vendors can provide the same services. This is fine, but to be honest not very interesting. The places where they differ, and why they differ, are really the issues.

What Mike is trying to do seems to be to stress the advantages over a ‘middleman’ rather than buying direct from the publisher. I don’t really disagree with any of it, but it feels a bit defensive.

Mike now asking, with all these similarities, why are libraries changing their workflows for e-books, and saying ‘keep the book vendor involved’ what he isn’t engaging with is stuff like licensing, issues with ownership and access rights, pricing models, single platform deals, package deals and lack of title-by-title purchase models etc.

Mike noting that for YBP the fact that e-book prices vary from library-to-library (e.g. based on size of institution, fte count etc.) is a really problem – makes it very difficult to display a ‘list price’.