U of Chicago Press Takes Aim at Library Users

Via DigitalKoans an article in Publishers Weekly on a recent push into ebooks by several American university presses:

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners…The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

And as the Harvard University Press announces that they are putting 1,000 ebooks on Scribd, the American Chemical Society is admitting that their users say the “…ACS is not moving to an all Web-and-mobile digital publishing mode quickly enough…” (via Teleread.)

But the smartest move into scholarly ebook publishing may be coming from the University of Chicago Press which has hitched its wagon to Adobe Digital Editions. By taking advantage of the DRM capabilities in Digital Editions they are able to offer varying levels of ownership, including the ability to rent an ebook for a limited time.

As their press release points out:

The Press currently offers three e-book licensing options: Perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership for about 50% off, and 30-day ownership for just $5.00.

According to Patti O’Shea, executive director of information systems at Chicago, “the limited-time plans will allow students who only need a book for a semester-long course, or for a research paper they’re working on, to get the book immediately and own it for only as long as they need it.”

The limited 30 day book rental is aimed at dissatisfied library users:

No more lugging twenty pounds of books across campus, no more waiting for recalls and interlibrary loans…

It is not hard to imagine a service like this being successful, especially if offered by a vendor with the scope of a Google or an Amazon. What harried undergrad or professor wouldn’t pay a small fee to bypass their library and quickly download an essential book? Rather than take the approach that the DRM in Digital Editions will be a turnoff, the University of Chicago Press is shrewdly highlighting the flexibility of Digital Editions (allowing as they do for more transfer of content than most readers would reasonably need, particularly those only paying for a limited period):

O’Shea said the rental options were aimed at students and noted that using Digital Editions allows the e-books, “to be used on up to six unique devices registered to a single users. Readers can seamlessly transfer their e-books between different computers and e-book devices.”

It isn’t DRM that will hinder this, but the fact that, until Amazon opens up the Kindle to allow it to read Epub formatted books, Kindle owners will be shut out. Nevertheless the concept of offering an affordable time-limited ebook service is a sound one as is the prediction that academic libraries will soon be facing real competition for their collections.