to Libraries
Christine B. Charlip
AbstrAct
The American Society for Microbiology’s (ASM) publishing unit annu-ally produces six to twelve new titles, a combination of college textbooks and practitioners’ manuals. The ASM Press has three primary markets for its books: content resellers, institutions, and individuals. Distributing e-content directly to institutions is a relatively new endeavor and required developing a customized publishing portal, converting backlist titles to e-books, writing chapter abstracts, offering different purchase models to libraries, deciding how to price e-books, providing use statistics to insti-tutional customers, and developing strategies for enhancing visibility for ASM titles in library discovery layers. The author concludes by considering the challenges and future directions for small scholarly publishers.
AmericAn society for microbiology And the Asm Press overview
The field of microbiology has a large footprint within the life sciences and addresses our understanding of the roles of microbes—archaea, bacte-ria, fungi, parasites, and viruses—on our planet and their application to research and practice in improving global health and the environment.
The ASM aspires to define the future of and lead the microbiological sci-ences; this mission is reflected in many activities, including publishing.
The ASM is a niche publisher well-known to libraries for high-quality jour-nals, reference works, textbooks, and monographs. Hundreds of books and
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16 journals present a variety of work in microbial pathogens, food safety, molecular genetics, public health, ecology and diversity, clinical diagnos-tics, science education, and biotechnology; microbiology also informs much of the work being done in chemistry, medicine, and engineering. ASM is a credible source of vetted, peer-reviewed content in microbiology, making it a natural partner to libraries around the world.
The ASM Press, the book imprint of ASM, publishes six to twelve new titles per year, including the leading textbooks used to educate upper-level undergraduates and graduates: Principles of Virology by Flint, Enquist, Racaniello, and Skalka; Molecular Genetics of Bacteria by Snyder, Peters, Henkin, and Champness; Bacterial Pathogenesis by Wilson, Salyers, Whitt, and Winkler; and Molecular Biotechnology by Glick, Pasternak, and Pat-ten. The Manual of Clinical Microbiology (11th edition, 2012) is the princi-pal reference work in the field and is used in hospital and research labora-tories around the world.
Print is far from obsolete and brings in most of the revenue (see Table 1). Customers often tell staff that they use e-resources for searching and discovery; then they often choose to read the print version. Also, because the ASM Press titles are sold internationally, print is required in the many places where Internet access is limited or absent. The ASM Press issues almost all titles both in print and as e-books.
table 1. The ASM Press annual print and electronic revenue split.
Year Electronic revenue* Print revenue
2011 12% 88%
2012 14% 86%
2013 22% 78%
2014 30% 70%
*Electronic revenue includes journal subscriptions and e-book sales.
The ASM Press has three primary markets for its titles: content resell-ers, institutions, and individuals. Content resellers provide the largest source of revenue and include international print distributors, university bookstores, and e-book aggregators, but like other publishers, the highest
volume of annual print sales in recent years has been with Amazon. Ama-zon’s vast catalog of offerings, highly competitive pricing, and low-cost shipping are so attractive to individuals that it is difficult for publishers to sell directly to customers. The smallest revenue stream is sales to individu-als; these are fueled by discounts offered to members on the association website and at bookstores during large ASM meetings.
In 2011, ASM made a strategic decision to distribute e-books directly to institutions, in part to meet these customers’ needs better and in part to gain greater insight into how the content is used. Until then, the ASM Press made very few sales directly to institutions because libraries bought ASM titles primarily from book wholesalers or e-book aggregators. The opportu-nity presented by e-books changed that.
evolution of Asm e-books
The ASM Press first experimented with electronic book publishing in 2006, using Ingram’s Vitalsource service to trial several e-textbooks. Since then, the ASM Press has supplied PDF files to many e-book aggregators who then offer the content to institutions for a variety of licensed uses. For a small soci-ety publisher, it is advantageous to work with an e-book aggregator because that company is the one that builds and maintains the digital delivery plat-form and controls the digital rights management (DRM) of the e-book files.
Before deciding which titles to supply to which vendors, it is important to become familiar with each aggregator’s audience and business model (e.g., licensed access as part of a collection, multiple- and single-user perpetual licenses, nonlinear lending with user cap, short-term loan periods, patron-driven acquisition triggers, or microtransactions). Table 2 provides a basic overview of several e-book aggregators with which the ASM Press works.
The ASM Press supplies some but not all e-books for resale to the e-book aggregators. There is not much interest in the backlist, other than textbooks. Textbooks are the biggest sellers through ebrary, EBL, and R2;
reference manuals and monographs also sell well on specialty platforms such as Stat!Ref (medical) and Knovel (engineering). Vitalsource has been able to offer institution-authenticated access for oral microbiology titles to entire incoming classes in certain dental schools. However, it is common knowl-edge that library patrons often complain about the use limits imposed by the aggregators’ DRM. In addition, publishers receive no information about the
table 2. Popular e-book aggregators. E-book platformBusiness ownerCustomersSubject matterBusiness models/offerings ebraryProQuestInstitutions, corporationsVariety• Perpetual access sale: single user, three users, or unlimited users; users can download titles for specified lending period • Perpetual sale, nonlinear lending: multiple concurrent uses with use cap per year; when use exceeded, second e-book copy is purchased • Subscription to specified collection • Short-term loan: time-limited access at prorated price; single user only • Patron-driven acquisition with use-triggered perpetual access sale EBLProQuestAcademic and research libraries
Variety• Perpetual sale, nonlinear lending: multiple concurrent uses with use cap per year; when use exceeded, second e-book copy is purchased • Demand-driven acquisition: load catalog, set purchase trigger based on browse period • Short-term pay-per-use
MyiLibraryIngramPublic, academic, and research libraries
Variety• Perpetual sale by title or by collection: users can download titles for specified lending period • Subscription by title or collection • Patron-drive acquisition R2 Digital LibraryRittenhouseHospital, academic, and institutional libraries Medicine, nursing, allied health, dental, pharmacy, veterinary
• Purchase multiple concurrent access to titles for life of edition • Patron-driven acquisition Stat!Ref OnlineTeton Data SystemsMedical institutions, individuals
Medicine, nursing, dental, pharmacy
• Annual subscriptions to core collections or pick-and-choose collection • Concurrent user limits KnovelElsevierCorporations, research libraries, institutions, societies, government
Engineering• Annual subscriptions • Customized plans that offer users unlimited access VitalsourceIngramStudentsVariety• Individual access to textbooks • Perpetual sale or one-year or half-year rental
use of their content from resellers. Not knowing the customers’ consumption habits, it is difficult to know how to adjust content to meet users’ needs.
To take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital publishing and distribution, the ASM Press adjusted its book publishing strategy in several ways to increase distribution to and understanding of institutional and individual markets. These goals guided several important decisions.
• The ASM Press made a commitment to publish titles in both print and e-book format simultaneously, assigning both print ISBNs and e-book ISBNs. An exception can occur at the author’s request. Authors of a few titles will not permit them to be published as e-books, fearing either digital piracy or improper display of important color subtleties (e.g., laboratory test results) by monitors and other screens.
• The ASM Press has one list price for each book, regardless of format, so that a print book and an e-book cost the same when ownership is per-petual. ASM members enjoy discounts, which helps the association com-pete with the often deep discounts offered by resellers. Other than e-book rentals via aggregators, the ASM Press does not offer any discounts on textbooks, instead choosing to price them as reasonably as possible.
• The ASM Press realized the importance of preparing, preserving, and dis-tributing accurate, robust book metadata to our business partners. In the case of libraries, this means creating and maintaining accurate, up-to-date MARC records and KBART files.
digitAl distribution by Asm
The ASM Press embarked on an enterprise effort to present our content—
books and journals—on one customized publishing portal, ASMscience (www.ASMscience.org), which launched in October 2013. In preparation for loading onto the ASMscience digital platform, the ASM Press active titles were converted from print-ready PDFs into XML (NLM DTD 2.3) files beginning in 2011. This effort is ongoing, and the DTD is being updated to the Book Interchange Tag Suite (BITS). For discovery purposes, abstracts were written for every chapter of every book (> 5,000 abstracts). This infor-mation also supports sales of individual chapters.
ASM structured ASMscience so that it allows both IP validation for insti-tutional users to access their purchased e-books or journal subscriptions and
password authentication for individual access. When accessed by authen-ticated institutional users, books are presented in a manner similar to how users are accustomed to reading electronic journals, with an HTML-driven full text for online reading and chapters presented individually as PDF files.
Icons and text make it clear to patrons which e-books on ASMscience are owned and available for use.
Perhaps the most important feature of ASMscience is that it is free from DRM, allowing unlimited concurrent access that permits reading, sav-ing, and downloading by chapter.
Individuals (not authenticated through institutional access) can browse ASMscience and find books or chapters of interest and purchase and download an entire e-book as either PDF or EPUB file or a chapter as a PDF file. The ASM Press has not included newer textbooks in our “all you can use” presentation to institutions because of the degradation it would cause to textbook sales. E-textbooks are sold on other platforms (e.g., Vital-source, RedShelf) that limit the use of that textbook to the purchaser via DRM. However, the ASM Press has sold textbook files directly to a library for it to host securely for its patrons.
By fall 2015, ASMscience presented more than 215 full-text e-books. A few of these titles were published in the 1990s; because the field of micro-biology is vast and microbiological concepts do not change rapidly, these older books still are being purchased in print, so ASM converted them into e-books. In the coming years, ASM will be able to determine the level of the interest in those titles based on the number of views and downloads of the e-books. The hypothesis is that presenting the entire list of titles, with chapter abstracts, will increase the discoverability of the backlist content. The long-term goal is for all ASM Press-generated content, including books, journals, reports, guidelines, webinars, and so forth, to be included in ASMscience and be cross-searchable. ASM believes that this approach will provide important synergy and opportunities for interested readers to learn as they search, browse, and discover this curated collection of vetted microbiology content.
develoPing Products thAt APPeAl to librAries
When ASMscience launched in October 2013, the ASM Press finally had a direct distribution channel to institutional customers, presenting an oppor-tunity to reach institutions that were familiar with the ASM Press e-journals
but whose consumption of the ASM Press books previously had been hid-den by the intermediaries in the supply chain. Major decisions included what products to offer, how those offers would be structured (purchase models), and pricing.
Products
Libraries already could buy single titles through the e-book aggregators, so the ASM Press chose to offer e-books in collections. Although this deci-sion limited the potential customer pool to research-focused institutions and larger universities with life sciences programs, staff believed that the ability to buy e-books “in bulk” would be appealing. Those institutions not interested in collections could continue to buy e-books individually from aggregators. However, the user’s experience with a title on ASMscience is enhanced compared to what is offered by the e-book aggregators. When using the ASM platform, library patrons are assured of access because there is no limit on the number of users reading the e-book at the same time. The user can search or read through the full text or, having found a chapter of interest, can print or save the chapter PDF to read later. Patrons can estab-lish customized accounts on ASMscience that will allow them to highlight sections, create favorites, and bookmark pages. Patrons can save or print as much of a book as they want. They also can save books to their personal laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
ASM’s first products were two e-book collections: a three-year frontlist collection (2010–2012 titles by copyright date) and a backlist collection (1993–2009). Since then, all of these titles have moved into the backlist and the frontlist consists of the most recent two years’ imprints. The frontlist and backlist collections combined total 215 e-books. In response to librar-ians’ requests, ASM also offers smaller collections of e-book titles: a basic microbiology collection (35 titles), an applied and environmental collection (45), and an infectious diseases collection (40).
The most popular collection is the complete collection. Librarians not only like the ability to buy the whole collection at once, but they also like the lower per-title cost with this option. Librarians who bought the com-plete collection typically continue to buy each new frontlist to keep their collection growing. Although ASM announced a recent frontlist in June, staff hope to make future annual announcements earlier. However, despite
updated production processes with compressed timelines, publishers still cannot wrest manuscripts from authors and editors on demand. Writing, peer review, and editing all take time.
One large society journal publisher, the Institute of Physics (IOP), recently began a new e-books publishing program. This press successfully delivered a collection of about 30 e-books within a year or two by paying individual authors to write relatively short (about 100-page) e-books on cur-rent topics in their field. These e-books are available only within collections sold to IOP’s international base of journal customers. This approach takes advantage of IOP’s sophisticated proprietary digital platform to deliver e-books that go beyond PDFs; they include dynamic media elements and cross-linking. At the heart of this program is a library advisory board that helped shape the nature of the e-book publishing program and its offerings, and will continue to provide ideas and feedback.
Purchase models
The ASM Press gives libraries a choice between perpetual access purchase and annual subscription. Overwhelmingly, 95% of libraries want to own the content. The business model offers pricing by tiers and negotiates pric-ing for multisite and other institutions havpric-ing more users than the largest tier. The ASM Press tiers are based on the number of life science users who are graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and researchers in one geographic location. The tier sizes are 1–200 (tier A), 201–1,500 (tier B), and 1,501–3,500 (tier C). Custom pricing is applied when there are more than 3,500 life science users and/or multiple sites.
The ASM Press preserves the electronic content on ASMscience in the CLOCKSS archive. This backup plan ensures that institutions that have purchased content will have continued use of it should the digital platform become unavailable.
Pricing
Deciding how to price the collections was difficult. How much should e-books with unlimited users and no DRM cost? The association followed the practice of using multipliers of the list price related to tier size, modi-fied by the age of the book (see Table 3). Some librarians understand that having the e-book in their collections without DRM is in essence buying as
many copies of the book as users need with just one purchase. Others do not seem to understand the need to pay more than list price for a title regardless of the unlimited access and use.
table 3. Sample list price multiplier for collection pricing (ASM Press).
Annual subscription Perpetual purchase Age of book (years) Tier A Tier B Tier C Tier A Tier B Tier C
0–5 .375 .72 1.05 1.5 2.10 3.0
6–9 .300 .63 0.90 1.2 1.75 2.5
10–13 .200 .42 0.60 0.8 1.20 1.8
> 13 .100 .21 0.30 0.4 0.60 0.9
Publishers struggle with this dilemma; they may earn less on each pub-lished title compared with the print-only era, but there are many poten-tial benefits of wider exposure of their content in a digital environment. As libraries push to spend less when acquiring content, publishers earn less by delivering it. Publishers find themselves in a transitional period, first experimenting and then “waiting and seeing.” It is easy for end users to for-get the costs involved in producing and delivering e-books; these costs often increase book prices because of the expense of the technology involved. The typical book represents an investment by the ASM Press of at least $25,000;
the expenses are often double or triple that for a book with hundreds of chapters and thousands of pages.
use
Publishers want to be able to demonstrate the value of their content. At pres-ent, the meaningful and most accepted measure of this is use. ASMscience provides COUNTER-compliant reports on ASMscience for librarians to review. Because the ASM Press books primarily are used by the chapter, customers tell us that the section report (BR2) is the most useful. Industry-wide anecdotal evidence says that only 20% of any collection shows use, and of that 20%, only 20% will be highly used and the rest lightly used. The goal is to analyze the use trends to inform future publishing decisions.
But low use is not necessarily a reflection of how much users value the content. Use is strictly dependent on seekers being able to find the content.
Getting content to surface depends on getting it properly cataloged and included in libraries’ e-holdings, and listed in the link resolvers and knowl-edge bases of the library discovery services. ASMscience offers free down-loadable MARC records by e-book collection to help librarians get the titles they have purchased into their catalogs. But MARC records are of limited usefulness unless patrons can link to the full-text content in their digital hold-ings. It has been extremely challenging getting the ASM Press e-books added to the institutional link resolvers and the knowledge bases of the larger dis-covery services. Smaller publishers seem to be far down the list for this work.
Fine-tuning or customizing the “link resolver experience” is in the librarians’ hands; they set the algorithms for what results are returned and in what order. For example, some librarians may prefer that patrons’ search results display a particular publisher’s platform or collection first. Other librarians set search results to display only one record, from what may be many aggregators holding a particular title, to avoid “confusing” users with multiple choices for the same item. JSTOR provides guides for how to do
Fine-tuning or customizing the “link resolver experience” is in the librarians’ hands; they set the algorithms for what results are returned and in what order. For example, some librarians may prefer that patrons’ search results display a particular publisher’s platform or collection first. Other librarians set search results to display only one record, from what may be many aggregators holding a particular title, to avoid “confusing” users with multiple choices for the same item. JSTOR provides guides for how to do