<
https://walledculture.org/guest-post-ebooksos-crisis-price-gouging-publishers/>
"Despite only 10% of university reading list items being available in ebook
format, “everything is available in E-format” is a sentence librarians hear
often. In the so-called digital age, you cannot blame people for making this
assumption. However, ebooks have long been problematic for librarians due to
lack of availability. The ebooks that do exist for use by libraries are
licensed and not owned, thus continuing access is precarious. Furthermore,
licenses are often many times the price of the equivalent hardcopy. Pricing is
unpredictable and arbitrary, with sudden and inexplicable price rises common.
Despite their price tags and publisher claims to the contrary, the quality and
accessibility of ebooks is often poor.
Consequently, until the COVID pandemic struck, hardcopy books were still
depended on as the core textbook provision by libraries. As lockdown measures
closed university campuses, and the higher education sector scrambled to move
teaching online, hardcopies were no longer an option. Physical library
collections were closed off from use.
In the early weeks of campus lockdown, the big publishing houses announced,
with much congratulatory fanfare from their press officers, that they had
opened their ebook collections to universities for free. This was welcomed by
universities. However, access to these books was quietly withdrawn as early as
June 2020, when the pandemic was still raging. In their place, universities
were offered exorbitantly priced subscription-based bundled packages of the
ebooks or individual ebook licenses priced at as much as 500% more than the
hardcopy. The cynical among us could be forgiven for concluding that the
initial generous offer was nothing more than a ploy to manipulate the market by
forcing libraries, desperately trying to support students studying remotely,
into signing up to expensive and unsustainable subscription ebook models.
This was the context in which the campaign group #ebooksos was founded. Led by
three academic librarians – Yohanna Anderson (University of Gloucestershire),
Caroline Ball (University of Derby) and Rachel Bickley (London Met University)
– the group penned an open letter asking that the UK Education Select Committee
investigate the academic ebook market. The cross-party committee scrutinizes
the work of the government department responsible for education. To date, over
4,600 librarians, students, researchers, academics, consortia, professional
bodies and more have signed the open letter."
Via Glyn Moody, who wrote "this is a scandal; get angry, get even. also, you
may wish to download the illustration to pin on your wall…"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
