Title: Issues in Vendor/Library Relations - Johannes Gutenberg and the Twenty-First Century
Author: Bob Nardini
Description:
Link: pdf
I think that Johannes Gutenberg
went to the grave without knowing
what a fortunate man he’d been to have
lived, worked, and invented in the 15th century,
rather than in our own, and so able to
develop movable type and change the world
without need of a vision statement, probably
without much of a marketing plan, and
even with no statement of values.
He did it all without the benefit of focus
groups, or of discussion groups.
Websites and listservs were far into the future.
He probably did do FAQs, but he did
them orally, as needed.
Mailing lists, direct mail, space ads,
color brochures, and packets full of literature
all later became necessities, thanks to
his invention, but he had no need of them
himself. Press releases and newspaper feature
stories, also, were unnecessary.
Gutenberg could afford to skip the strategic
alliances and didn’t have to locate customers
who would partner with him, since
he needed no beta sites.
If Gutenberg had lived today, he would
have had to pin on his yellow exhibitor’s
badge, and attend ALA. And in 1999,
there’s no doubt he would even have had to
register for a pre-conference, maybe even
speak at one, and somebody would have
had to explain to poor Gutenberg what that
meant.
All of this probably would have discouraged
him and Gutenberg might have burned
his press, opened up a high-end scriptorium
instead, muttering, “Let’s just forget about
the whole idea.”
Actually, Gutenberg must have been
quite a salesman of a kind, because he had
to attract the best craftsmen to his shop and
had to raise lots of capital in support of his
idea. He went into debt past a million of
today’s dollars in order to produce his famous
Bible in the 1450s. But he attended
to the demands of invention and printing
better than he did to matters of business.
Gutenberg delivered the functionality, in
today’s terms, but he went broke doing so,
and it was others who finally brought his
invention to market.
Today, in the realm of e-books, we have
the marketing end of it down pretty well;
but we’re still working on the functionality.
Even the word “e-book” itself is a little
odd, since what about them are like a book?
Not all that much, if you think about it. The
text probably starts out the same, and the
original author is the same, and probably
the title; past that, parallels get harder to
find. We use the word “book” as a convenience,
since we haven’t thought of a better
one.
Potential users of e-books are by and
large taking a cautious, I’m-in-no-hurry,
type of attitude. That stance is the one that
library book vendors, at least until now, also
have taken. The vendors, by the way, have
also been extremely busy and somewhat
distracted, maybe to a degree more than
wise, by the need to deal with the 50,000+
new printed books published annually in
the United States.
There also are plenty of electronic texts,
or e-books, out there. But, in considering
the possible role of the traditional book
vendor in the dissemination of e-books,
what has not yet happened is the ongoing
demand for a large number of products
from a large number of customers willing
to pay for them; customers who buy them
in such a way as to create a large number
of decisions and transactions requiring certain
routine task, which are repeated over
and over and over again; repeated so often,
in fact, that it makes sense for buyer and
seller to hire out, for pay, some of these
tasks to a third party, the vendor, that is.
That’s the part we always get, the drudgery.
But we’re pretty good at it by now,
used to it even, and in fact have developed
certain structures effective in the print
world that might transfer well to the world
of e-books.
First, we consolidate orders. For the library,
that means fewer publishers and distributors
to deal with directly. For the publishers
and distributors, that means fewer
customer transactions to have to process.
Following the order, we consolidate the
billings, with the same benefits.
In between, and before and after for that
matter, we help to consolidate the flow of
information between original seller and ultimate
buyer. This ranges from macro-level
product information, to micro-level information,
such as order status.
Not all of these things will necessarily
work the same at all in the e-book world as
they have worked in the world of print.
Title-by-title orders, for example, may not
happen; and if they do we’ll have to rethink,
for one more small example, statuses
such as “temporarily out-of-stock,” and
instead work on new ways of saying, “the
server’s down.”
Conversely, there may well be new
transaction-consolidation opportunities.
Rights transactions, for example, unnecessary in
the print
world, are
one of the major hurdles in the way of
today’s e-book, a problem looking for a solution.
One set of vendor-based structures with
particular potential for the e-book might
be the approval plan. Through the approval
plan mechanism, vendors already know
how to gather information about new titles
from publishers and distributors; know how
to verify, supplement, and arrange that information;
then how and when to present
the information, in both paper and electronic
formats; even know which libraries
will be interested in a given title and sometimes
who within the library needs to be
alerted; have some experience in linking
different versions of the same title in their
systems; know what to do when a customer
doesn’t want what has been provided; and,
at the end of a period or whenever a customer
wants, can generate all kinds of reports
tabulating what’s happened.
If, as the e-book develops, the pattern
becomes title-by-title purchase, as is true
with printed books, many of these parallels
have a chance of holding up. But if,
instead, the dominant model for libraries
will be to buy e-books as blocks of subject
content, not one-by-one, what then?
There’ll be no need for the jobber or vendor
or wholesaler, that is, someone who
knows how to consolidate many small
transactions into larger ones. Yet we may
still need a middleman, but of a different
kind, the broker or agent, someone who
knows how to facilitate smaller numbers
of larger transactions.
But wait, isn’t that what an organization
like netLibrary already does? Yes, it
is, of course, and perhaps we will end up
with two separate types of book vendors,
one for print and one for e-books. Or, there
will be two types but the lines will blur, as
they learn to cooperate with one another,
with the e-book vendor drawing upon what
is the real expertise of today’s traditional
book vendor, the intimate knowledge of library
customs, cultures, routines, and
workflows, and the personal and organizational
relationships and credibility hardearned
by the book vendor over the years.
Or, perhaps these separate vendors will
merge into one. We might see a significant
level of production and demand for
free e-books, where there won’t necessarily
be a commercial transaction at all. Perhaps the dominant model on campus will be
departmental purchase of e-books, without
library involvement. Or perhaps it will be
consortial buying.
Or, perhaps all of these things will happen,
maybe all at once, maybe in some kind
of disordered sequence. Perhaps this will be
a brand new area of publishing chaos.
We in the business of being vendors can’t
promise, today, to succeed at any of those
more attractive possibilities, but I do know
that all of us will be working as well as we
know how to avoid that last one.