Session 2: Procurement and E-Books

1. Session 2:Procurement and E-Books David Ball

2. Summary • Consortia • Procurement cycle • E-books tender

3. Advantages of Consortia • Aggregation of spending power: • Discounts • Suppliers will invest to develop new services, e.g. shelf-ready books • Savings: • Competitive tendering process and contract management • Monitoring and improving quality: • Pool spend and knowledge about suppliers

4. UK Library Purchasing Consortia • 7 regional consortia covering all UK HEIs • Procurement for Libraries – umbrella group; forum for determining appropriate level of procurement • Funded by subscription and staff resources of members • General university consortia – stationery, IT, laboratory supplies • Concentrated on hard copy: exploit competition between aggregators

5. Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium (SUPC) • Largest of the regional consortia • 47 members – small to very large • All areas of university purchasing • Contracts worth over £100m p.a. (US$187m) • Framework agreements not central purchasing

6. SUPC Library Group • Library contracts worth £33m p.a. (US$62m) • Books, including campus bookshops: • 4 suppliers • Discounts average 15% of list price • Pioneered fully shelf-ready books • Hard-copy journals – 2 suppliers • E-books

7. Higher Education Agents • Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) • Non-commercial, funded by top-slice • NESLi2, JISC Collections • Eduserv/CHEST • Owned by HE sector, BUT funded by percentage of sales revenue • Collections of e-journals and databases • Both concentrate on e-resources: negotiate with publishers (monopolists)

8. Differences from Turkey?

9. Procurement Cycle • Identify the need • Prepare the specification • Tender to find suppliers • Award contract • Measure and monitor performance

10. Identify the Need • Determine precisely what is required • On what basis – bought outright (hard copy), access (electronic), leased (LMS) • Consult users and librarians

11. Prepare the Specification • Fundamental to any procurement • Informs suppliers of what is required, when, how, to what standards • Basis on which to evaluate and choose suppliers, and judge quality of service • Specify requirements, not detailed processes – allow for creativity by suppliers

12. Find the Supplier • Tender evaluation • Measurable requirements from specification • Quality – accreditation, references, site visits • Ability to meet specification - functionality • Cost – comparable, whole life of contract • Weight each requirement according to importance • Award contract

13. Measure and Monitor Performance • Essential to keep suppliers engaged • Contract management meetings – 2-4 per year • Performance measures from specification • Discounts • Supply times • Errors • Feedback from members

14. Questions?

15. E-Books • Existing heavy use of e-journals by undergraduates • Electronic medium the norm for students’ social and leisure pursuits • Electronic medium becoming primary in HE • Need for e-books

16. E-Books: Problems and Obstacles • Lack of a clear open standard for operating systems; • Fears about the protection of content and the rights of the content owner in the context of giving users flexibility; • Lack of appropriate content in suitable quantities; • Pricing of titles, software and hardware; • Lack of integration into the general market for books. (Herther)

17. E-Books: Current Developments • Google Book Project: • California, Complutense of Madrid, Harvard, Michigan, New York Public Library, Oxford, Stanford • Scan and digitise 16m volumes • MSN and BL – 100,000 volumes • Apple: • iPod book reader • Agreement on content with publisher

18. E-books: Identifying the Need • Developing market place • Fluid business models • Mimic hard-copy business models • Trend towards bundling/Big Deal • Avoid what happened with e-journals – publishers determine business models; price tied to historical spend on hard-copy • Virtual learning environments

19. Preparing the Specification 1 • Aim to provide agreements that: • Are innovative and flexible • Exploit the electronic medium fully • Focus on users’ needs not libraries’ • Encourage the addition of library-defined content • Agreements available to all UK HEIs, not just SUPC

20. Preparing the Specification 2 • Two distinct requirements: • Requirement A – a hosted e-book service from which institutions can purchase or subscribe to individual titles • Requirement B – a hosted e-book service of content that is specified by the institutions

21. Selection Criteria • Academic nature of content • Satisfactory authentication • Demonstrable benefits for consortium purchase • Customer and technical support • 4 suppliers selected out of 8: 3 general aggregators, 1 specialist

22. List Price? • The 3 general aggregators offer pricing based on publisher’s list price • 1190 common titles from 4 publishers were compared • Many titles have no common list price in e-form • Average e-book price for the common titles varied from $99.9 to $102.2, a spread of 2.3%

23. Prices: Hard Copy vs. E • One aggregator, offering outright purchase and only 1 simultaneous user, allowing for discounts and tax: • E-book: 155% of list price • Hard copy: 85% of list price • E-book is 82% more expensive • Book budget buys 45% less e-books than hard-copy books

24. Price Comparison Year 1

25. Price Comparison Year 3

26. Relative Pricing • Purchase of 1500 titles: • Co. C 69% of Co. B • Co. A 63% of Co. B • Subscription over 3 years to 1500 titles: • Co. A 15% of Co. B • Over 10 years: • Co. A subscription 42% of Co. B purchase

27. Bespoke Subject Collections • 2 aggregators expressed an interest • First subject – nursing; other subjects to be determined • Core list of 200 titles prepared by 4 universities, the Royal College of Nursing A maximum of 13% currently available • Aggregators have agreements with some of main publishers

28. E-Textbooks? • Obvious advantages for libraries – no more multiple copies or short-loan collections; save on staff costs • However 80% of publishers’ textbook revenue is from students – not available

29. Contract Award • Requirement A – ProQuest/Safari and Ebrary • Offer innovative models; value for money; flexibility • Exploit electronic medium in terms of granularity and multi-user access • Requirement B – Ebrary • Show flexibility and willingness to work openly • Investigate textbook models

30. Lessons • Strong message to the market place • Flexible and innovative pricing models • Value for money • Reject the strait-jacket of hard-copy model • Exploit electronic medium • Libraries influence and select the content to be provided • E-textbooks move us closer to completely electronic provision

31. Questions? dball@bournemouth.ac.uk

32. References D. Ball. Managing Suppliers and Partners for the Academic Library, London, Facet Publishing, (2005). R. Everett. MLEs and VLEs explained, London, JISC, (2002). Available at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=mle_briefings_1. N.K. Herther. “The E-book Industry Today: a bumpy road becomes an evolutionary path to market maturity”, The Electronic Library, 23(1), pp. 45-53, (2005). D. Nicholas and P. Huntington, ‘Big deals: results and analysis from a pilot analysis of web log data: report for the Ingenta Institute’, in The consortium site licence: is it a sustainable model? Edited proceedings of a meeting held on 24th September 2002 at the Royal Society, London, Oxford: Ingenta, 2002 (Ingenta Institute, 2002), pp121-159, pp149, 151. C. Tenopir. Use and Users of Electronic Library Resources: an overview and analysis of recent research studies, Washington, Council on Library and Information Resources, (2003). Available at: http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub120/pub120.pdf. dball@bournemouth.ac.uk