Paying for digital libraries

Why is this hard?

•New services, but no new money

•Cost of transition

•Users not in the community

A problem of quantization:

Sell by item or sell in bulk?

Sell to one reader or to many?

Digital reading in libraries

Our technology has outrun our economics.

As always.

Items sent out Approx. bytes

Website 900M 9 TB

Reading rooms 1.6M 1 TB

Library of Congress, calendar year 2000 statistics:

More and cheaper disk

1E+3

1E+4

1E+5

1E+6

1E+7

1988 1991 1994 1997 2000

disk TB growth: 112%/y

Moore's Law: 58.7%/y

ExaByte

Disk TB Shipped per Year1998 Disk Trend (J im Porter)

http://www.disktrend.com/pdf/portrpkg.pdf.

0.0001

0.001

0.01

0.1

1

10

100

1000

10000

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010

$/MB

(From Jim Gray)

Even more information!

And yet more information…

How do we pay for it all?

• Communities pay (what happens now)

• Readers pay by month or year

• Readers pay by item or minute

• Authors pay

• Advertising pays

• Other (PR, bounties, cost avoidance, …)

None of these seem to quite work…

Electronic purchases at SUNY

“freely available to everyone, twenty-four

hours a day, everywhere, forever.” (Harnad) 

Remember when electricity was going to be “too cheap to meter”?*

80% of a library cost is not shelfspace.If we all we cared about was minimizing storage

cost, we’d have been reading microfilm for decades.

Books on disk are cents each instead of dollars: but the staff still gets paid (perhaps more).

* Lewis Strauss, AEC Chm, Sept. 16, 1954

Costs: libraries and disk farms

Per book-year: $3-8

Per staff position: 7,000-20,000 books

Per megabyte-year: under a cent

Per staff position: terabytes (millions of books)

Why is digital a problem?

Most users are not in the community paying. For example, the BUBL site had only 15% of its users from within the UK, which pays for it.

Why should a university provide a good digital library service, if most of the users are not on premises?

Subscriptions

Library subscriptions work

Elsevier reports regular growth in ScienceDirect, with $1.5B in online revenue.

Consumers spent relatively little for online content, however.

Enough is available free, and people resent paying for better: Gresham’s law

(but note bottled water and cable TV)

Page chargesBrain Research costs 19,000 euros/yr

PLOS will recover costs from authors at $1500 per article; then post free.

US legislation to prohibit copyright on government funded research

Warning: proportionally more authors are in universities and readers in industry

The answer has to be in profit and setup costs, since authors are not paid and paper is cheap.

Advertising

Advertising unlikely to help

Most journals in past did not get that much advertising; most web advertising goes to a few sites and does not seem likely to be targeted at readers of journals.

Mostly, libraries advertise for donors; and computer equipment becomes obsolete too quickly to attract bequests.

Micropayments

Lots of resistance: people dislike

Recordkeeping, metering

Hard to collect small amounts of money

Lots of administrative overhead

Bad social incentives

Users, librarians, publishers all risk-averse

So we’ll sell in bulk to groups

Other ideasFoundations

Cost avoidance

Advertising print

Reputation

Bounties

Dedicated taxes

Government support

Pledge breaks

Conclusions

It’s probably library subscriptions vs author page-charges (paid by institutions).

Both represent bulk sales to groups.

Inertia is winning: library subscriptions