The Demise of the Big Deal?

"Claudio Aspesi — an analyst based at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein — predicts a difficult future for Reed Elsevier, particularly for its scholarly journal business. He also predicts the demise of the Big Deal, the business model in which scholarly publishers sell access to multiple journals by means of a single electronic subscription....[Quoting Aspesi:] I can observe, however, that there is something unhealthy about an industry which has managed to alienate its customers to the point their membership associations increasingly focus time and attention on how to overturn the industry structure. It is not a good thing to have your customers spend their time trying to put you out of business....But if management has a Plan B, they have certainly kept it under wraps, and everything they have said supports my current view that they are in denial...."