College Libraries Push Back as Publishers Raise Some E-Book Prices - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"In mid-May, the Boston Library Consortium, which represents 17 academic libraries in New England, received an abrupt and unsettling phone call from ebrary, an e-book library owned by the aggregator ProQuest. A company representative said 11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent. The suddenness, scale, and timing of the changes—shortly before the end of one fiscal year, with money already committed for the next—left the consortium and its member libraries feeling ambushed ... Publishers contend that the e-book-pricing model was still in beta, and that recent changes are simply a market correction. But the tone and intensity of reaction to what otherwise seems like a routine, if poorly timed, price increase has exposed a lingering sense of suspicion between large, mostly commercial publishers and academic libraries ... At issue is a short-term loan model for e-book purchasing that has been tested over the past two years. It allows libraries to offer large catalogs but pay for only those books that are actually used—and not to pay full price until books have been used several times.  Each time a client checks out one of the e-books in these "demand-driven acquisition pools," the libraries pay a portion of the title’s list price—from 10 to 80 percent, depending on the length of the loan and the publisher’s rate. After a certain number of loans—publishers say the number can be as low as two, theoretically, or high as 25—the library automatically buys the title at full price ..."