Increase Licensing, Generate Access Models, Grow Publishing Output
Lived Places Publishing is equally committed to expanding the availability of content that improves classroom learning and discussion in regard to social identity and location and expanding access and affordability in library access. In this post from the Lived Places Publishing blog I describe how we are pushing forward whole ebook interlibrary loan, publisher-funded open access, and equitable pricing:
I was interviewed on the IPG Podcast talking about how we’re building a publishing business in collaboration with Newgen Publishing in the UK and how to make partnerships like this work. I got the chance to talk about some of the big issues in academic publishing at the moment, especially around library delivery and access.
My writing in 2021 was focused on new product development, publishing, and licensing strategy with an occasional thought piece on the intersection of platforms, business models, and negotiating strategy. This piece is a departure from form in that I would like to share my four most significant observations from 2021 in regard to the higher education publishing, educational technology, and library product and services world.
Observation One: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is not Everywhere
I begin each day scanning news from Outsell, The Scholarly Kitchen, EdSurge, Linked In News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous listservs. Based on these daily feeds and the many new hire announcements I see on Linked In, there is no doubt that much attention has been placed on addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, publishing focus, and library collection development. But most of the “gains” I have seen have been in high-level appointments to corporate senior management teams, senior editorial roles conceived to shape the publishing priorities and agenda, and senior university/library roles with much the same intent as the corporate roles added; that is to influence future hiring, practices, and policies.
I do not personally hold that this is deeply meaningful progress; it is visible andnotable, but it does not necessarily produce change. I believe the progress we should be seeing and celebrating is in the quotidian announcements of new hires into roles well below that of vice president. And, from my very unofficial vantage point, I saw very little change in hiring in 2021. In my daily Linked In feed where promotions and new hires are celebrated, it was business as usual. And by that I mean white people hiring and promoting white people. I hope I am wrong and my “sample” is off. But we will only make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion when each of us white people and people in power, in our narrow operating space, change our recruiting and hiring practices and make a measurable and specific commitment to hiring for difference. And the difference needs to extend beyond skin color. Have you hired somebody with a disability, visible or invisible? Have you looked for candidates that had to fight through poverty in their youth? Have you recruited anybody that openly and without shame shared their mental health struggles? You will build a better company, a better library, a better publisher, when you build a team that looks like the travelers on any sidewalk in New York City rather than any walkway in the many private universities of the United States.
Observation Two: Print is not Dead
In fact print is thriving. Just ask any publisher with a substantial portion of revenue coming from print publishing. Supply chain woes combined with growing demand have created significant price increases from the printers coupled with delivery delays. Of course publishers that never had a significant print business did not feel the pain of the print shutdown during the pandemic, even as digital sales accelerated. But many trade and consumer publishing houses saw a swing to digital that is now swinging back to a revised but not entirely unfamiliar print/digital mix. What will this mean for print book prices in 2022? Will digital prices rise as a function of the print price (that the print and digital price were ever a function of one another is a legacy of little internal logic beyond publisher revenue forecasting and protection of known revenue). Will the surge in growth in digital textbooks continue apace? Or will libraries and students revert back to print textbook purchasing? I wager, barring another massive shutdown of physical spaces, the distribution of print to digital sales will resettle close to where it was pre-pandemic with a moderate rebalancing toward digital.
Observation Three: Open Access Has Little Room Left for Upstart Entrepreneurs and Innovators
Wiley owns Hindawi and Knowledge Unlatched. Read and Publish/Transformative Agreements are everywhere. I don’t tilt at windmills and there was never much likelihood that open access would find its way free of for-profit publishing except at the margins. But the acceleration and pace of announcements across 2021 signal, from my perspective, a future without author-processing and book-processing charges, and without much funding model innovation. And transformative agreements will create a context in which institutions are striking deals with all the major publishers to assure access to published output and authoring opportunities for their university faculty. How this will play out for economically disadvantaged institutions across the globe, and their faculty, will be a key question. But then the APCs and BPCs were beyond their reach anyway and wavers and discounts are a false balm. Subscribe-to -Open does seem to offer a potentially leveling effect, but still relies on wealthy institutions to underwrite access for the global community. And the model could influence publishing decisions in favor of the funding institutions’ faculties.
Observation Four: Private Equity is Stacked with Cash and Loves Ed Tech
I wonder what teaching principles of micro and macro economics to college undergraduates must feel like today. A glut of cash in the global economy leads to increased demand for scarce resources, which drives up inflation, which leads to interest rate increases. Right? Wrong. Money is cheap and plentiful and the debt issuance markets are working well and there is no sign of central banks tightening significantly the flow of money. Private Equity has been active in education technology for more than half of my time in the industry dating back to 1999, but the pandemic lit a fire. Investment flowing into education is a good thing so long as that investment is deployed by thoughtful product managers building better solutions. I expect the PE acquisitions and combinations will continue and innovation will not necessarily slow down. I am less concerned with the role of private equity in educational technology until the point at which PE makes a decision to sell an asset to an established publishing, library services, or aggregation business and the inevtiable inovation-choking integration effects take shape. And this will be the mark to watch for in 2022 and beyond as the pandemic-induced edtech acquisition boom looks for its exit.
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By David Parker, Publisher and Co-Founder
Lived Places Publishing launched in April 2021, guided by the belief that our team of editors and authors can innovate both in terms of content and with regards to access and affordability. Our enterprise is committed to delivering curriculum-ready content that allows students to engage with global author voices exploring the intersection of social identity and place or context. And we are developing a library-first purchasing model that supports unlimited user access without restriction, interlibrary loan, and open access.
What do we mean by the intersection of social identity and place or context? Our co-founder and Black Studies Collection editor Chris McCauley says it best:
“Lived Places Publishing is guided by the belief that story-sharing can both shorten the distance that separates us and increase our collective efforts against thinking and policies that penalize and exclude far too many people for simply being who they are. By “Lived Places” we mean more than geographical or physical locations, but also the social and institutional ones that we have been forced to inhabit and those that we have claimed and embraced.”
During the summer of 2020, when the world was ablaze with awareness, we began asking how the global higher education curriculum is representing the voices at the intersection of location and lived experience. We did in depth analysis of dissertation and theses publishing and course reading lists and syllabi across the social sciences. And we discovered that scholarship is especially focused, through the lens of discipline or interdisciplinary study, on social identity and place. And as we dug deeper into assigned readings and materials we saw that instructors explore these themes with students most often through scholarly readings, journal articles, and their own writing. Our insights empower collection editors to build disciplinary or interdisciplinary collections of course readings that can be assigned weekly, written by academics and activists across the globe who are concerned with the intersection of social identity and lived places and spaces.
With our content vision and mission in place, we turned to the question of pricing, access, equity, and affordability. Every Lived Places title will be available as a single title in print and digital formats at affordable price points. While some students will choose to purchase individual titles, we decided to focus especially on building an annual collection of titles that institutions can purchase for a set price tied to the local budget and economic context. Our model will provide access to every title in the collection at a fraction of the single title price and delivered without digital rights management restrictions and perpetual ownership. In addition, for libraries that wish to support interlibrary loan, the Lived Places collection will include an option to upgrade to single title interlibrary loan rights for all titles held with unlimited access. In other words, unlimited institutional access for the purchasing library and simultaneous single title loan rights to another institution.
We believe in and support open access and open educational resources. And we believe in returning a high royalty to our authors and editors. 35% of each sale will be allocated to royalty and funding for open access. Individual authors will be given the option to choose publishing open access or earning a royalty. Equity, in our view, requires fairness in royalty, support for open publishing, pricing that allows every global institution to purchase and, by extension, support the Lived Places mission to support open access and author royalty.
And if you just want to connect and learn more, you can reach me here directly.
And if you want to follow our blog and learn what our collection editors and authors are up to, please subscribe here.
Peace to you,
David Parker, Publisher
P.S. You can also follow our progress on Medium and Substack.
This post was originally published by David Parker on the Lived Places Publishing blog.
IMAGE CREDIT: Michael D Beckwith, used under the Unsplash License
Publishers, that is enterprises devoted to bringing to life the intellectual work of content creators for commercial ends, thrive in the world of digital distribution when they most skillfully manipulate three key levers that are entirely within the publisher’s control: 1. The timing of release and point of first access, 2. The digital list price and associated price multipliers for access models across vendors and 3. The selective deployment of digital rights management. I believe the primary objectives of a publisher in the educational space should be to simultaneously maximize revenue return to authors and creators and drive exposure and usage of the published content. The three-levers available to publishers should be continuously monitored, skillfully adjusted, and then measured by reader/viewer/listener engagement and usage and royalty return to authors and content creators. The following explanation of the three levers is intended primarily for those seeking to understand why publishers make the distribution and access decisions they do, especially as concerns their publisher-direct strategy.
The most important decision a publisher must make, again and again, is when to release a title into partner distribution versus restricting access of the title to the publisher’s business models. Ultimately this is a function of the channels strategy each publisher crafts and the priority placed on publisher-direct business models versus partner solutions such as aggregated, usage-based products or demand-driven distribution models than ensure single title pricing maximization. Netflix, for example, has taken the strategic decision to not release its original content into any other distribution platform, whereas HBO and Showtime have both made their original content available as part of Amazon Prime subscriber access and/or purchase within Prime. Showtime, for example, has released new shows to Showtime subscribers only for first-season access and then extended access in year-two and beyond to Amazon Prime. At the company I founded, Business Expert Press, we retained what we projected to be our top 10% of new eBook titles for access only through our complete, publisher-direct collection. The principle at work in these examples is prioritization by the publisher of prized access to its most valuable assets. The decision not to release these titles to third-party distribution is a decision to return more royalty to the publisher’s authors and content creators, but limits access.
Once the publisher has decided to release a title into partner distribution many decisions must follow as concerns access models and price points. While a stated publisher list price, or digital list price, will be evident in the publisher’s catalog and across its web presences, the percentage multiplier of that price will vary based on the access models selected and, sometimes, by the vendor. For example, a publisher of academic books is presented with many options, including one-user, three-users, unlimited users, one, seven, 14 or 28 day short-term access, and more. The publisher can select, by title, which of these access models to use and the multiplier of the digital list price by model. It is not unusual to see a publisher, for example, place a title into unlimited user access but then apply a multiplier of 300% to the single title digital list price. That same title may well be accessible as part of a publisher-direct subscription package or for single title purchase directly from the publisher at a much better price. Finally, a publisher may choose to offer access models and price multiplier discounts from one vendor and not another based on a proprietary relationship with the vendor that may well be returning a higher margin of sale to the publisher than that commonly available from other vendors. The decision to move a title from available only from the publisher into third-party distribution is done to increase total return across publisher-direct distribution and partner distribution, and it is often done with the objective of increasing exposure of the title with the hope that the purchaser will choose the more advantageous publisher-direct price.
Digital rights management (DRM) technologies are designed to control, or attempt to control, the access, use, modification and distribution of copyrighted works such as videos, ebooks, streaming music and podcasts. Very often discussions about the deployment of DRM are focused on efforts to forestall digital piracy that leads to illegal file sharing across unscrupulous platforms. But publishers just as often use DRM as a lever to drive purchases toward preferred models or, at minimum, restrict what is perceived as misuse of the content. For example, very strict DRM controls on an eTextbook are often put into place to ensure chapters are not printed, scanned and shared across a student population in lieu of students purchasing the eTextbook. Publishers may elect to remove all DRM controls, especially when delivering publisher-direct. At Business Expert Press we sold our eBook collection DRM-free, publisher-direct from our own platform, but we enforced rather strict DRM when single titles were purchased through third-party eBook vendors. Music creators may allow purchase and download of a new album directly from the band’s website but allow “listen only” on streaming services like Spotify.
On more than one occasion I have been in a room of licensing agents or librarians or bookstore managers or platform leaders and heard the complaints about publishers and their unwillingness to deliver content DRM-free or at preferred pricing available directly from the publisher’s website. My view was always more nuanced, based on my many years as a publisher but, more importantly, my many personal interactions with authors, documentary filmmakers, podcasters and other content creators. I will not naively contend that all publishers are first and foremost concerned with maximizing royalty return to authors, but I will contend that publishers have a duty to authors that third-party vendors do not. And it is this duty, however deeply or remotely felt, that drives the publishers strategic deployment of the three levers they control in an ecosystem of digital delivery where they control little else.
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