The MIT Press and the University of Michigan Press recently announced plans to start selling their ebook collections directly to libraries by creating their own distribution platforms.
Previously, the publishers did not have a mechanism for selling to institutions directly. Instead, access to ebooks was largely brokered through third-party acquisition services such as ProQuest, EBSCO, Project Muse, OverDrive and JSTOR.
According to Amy Brand, director of MIT Press, these platforms take a significant percentage of the revenue from ebook sales, and also created a barrier between university presses and their customers. MIT Press's new distribution platform, called MIT Press Direct, will launch in beta this December. The new platform is projected to give the press greater flexibility in what it can publish.
The University of Michigan Press is planning to offer its ebook collection directly to libraries in the next few months. Charles Watkinson, director of the press, said the ebook collection will launch in January 2019 on Fulcrum -- an open-source publishing platform being developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The University of Michigan Press will continue to offer access to individual titles through JSTOR, Project Muse, ProQuest, EBSCO and OverDrive. Both MIT Press and the University of Michigan Press will offer tiered pricing structures for their collections -- with prices corresponding to the size of the institutions buying the books. The MIT Press is yet to finalize the pricing for its collections, but plans to do so by mid-December.
According to Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press, the list price for the University of Michigan ebook collection would be $6,800, but university libraries will pay between $694 and $5,780 per year based on their size. For this price, the libraries will get perpetual access to all titles published in 2019, and a year's access to approximately 1,000 titles in the publisher's back catalogue. The press expects to publish at least 80 titles in 2019.
By taking control of the distribution of their ebook collections, MIT Press and the University of Michigan Press will soon join a very select group of university presses that sell their collections directly to libraries -- including the presses of Oxford and Cambridge Universities in Britain and Duke University in North Carolina.
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