Jennifer Howard | The Chronicle of Higher Education | September 5, 2010
E-book readers are just as well suited to scholarly books as they are to the latest Jane-Austen-meets-zombies literary sensation. University presses understand that some scholars want the option to buy monographs in electronic form, and they know how to sell to those scholars: one book at a time, straight from the presses’ Web sites, or through a vendor like Amazon.com.
What’s been harder to figure out is how to market digital books to academic libraries. For those customers, who are used to buying lists of books from just a handful of distributors, the single-sale approach doesn’t have much appeal. But many presses lack the technical and marketing resources to sell e-book packages designed for libraries. So they’ve decided to experiment with a strength-in-numbers approach.
