As a consultant to companies and organizations who publish nonperiodical products, I’ve been observing and sometimes advising on the development of eBook strategies for the past several years. This is a fertile field for consultants. Publishers have a plethora of questions about the practicalities and business implications of eBooks, and the answers are not always obvious. Thinking about eBook strategies from the viewpoint of publishers may help explain to weary librarians why this medium is progressing unevenly.

How should a publisher sell to libraries? As with hardcopy books, the answer is “directly, indirectly, or both.” Some very large publishers offer their eBook content only on proprietary platforms, which offers them control over the user experience, direct access to the licensees (librarians), direct access to comprehensive usage data, and, of course, all of the resulting revenues. Other publishers provide eBooks through a number of eBook aggregators. In recent consulting assignments, I have worked with nine aggregator platforms, with widely varying approaches to everything from searching to digital rights management (DRM), so there are significant alternatives to choose from. Ultimately, some publishers choose to make it as easy as possible for libraries – their materials are available on a proprietary Web site as well as multiple aggregator sites.

How much help should the platform offer specialized users? One key noneconomic reason for a publisher to favor a proprietary platform is the ability to develop searching and indexing capacities for specialized disciplines. Specialized health science platforms can offer medically oriented spell checks for searches, standardized lexicons and cross-indexing among lexicons, semantic tagging back to standard lexicons, and other forms of machine intelligence.

Which digital rights will the publisher offer to users? To what degree? Every platform, whether proprietary or aggregated, mentions “fair use” or equivalent wording in its Terms and Conditions statement. In practice, DRM of eBooks affects a user’s authority to cut, paste, and save outside the platform, and the ability to print. At one extreme, users may save content only within an individual account to which the library entitles them, and any printing can be done only on a pay-per-view basis. (Expensive pay-per-view, at that – often $25.00 per chapter.) On the other hand, some of the pioneering, HTML-based platforms permit users to highlight and print, theoretically without limit. In practice, the proprietors of these platforms observe usage statistics, and if they see signs of trouble, they ask the local librarian to intervene.

How do publishers balance the different attractions of PDF versus HTML? Very loosely speaking, HTML is easier to tag and more versatile in terms of the hardware on which it can display, but PDF provides simpler ways to apply DRM. Also, PDF conserves the page layout, an important factor for textbooks, atlases, and the like. Another concern here is “living books” – book titles that are updated frequently, sometimes on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis. Html, which presents material in a generic screen display, accommodates updates more easily than PDFs.

Can a given title recover the upfront costs of preparing for eBook use? Although publishers in general have adopted medium-neutral work flows for their journals, this trend is less advanced in the book world. And even now, the mindset at most publishers is that the book is the primary product while eBooks are derivative products. All of this means that publishers need to tweak their digital composition files for use in any eBook environment, whether HTML or PDF. Also, publishers have been lax about the ways they archive book content, so simply finding and identifying the final version of a book composition file may be an adventure. All of this means that each individual title that’s mounted on an eBook platform requires both staff time and a cash outlay – often $500 to $1,000 per title. In the minds of publishers, some titles simply don’t warrant the relatively modest investments of time and cash.

Publishers are an immensely varied lot, from professional societies that publish a handful of titles a year to family-owned traditional publishers to massive conglomerates. All of them ask these questions in different contexts, and every publisher has arrived at its own mix of answers. As a result, eBook availability is still less than universal – just 43% of the titles in DCT are currently available from the participating aggregators, and their business terms vary tremendously. In time, there is likely to be some convergence, particularly as more and more publishers adopt medium-neutral production workflows. Even then, publishers will approach eBooks with diverse philosophies and goals. And collection development librarians will work out an optimal way to serve their clients’ diverse needs.