Duke University Press in Durham, N.C., has announced the launch of the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. The e-books, which will be available to libraries through ebrary beginning January 1, 2009, will include more than 100 scholarly titles published by Duke in the calendar year.
Duke publishes about 115 titles each year in the humanities and social sciences and other categories, such as recent collections of lesbian and gay writing from the Caribbean and an examination of the effects of free computer software. Other books, such as a history of Duke University basketball, have been deemed to be of too narrow interest to be appropriate for academic libraries and the e-book collection.
The collection will be available on a tiered pricing plan, based on the Carnegie Classification systems. Pricing will range from $6,000 for top research libraries to around $500 for community colleges. Titles will also be available individually in January. By purchasing the current year's titles in the collection, libraries also receive access to more than 900 Duke University Press backlist books now available in electronic form.
Michael McCullough, Duke U.P. sales manager, said he is unsure how the introduction of the e-book line will affect print sales. “That's going to be an interesting thing to watch. We have seen the sales of our library cloth editions decline year by year. That doesn't mean that the total unit sales have gone down. Lots of libraries are now buying paperbacks, which they didn't do before.” So that libraries can easily and inexpensively give patrons access to the print editions of the books in the e-book collection, Duke will also be offering a print-edition add-on for libraries that purchase the e-book bundle; for an additional $500, they will receive one library cloth edition of each title in the year's collection.
McCullough said that plans to make DUP titles available digitally had been in the works for a long time: “DUP was very cautious in approaching e-books. Steve Cohn, our director, cogitated for a long time over the best way to make our book content available electronically. He's the one who came up with the model for the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. He saw our list as right for a stand-alone package: not so large that it's unaffordable, with a clear brand identity, and without too many nonscholarly books that have to be excluded. Also, our lists are well-established enough that librarians can feel confident about what they'll get from year to year, since we're asking them to buy a year's worth of titles before we know what every one of them will be.”
Ebrary is a leading distributor of digital content to libraries, publishers and other organizations. There are no plans to make these e-books available to consumers at present, but McCullough said that might be a possibility as “a second wave.”
