Carol Mandel and Mary Summerfield, Columbia University Library

(revised January 1998)

1. Introduction

The Online Books Evaluation Project at Columbia University explores the potential for online books to become significant resources to scholars by analyzing (1) the Columbia community's adoption of and reaction to various online books and delivery system features; (2) the relative lifecycle costs of producing, owning and using online books and their print counterparts, and (3) the implications of intellectual property regulations and traditions of scholarly communication and publishing for the online format. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded this Project as part of its program of grants in the field of scholarly communication and technology. [1]

Online books might enhance the scholarly processes of research, dissemination of findings, teaching, and learning by allowing both greater access and expanded usage options. Alternatively, or in addition, they might enable publishers, libraries, and scholars to reduce the costs, both in dollars and time spent, of disseminating and using scholarship. Thirdly, the potential for alternative packaging of books for sale to libraries and individuals could enhance the precarious financing of scholarly publishing. For example:

• If the scholarly community were prepared to use some or all categories of books for some or all purposes in an online format[2] instead of a print format, publishers, libraries and bookstores might be able to trim costs as well as enhance access to these books.

• Online access to books would enhance scholars' awareness of works in their fields of interest and make it simple for them to purchase a book.

• If an online format became standard, publishers could offer affordable online access to books to institutions and individuals who would not normally have purchased print copies, thus both expanding convenient access to scholarship and expanding publishers' revenues from these books.[3] The online format could also have the advantage of being available (in print) for far longer than is the case for the typical print book, thus allowing scholarly access and publisher and author compensation for many years after initial publication.

• If online books made scholars significantly more efficient or effective in their work of research, teaching and learning so as to enhance revenues or reduce operating costs for institutions of scholarship, these books might be worth adopting even if their costs were no lower than those for their print counterparts.

This paper will outline the methodology for the Online Books Evaluation Project, review early findings about user reaction to online books and the economics of publishing scholarly books, and suggest some new market models that the electronic format might enable and which publishers might be wise to test as they attempt to overcome the challenge of garnering sufficient revenues to cover the costs of publishing scholarly monographs.

We should note at the outset that online books are just one element of the Columbia University Digital Library. The Digital Library is a well-organized, continually growing collection of information and tools, available over an integrated network. This collection presents exciting new opportunities for teaching and learning, for research, for administrative interactions, for communicating about campus activities. Its content extends beyond scholarly materials to include instructional, administrative, and student information. Researchers can access information and images through worldwide data banks; students can register for classes or check grades; faculty can monitor exams as they are given; and administrative staff can expedite transactions. The Digital Library includes such electronic formats as full text documents, books and journals, images, indexes, catalogs, databases, multimedia resources, geographic and numeric data sets, and links to selected services on the Internet. This content is organized and delivered through powerful search and retrieval mechanisms; it can be manipulated and used through a wide array of applications.[4]

2. Project Methodology

The Online Books Evaluation Project puts various types of books in several scholarly fields online and seeks to learn about reactions to the online format for those classes of books and cohorts of users.[5] The types of books included are reference titles (dictionaries, encyclopedias), scholarly monographs, anthologies, historical humanities texts, and books designed for professional education, including text books. Disciplines for which books are now online include social work, political science and international relations, earth and environmental science, philosophy, and literary criticism.

Publishers providing books to the Project are Columbia University Press, Garland Publishing, Oxford University Press, and Simon and Schuster Higher Education. In general, the publishers provide Columbia with electronic files for their books; Columbia's Academic Information Systems then creates an HTML version of the book and adds it to a set of Web pages for the collection.

2.1 Analysis of User Response to Online Books

User response is analyzed by reviewing the records for use of the books in the online collection in both their online and print formats. It is also studied through a range of surveys, focus groups and interviews.

2.1.1 Quantitative Data On Use

Key measures for documenting use of the books in the online collection include:

• Historic and current circulation data for each print book in the regular collection provides information on number of times a book circulates, circulation by cohort, duration of circulation, number of holds and recalls. For most libraries, the same data are available for reserve books.

• The records of the Columbia computing system provide, for the most part, use data for the books accessed via CNet, Columbia's original, gopher-based Campus Wide Information System, including the number of sessions, their date and time. These records do not include the duration of the session, the activity during the session, e.g., printing or saving, or anything about the user. Thus, all we can analyze are the patterns of use by time of day, day of week, and over time.

• Columbia University database on community members. This information is tied into the information on users of the online books to derive cohort analyses.

• The records of the Columbia Web servers provide, for the most part, the use data for the online books. Information on date, time and duration of session involving an online book, user's cohort, location of computer, number of requests and amount of the book requested, means of accessing the book, and networked printing activity[6] are available.

• Until March 15, 1997, for books accessed via Columbia's Web server, we knew the use immediately preceding the hit on the book, the day and time of the hit. For data collected through that point, our analysis is constrained to patterns of use by time of day, day of the week, and over time. By manual examinations of server data, we counted how many hits a user made on our collection during one session and the nature of those hits.

• Since March 15, 1997, we are able to link user information to usage information and derive a series of analyses involving titles used, hits, number of books used, and the like by individual and to group those individuals by department, position, and age. These data do not yet include number of sessions of use, just the magnitude of overall use during the period. Session specific data will be available in early 1998.

2.1.2 Documentation Measures for Reactions to Online Books

We are using a wide range of tools in trying to understand the factors that influence use of online books. Table 1 summarizes our array of surveys and interviews.

Table 1. Types of Surveys

Population	Method	Contact	Rate
Users of Online Books	Online instrument	Passive	Low
Users of Online Books	Online post-use survey	Passive	Very Low
Users of paper alternatives	Questionnaires in books	Passive	Unknown
Users of course materials	Interviews distributed in class	Active	High
Users and non-users	Library & Campus-Wide surveys	Active	Moderate
Potential users by discipline	Surveys & Interviews	Active	High

Note: Passive instruments are ones which the user must elect to encounter. Active instruments are distributed in some way, to the attention of the user. High response rates are in the range of 80-90 percent completion, with better than 60 percent usable.

We continue to seek new methods of reaching the Columbia user community that will yield greater cooperation with the surveys and interviews.

2.2 Cost Analysis

The Project's cost analyses include tracking the costs of paper and online versions of a book: of a publisher or library developing and producing them, of a library acquiring, owning and providing scholars with access to them, and of scholars' producing and consuming them. These data are gathered in a variety of ways, including time sheets for Columbia staff involved in book conversion and in supporting the online books effort by assisting users and promoting the availability of these resources, review of the library and scholarly publishing literature on costs, and tracking of Columbia University Libraries costs for the various elements of providing print books.

2.3 Environmental Context

The Project attempts to put these findings into an environmental context of what is happening in various disciplines, press attention to the Internet and related topics, the penetration of personal computing and online activity in society at large, and the provision of computing and online support and the penetration of these activities within the Columbia community over time.

3. Early Project Findings on Use

3.1 Students and Faculty Are Ready for Online Resources

3.1.1 Access to Networked Resources

In March 1997 in a library-wide survey we asked visitors whether they felt that they had ready access to a computer linked to the campus network. The overwhelming majority of the twenty four hundred respondents (87% of undergraduates, 76% of graduate students, and 86% of faculty) reported that they did.

In August 1997 the Libraries queried incoming first year students about their current or anticipated possession of a computer on campus. About 90% reported that they had a computer already or planned to purchase one soon. About 88% of those computers would be equipped with Ethernet cards allowing connection to the campus network from the dormitory room.

3.1.2 Usage of Online Resources

In the March 1997 library-wide survey we asked how much time each week the visitor spent in various online activities, e.g., email, listservs, Web resources. The following chart gives the distribution of responses by cohort. Overall community members tended to be online about one hour a day, with more than 50% spending at least four to six hours a week online. This level of use suggests that they are sufficiently familiar with the potential for online resources that they should not be overly shy of digital library offerings, including online books.

Chart 1. Weekly Hours Online By Columbia Cohort, March 1997 Onsite Library Survey

3.2 Scholars Use Online Books

3.2.1 Online Books Are Used More Than Library Print Copies

During the Spring 1997 semester, members of the Columbia community made considerable and substantial use of all types of online books. We expect that data for the Fall 1997 semester will confirm these findings.

3.2.1.1 Reference Books

Some of the reference works available online to the Columbia community are core resources that would be used relatively often in their paper format, e.g., The Oxford English Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica. Others are more specialized works that would not be known to or used by many scholars, e.g., Chaucer Name Dictionary, Granger's Index to Poetry. Reference books do not circulate, so our information on the amount of use that each receives is spotty. For some that are shelved at the reference desk, e.g., Granger's Index to Poetry or Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, reference staff can keep records of use. But for others that are on open shelves in the collection with varying degrees of user reshelving, we can only estimate use of the print collection.

The Online Encyclopedia Britannica became available to the Columbia community in July 1996. Use took off immediately; the resource now receives about 8,000 hits a month[7], or more than 250 a day, during the academic season. It is unlikely that the Libraries' copy of the print encyclopedia receives as much use.

Use of the Concise Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, a text-based resource on Columbia's gopher-based CWIS, diminished as Web-based resources like the Online Encyclopedia Britannica became available. Nonetheless it still has about 10 users a day during the academic year while the print copy at the reference desk has a handful of users a month.

The second most heavily used reference work in the Columbia online collection is the Oxford English Dictionary. During the academic year it receives about 600 to 1,400 hits a month with the heaviest use during months in which Columbia undergraduates are learning to use this resource in a logic and rhetoric course.

Other reference works (Granger's Index to Poetry, Chaucer Name Dictionary, African American Women, Native American Women), the print versions of which receive at most a handful of uses a month in the Libraries, receive dozens to hundreds of hits a month online.

3.2.1.2 Monographs & Course Books

One way to assess the relative use of online books and their print counterparts is to count the number of users of the online books, something we have been able to do since March 15, 1997, and the number of circulations of the print versions, data which we gather twice a year. Table 2 gives this use information for the 33 contemporary online books available during the March 15 - May 31, 1997 period.

Table 2. Unique Users and Hits for Contemporary Online Non-Reference Books, March 15 - May 31, 1997, & Print Circulation Of These Titles, January - June 1997

	Online Activity: 3/15 - 5/31/97
Title	Users	Hits	Mean Hits/ User	Print circulation 1/ 6/97	Online Users/ Circulation
Task Strategies: An Empirical Approach...	30	288	9.6	4	7.5
Mutual Aid Groups, Vulnerable Populations & the Life Cycle	18	138	7.7	12	1.5
Supervision in Social Work	8	33	4.1	12	0.7
Philosophical Foundations of Social Work	8	21	2.6	0	NC
Self Expressions: Mind, Morals and the Meaning of Life	7	21	3.0	3	2.3
Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, & Shrieks	7	21	3.0	0	NC
Handbook of Gerontological Services	6	31	5.2	1	6.0
Turning Promises into Performance:	6	31	5.2	1	6.0
Qualitative Research in Social Work	6	10	1.7	1	6.0
Gender in International Relations	4	6	1.5	3	1.3
Other Minds	4	34	8.5	2	2.0
Seismosaurus	4	8	2.0	0	NC
Nietzshe's System	3	6	2.0	5	0.6
The Logic of Reliable Inquiry	3	7	2.3	0	NC
Sedimentographica	2	6	3.0	1	2.0
Free Public Reason:	2	6	3.0	0	NC
Philosophy of Mathematics & Mathematical Practice in the 17th Century	2	3	1.5	0	NC
Real Rights	2	3	1.5	0	NC
Hemmed In	0	0	0	13	0
Jordan's Inter-Arab Relations	0	0	0	8	0
Ozone Discourses	0	0	0	3	0
Children's Literature & Critical Theory	0	0	0	1
Freedom and Moral Sentiment	0	0	0	1	0
Autonomous Agents	0	0	0	1	0
Novel & Globalization of Culture	0	0	0	1	0
Morality, Normativity, & Society	0	0	0	1	0
Managing Indonesia	0	0	0	1	0
Littery Man	0	0	0	0	NC
Law & Truth	0	0	0	0	NC
Poetics of Fascism	0	0	0	0	NC
Majestic Indolence	0	0	0	0	NC
International Politics	0	0	0	0	NC
TOTAL	122	673	5.5	75	1.6

Note: Titles in bold were on reserve for one or more courses in Spring 1997. One book has been omitted from the list as it only went online in April 1997.

Fourteen (42%) of these online books had no online use during the March to May measurement period; 12 had no print circulations during the January to June measurement period. In total the online versions had 122 users in the 2.5 month period while the print versions had 75 users in the six month period. Looking at only the online books that circulated, we find that the 122 users compared to 45 print circulations, or that there were nearly three times as many online users as circulations. These data suggest that, compared for an equal period, the volume of users of the online books will be much greater than for the users of the print books.

3.2.2 Online Books Get Substantive Use

Table 2 also indicates that the use of these online books was substantive, i.e., that scholars were not simply going to the Table of Contents. These books sustained a total of 673 hits by the 122 users, for an average of 5.5 hits per user per book. The most used book (Task Strategies) had 30 users and averaged almost ten hits per user.

3.2.3 Online Books Attract Cross-Disciplinary Use

The ease of accessing online books, especially when the collection allows easy browsing, seems to attract a greater level of cross-disciplinary use than is likely with the traditional library or bookstore.

Self Expressions: Mind, Morals and the Meaning of Life and Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers and Shrieks are both Oxford University Press philosophy titles. Self Expressions is listed in the Current Social Science Web page along with the social work titles. Five social workers, one neurobiologist, and one engineer used the book from March 15 to May 31, 1997. Bangs, Crunches ,... is listed under Physics in the Current Science Web page. Two of its seven users were physicists and another two were engineers.

3.3 Online Books Use Occurs in a Mixed Format Environment Currently

Patterns of use of online books are likely to evolve as scholars become aware of these books and possible techniques for using them and as technology improvements make use more convenient. At this time, we see scholars developing a pattern of using more than one book format, e.g., browsing a print book and photocopying relevant portions, browsing an online book and printing out relevant sections, or browsing an online book and purchasing the print book.

3.3.1 On Campus Use Predominates

Through Spring 1997, online books were accessed mainly from on-campus computers rather than from off-campus homes. For example, only 13% of the hits on the OED in the period from May 1996 to March 1997 were dialup connections. The monographs from Columbia and Oxford University Presses experienced a similar incidence of dialup connections. Several factors are responsible for this low rate of dialup connections to these Web resources:

• The concentration of undergraduates on campus. These students do not need to dial-in to access online resources from their residences.

• The heavy use of Columbia's dial-in modem pool. Faculty members have reported that they would use online resources, including the books, from home more but they receive busy signals repeatedly when they try to dial in on evenings and weekends.

• The relatively high cost of an ISP account given graduate students' income and the high cost of dialing in from outside New York City.

• The slow dial-up connection with standard modems, especially the older ones. In addition, some members of the community have computer systems that are not amenable to the Netscape interface that the Columbia dial-in connection uses or simply do not have computer systems with modems at home.

3.3.2 Valued Functions in Using Books_

In response to our questionnaires and in interviews and focus groups, online book users have noted that the features that they most value in online books are the ease of searching, browsing and printing out parts of the text. Few indicate a willingness to read at length online.

Looking at the factors that influence format preference in general, we find that convenient availability and ease of annotation are critical. While an online book is always available in a certain sense, it is tethered use -- one must be where a computer with a network connection is located. This is not availability in the sense of a paper book or a chapter printout in one's backpack. Most scholars are not yet sufficiently at ease with online resources to browse online and then clip sections of a source to a text file for later use in studying, preparing a lecture, or working on a paper.

Scholars indicate that the ideal book is one's own personal print copy available for reference at any time. However, if the scholar is unlikely to purchase a book, because the cost is too high relative to the book's utility in his work, then the choice is typically between using a library print copy or the online copy. As we discussed earlier in Section 3.2.1.2, early evidence suggests that scholars find using the online books more convenient for at least some purposes.

4. Early Project Findings on Costs

The Project is analyzing the chain of costs involved in production and use of scholarly books from the author through to the user. Our goal is to compare the chain of costs for traditional print-on-paper books with that we project for online books. At this point, our review of the economics of print-on-paper books produced by non-profit scholarly publishers is most advanced. We will highlight those findings as well as early indications of the incremental costs of producing electronic versions of these books.

4.1 Scholarly Publishers' Costs Profile

As many analysts have noted, the costs of publishing a print-on-paper book are heavily weighted towards various categories of fixed costs [8]. Among these fixed cost elements are:

• Plant -- the cost of setting the type for a book -- is a function of the length of a manuscript and its complexity. Marlie Wasserman estimated the cost as $8.50 per page with on-screen editing for a total of $2,448 for her hypothetical book of 288 pages, or $4 per copy for her 600 unit run. [9] Another major university press gave us financial projections for several titles which had plant costs of about $15 to $20 per page or totals of $4,100 to $6,000, for a unit cost of about $1 to $5.

• Fixed Overhead -- roughly defined as the ongoing costs of maintaining the business of publishing a given family of books, including staff and space costs primarily. Wasserman assigned an overhead cost of $18,000 to her hypothetical book, for a unit cost of $30. Our other publisher assigned overhead burdens of $11,000 to $16,000 to its titles, for a total of about $4 to $13 per unit.

• Variable Overhead -- these costs will vary somewhat with the volume of titles and books produced. They include marketing, sales and distribution related costs as well as editing and design related costs that are done on a freelance basis. Wasserman assigned a total of about $4,000 in such costs to her book, for a unit cost of about $7. Our other publisher attributed variable overheads of about $11,000 to $18,000, for a unit cost of about $5 to $12.

• Total Fixed Costs -- summing these three categories of fixed costs, we find that Wasserman's costs total $41 per unit with paper, printing and binding totaling about $5 per volume at this output level. Thus, fixed costs were about 89% of total costs for this hypothetical book. In our other sample plant, fixed overhead and variable overhead summed to 70% to 88% of total costs.

With such a heavy load of fixed costs, publishers must seek every means to expand unit sales of these scholarly books to institutions and individuals.[10] The marginal cost of each unit is low (say $4 to $7 for a standard book), so any contribution that an additional unit can make to covering fixed costs will help the publisher to achieve break even. If the cost of producing and maintaining an online version of a book is low, this version might contribute meaningfully to covering the cost of publishing a scholarly book.

4.2 Incremental Costs of Electronic Version May Be Modest

Our experience to date suggests that the cost of creating an incremental electronic version of a scholarly book may be less than $1,000, if the following conditions apply:

• The electronic version is planned for and becomes part of the production process from the outset. Our process of producing online books has involved the inefficient, labor intensive process of taking the printer's tape for a book, stripping it of special coding, then marking the book up with HTML coding, and finally proofreading the online version. If an electronic version were included in the production process from the outset, it could be created simultaneously with the typesetter's tape and little of the duplicative labor would be required.

• The design and production process is standardized so that the look and feel of most books is consistent. This would reduce the cost of manpower involved in making those decisions for each book and allow the publisher to use standard templates.

• Functionality is standard with only a modest level of hyperlinking within the book and from it to other resources.

Our cost averaged about $1,500 per book during our start-up period with its extensive learning curve. We believe that our production process could now cost less than $500 per book. This estimate will be tested out in the months ahead.

5. Implications for New Models for Marketing Scholarly Books

Our findings on scholars' interest in online books and on the costs of providing online books are preliminary but they suggest that it would be valuable for scholarly publishers to test new product models that combine print and online availability of books. Just as there are markets for both paper and hard cover books, there could be markets for both print and online books. And possibly, if we could find the right mix, the overall market might expand. The goal of such models would be to increase publishers' profitability from these books while also making them more available to scholars.

5.1 Mixed Product Models

New mixed product models could retain and expand research library markets, develop new academic library markets, and attract more individual scholars as buyers. Some possible options might include:

• Retain and expand the research library market with a free online version, i.e., an enhanced product package, or an online version available at a small incremental price (but one that would cover the costs of producing the online version). But this is cumbersome on a book by book basis given the need for tracking, authorizations, and the like.

• Another model that would retain and expand the research library market is one in which series or collections were packaged for online sale.

  o Online packages or collections might be available to libraries which bought a certain substantial percentage of the titles in print version. If the online collections were modestly priced, this could expand the sales of the print books as libraries sought to reach that percentage.

  o Online collections might be available only after the titles were no longer first run, say 12 to 18 months after they were published in print version. This would serve to maintain the sale of print copies as scholars would push their libraries to buy important titles soon after they were published. On the other hand, it would serve scholars who were seeking books that were not fresh off the press and might no longer be available from bookstores in print form.

• Another model would seek to expand sale of scholarly monographs into the vast majority of scholarly libraries in the U.S. and abroad that purchase few such books at this time. Online collections could be priced for sale to consortia. At the same time an on-demand electronic version could be made available that would be an attractive alternative to interlibrary loan. This would serve to shift spending on ILL back to funding scholarly publishing.

• We could encourage more individual scholars to purchase scholarly monographs with:

  o Pay per electronic view. The Web has undermined the concept of a pay per print model as Web browsers allow uncontrolled printing. The pay per view model would not be attractive to scholars with access to library copies but it could be attractive to those who are not affiliated with such a library.

  o Online ordering of a print copy of the book at a discount from a site connected to a library's online version. The scholar could browse the book online and decide that he wants to possess a paper copy. Ordering would be done simply and quickly and would have a lower price than retail. (This price discrimination would bring enhanced sale to individuals while ensuring that libraries continued to pay list price.) The book could be pulled from a warehouse shelf to be shipped or printed out at the time it was requested.

  o Potentially, expanding demand for these books could result in lower prices for the print versions. Historical demand does not give much hope for this to be the case for scholarly monographs which are of interest to a small group of readers. It might be so, however, for books with a wider readership.

5.2 Potential Benefits of Mixed Models

Some of the more likely benefits of a mixed print and online model for scholarly books are:

• Expanding the total revenue available to sustain publication of scholarly monographs. This expansion would come by expanding the demand for these books and the revenues flowing to publishers and authors, not by raising prices and, hence, reducing unit sales even further.

• Expanding readership for these scholarly books by making more scholars aware of their existence and able to have virtually instantaneous access to them.

• Keeping books in print for as long as the scholarly community of publishers and libraries maintains their online availability. As long as a book is in print electronically, a scholar will be able to access it online and to obtain a print copy.

• Reducing the interlibrary loan burden on libraries. Instead of turning to other libraries for access to modern books, libraries and individual scholars will turn to the servers which hold the online versions of these books. The considerable spending that now goes to the staff and shipping costs of such loan activity would instead go to fund scholarly publishing. At the same time, scholars would have instant access to these books rather than a several week wait, thus enhancing their efficiency.

All of these benefits are also possible from an online-only publishing program. We believe that for some materials the concept of online-only has a role and a future. But many -- perhaps most -- readers are not yet ready to give up printed monographs. And print versus online need not be an either/or decision.

We are in a transitional environment, and perhaps can derive benefits from that very transition. The transition -- which we think will be a protracted one -- could enable a variety of new product lines for scholarly monographs. We hope to explore further these possibilities in the next phase of our Online Books Project.

1 Details on early Project findings are available in Summerfield, Mandel and Kantor, Online Books at Columbia - Measurement and Early Results on Use, Satisfaction, and Effect: Interim Report of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-Funded Columbia University Online Books Evaluation Project, July 1997. This Introduction is largely extracted from the Executive Summary to that report, which is available in its entirety at http://www.arl.org/scomm/scat/summerfield.ind.html.

2 See Summerfield, Online Books: What Roles Will They Fill For Users Of The Academic Library? (available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/texts/paper/) for a discussion of the various elements of use of books in a scholarly context. The book could be used entirely in an online format or the scholar could choose to acquire a print version of all or part of the book once he had browsed the online version.

3 In effect, funds that would have been spent on scholars' travel to use books or on interlibrary loan activities, i.e., staff and mailing costs, would be redirected to the producers of the scholarly knowledge, thus supporting both the production and dissemination of such scholarship.

4 More information on the Columbia Digital Library is available in the Strategic Plan issued in Fall 1997 from which this description was taken.

5 Details about the methodology are available in Summerfield and Kantor, Online Books Evaluation Project: Analytical Principles & Design. This document is available at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/digital/texts/protocol/.

6 Networked printing that allows such tracking is not yet in place.

7 This value does not include hits on images or help menus.

8 Fixed costs are defined as those that will not change with the number of titles produced by a publisher or units of a given title produced or sold. Clearly such costs are only fixed for some range of activity, e.g., doubling the number of titles might well lead to greater expenditures in some of the areas that are considered fixed at the current level of activity. Some of the costs discussed here would, in fact, vary somewhat with those changes in production, but we do not have the data that would enable us to go into such detail here.

9 Marlie Wasserman, How Much Does It Cost to Publish a Monograph and Why? Delivered at the conference The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book? Economics of the Specialized Monograph, September 11, 1997.

10 Another strategic option is to reduce these fixed costs per book by achieving economies of scale, say by merging the operations of several publishers and, hence, increasing the number of books sharing a set of overhead costs.