The Corner Office: It's All in the Packaging

As part of this process, we established the position of library relations manager in our Journals Marketing Department, giving us a person whose job it [is] to talk with librarians, understand their needs and concerns, and also advocate for those needs and concerns within the press, and come up with terms on site-license language and pricing models that libraries would find fair and workable. ...

● What part did you play in the development of this project?
Cohn: A major factor in my thinking about an e-books package was that I very much wanted to maintain differential pricing for libraries and individuals. ...

Duke University Press' book-publishing program, perhaps more than that of any other university press, has been based on the publishing of dual editions. For almost every one of our books, we simultaneously publish cloth editions for the libraries, of very high quality and durability, and relatively inexpensive paperbacks for the trade, and for individual buyers and for courses. We have depended on the cloth sales to libraries to support an affordable paperback price for our cutting-edge books that are mostly sold not to well-established and well-salaried academics, but rather to junior faculty and graduate students, and for course use—all markets where the buyers are very sensitive to price. ...

So, as our cloth sales steadily eroded, with libraries buying paperbacks at what we used to consider the individual price, I wanted to use the e-book program to move the situation back to one where we would be selling a higher-priced "library edition." I now started to think of the library edition as including both an electronic edition that could be used by anybody on the campus computer network plus a clothbound print edition for storing on the library shelves. ... The sales of this new type of library edition could then support our continuation of a book-publishing program that includes inexpensive paperback prices for individual book buyers on just about every book we publish. ...