Roger Schonfeld

One insight emerged unexpectedly at AAUP this year, when Roger Schonfeld and Liam Sweeney presented some slides on the principal library vendors. One slide was of the leading vendors of serials (including journals), the other of vendors of books. Surprise! The top vendor of both formats is one and the same. That uncomfortable feeling you get when you look at this information? You are witnessing the unfolding of a gatekeeper strategy by EBSCO, whose apparent aim is to mediate as much commerce as possible between publishers and academic libraries.

Nature's greatest mystery is anything to do with books: who reads them, how many there are, how much of them we read, what they cost, where we buy them, who makes money on their sale. Every day I step through a wormhole to try to keep up with attempts to probe this mystery and am happy to report that we are chipping away at this great unknown, but there is much work left to do. A recent piece by Dan Cohen, sheds some light on the puzzle