Boom or Bust: Short-Term Loans Five Years Later

The University of Kansas (KU) Libraries began a demand-driven acquisition program for e-books in late 2011, which included short-term loans (STLs). At that time, STLs cost 5 to 10% of a book’s list price, with libraries paying no more than 130% when actually purchasing an e-book. The literature from the early years praises the new purchasing model as cost effective, often saving libraries thousands of dollars annually. However, in 2014, the cost of STLs began to increase, with a handful of publishers charging as high as 30 to 35% per loan. In FY14, the KU Libraries saw a sudden 122% increase in the cost of their STLs and a 277% increase in the overall cost of their ebook purchases. Alarmed by this sudden increase, KU librarians began looking for solutions to save money, including lowering the number of loans from three to two before triggering a purchase. Unfortunately, STL costs at KU continued to rise the following year by 32%. STLs were no longer working as a cost-saving measure, and publisher pricing for STLs has continued to rise, some to as much as 40 to 50% of the cost of a book. When the concept of demand-driven acquisitions (DDA) for e-books was first introduced, many libraries embraced this model as a cost-saving method for collecting monographs. Publishers agreed to try out pilot projects with certain libraries to see if this new model was profitable. E-book vendors such as EBL, Ebrary, and EBSCO offered e-book purchasing with short-term loans (STLs) costing 5 to 10% of the list price of the book, with libraries paying no more than 130% when actually purchasing the e-book. The library literature from these early years of STLs praises the new purchasing model as cost effective, often touted as saving libraries thousands of dollars annually. As opposed to the long-time standard of approval plans that allowed libraries to purchase books on a “just-in-case” basis with reduced budgets, libraries found the “just-in-time” approach of the DDA model to be highly advantageous. Even more desirable was a hybrid approach, essentially a demand-driven-preferred approval plan, which enabled libraries to provide access to more content than ever before, while spending less. The University of Kansas (KU) Libraries began a DDA program for e-books (eDDA) in late 2011 after successfully implementing a DDA program for print books (pDDA) during the previous two years. Some librarians at KU had expressed skepticism about investing in e-books, particularly in the humanities, but were swayed into piloting an e-preferred acquisitions model by writing criteria for purchasing e-books into the Yankee Book Peddler (YBP) approval plan for the sciences and social sciences. Ebooks had to fit into the approval plan parameters like their print counterparts and had price limits. For the social sciences, the price was capped at $94.99 to come in on approval, and books priced $95 to $150 were loaded into the online catalog as DDA. Any book over $150 had to be selected by librarians. For the sciences, there was a $150 price cap for books on approval, and books costing $151 to $200 were loaded into the online catalog as DDA. Any book over $200 had to be selected by a librarian. By consulting retrospective lists of books that would have come in on approval, we were able to project expenditures and average prices. We estimated that in the first year, 23% of our monograph purchases would be eDDA, 50% would be pDDA, 20% would be received on approval, and 7% would be selected by librarians. These projections were fairly accurate. When the e-book plan was created, KU Libraries set their preference for e-books to come in primarily through EBL’s nonlinear lending model, which allowed for 365 uses of a book before being bound to purchasing a second copy. If nonlinear lending was not available, single-user access was next preferred, followed by multiple user, if requested for use in the classroom. Librarians also had a week to review the approval e-books before they came in automatically.