Database bidding wars
Posted by: Barbara Bibel
Our collection development coordinator gave us some disturbing news today. It seems that some magazine publishers only want to deal with a single database and are selling to the highest bidder. First it was Consumer Reports. Now Time-Warner. This means that some of our most popular periodicals will not longer be part of our Infotrac Academic ASAP database. We will have to figure out if we can afford another subscription to get them, whether it will be possible to get a smaller package from the new vendor with those titles that we need, whether our consortium has any plans to work on this, and how to help our patrons deal with either the loss of their favorites or yet another interface. All of this is happening at a time of rock-bottom budgets and increased library use. The whole world of e-media has changed the business model for publishers and they have nothing but the profit motive to guide them. When Macmillan pulled its e-books from Kindle, Amazon did not take long to capitulate. Libraries are caught in the middle and they have no spare funds. Can we hope that someone out there will have a conscience and consider their plight?
February 5th, 2010 at 10:42 am
This database war is a very important factor in how we will offer information to our users in the future. Ebsco has purchased exclusive rights for the full text of some very mainstream journals, paying big money to do so (they admitted this at the ALA conference). Other vendors, like Gale, Proquest, and to a lesser extent Wilson, will need to remove the content that already exists in their databases. Subscribers to each vendor will be impacted in different ways.
Ebsco subscribers will retain the content, but I am expecting at higher prices.
Gale and Proquest customers will lose some content, but probably at stable prices.
Ebsco is gambling that libraries will switch vendors and gain more of the market share.
Gale and Proquest are afraid of losing market share and will be doing what they can to retain customers.
My personal prediction is that things will remain somewhat the same. Ebsco will gain some customers who switch for the exclusive content, but lose others to the higher prices. The customer base will move, but I am guessing that market share will remain pretty much the same.
The big loser in all this in my opinion will be Time Warner and the other magazine publishers that are going exclusively with Ebsco. While they are high subscription magazines, they are not critical to any research or leisure reading. Libraries that do not pay Ebsco will continue to buy print copies of those magazines for people who want to read the current issues. Users of those libraries who are searching databases will get similar information from other journals. The overall use of the exclusive journals and magazines will go down, not up.
Only time will tell, but I think that this gamble will not be good for any of our database vendors or for the publishers.