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Who are (and were!) the intermediaries?
1980s: The age of choice• Blackwell’s †• Dawson †• Swets & Zeitlinger • Bumpus, Haldane & Maxwell †• Bailey’s †• Ebsco• Faxon †• Universal †• Stobart †• Martinus Nijhoff †• Harrassowitz• Everetts(roughly in order of UK market share circa 1984)
And there were more!
• Karger, HKLewis, Bauermeister, Gothards, Collets, Karnac, Menzies, Wilshire, Bissets, Austicks, Galloway & Porter, Heyden & Sons, John Smith, Heffers, Haigh & Hochland, James Thin, Donald Ferrier, Munksgaard, Majors, McGregor…...
• In the early 1980s there were 32 UK-headquartered companies who were members of the ASA. Today there are somewhere between 0 and 2.
2003:Slimmer pickings
• Swets Blackwell• Ebsco• Everetts (with a UK base, active in all markets)
• Harrassowitz• Karger (selling to mainly academic libraries from Europe)
• Prenax, Infocandy, Instant Library(mainly active in the corporate market)
Um……that’s about it really.
Why the vanishing acts?
• Smaller suppliers found it hard to make the investment necessary to compete in the electronic age
• Larger suppliers keen to buy market share; attractive to directors of smaller private companies to sell out
• Decreasing discounts from publishers• Pips squeezed by consortia
Some jumped and some were pushed!
So if they’re disappearing thick and fast, is there any reason now for the
‘middleman’ to exist?or
“What has the intermediary ever done for us???”
Firstly, intermediaries are important to publishers
• Consolidated and timely payments, orders and claims
• Electronic payment
• Automated renewals
• Simplified communication
• Efficient price-tracking & payments
Services may or may not be rewarded by a discount from the publisher
But it’s libraries that more obviously benefit from a raft of services
• Consolidated orders, claims and invoices• Single cheque / payment point• Single currency• Binding service level agreement• Single contact point for customer service• Bibliographic services• Financial management services
Services may or may not be rewarded by a supplementary payment or ‘handling charge’ from the library (of which more later….)
As well as the core traditional services, intermediaries offer ‘added
value’ services too:
• Consolidation of print• Customer-facing database (online services)• Electronic license and access management• Gateway products• EDI• Fixed-price deals for consortia
Consolidation of print titles
• Potential cost-savings on US subscriptions• Automatic claiming of missing issues• Outsourcing, e.g. labels, tattletape• Machine-readable check-in data• Secure delivery• Single-issue bank
Online Services• DataSwets, Ebsconet, ESCUDA, OttoSerials,
LibriAccess• Company and product information• Bibliographic searching (print and electronic)• License management• Account overview• Order and claims status• Consolidation data• Financial reports• Management reports
Electronic License Management
• To help libraries deal with electronic license management, intermediaries:• Have developed web-based databases• Enable searching by title, publisher, ISSN• Provide pricing information – Free With Print,
Surcharge etc• Provide a link to the publisher’s license• Enable the license to be downloaded• Spend considerable time and money trying to keep
the information current and accurate
Gateway Services• SwetsWise, EbscoHost EJS
• “Gateway”= solution where content is “pointed to”, not hosted
• Single source for ordering and accessing subscription-based full-text e-journals
• Single source for e-journal authentication• Agents maintain URLs and passwords• Text stored on agents’ servers, or gateways to publishers’
servers. Internet delivery. Generally HTML for headers and PDF for full-text
• Catalogue of titles in the service. Search by Title, Author, Subject across TOC, Abstract. Searching across titles
• Some services allow searching through full-text
Gateways Full text @ Publisher A
Abstract &Full Text
Search header data
(this and next slide courtesy of Swets Blackwell)
Full text @ Publisher B
Full text @ Publisher C
Linking
Issues
Table of Contents
Abstract &Full Text
Local OPAC
Journal titles
MARC 856 field
What is EDI?
• Electronic Data Interchange
• A method of exchanging business information electronically in a standardized machine-readable format
• Used in business over 20 years - more recently in library technology
• Standards: ASC X12, EDIFACT: Neutral languages for describing business data in a structured way
EDI Transactions
• Ordering– Library to Agent to Publisher
• Invoicing– Agent to Library System
• Claiming– Library to Agent to Publisher
• Consolidation check-in data– Agent to Library System
For more info, visit http://www.icedis.org
Consortia
• Started in the 1990s; in the UK there are 6 academic consortia + others such as CHILL, BRISC and the NHS
• Consortia have depressed intermediaries’ margins through cut-throat competition
• Attractive to publishers wanting to deal direct for electronic content (“Disintermediation”)
• Consortia have contributed to the demise of some suppliers
• Pricing pendulum swinging back?
Who pays the ferryman?
• Average publisher discount = 5%• Additional income from:
– Service charges– Exchange-rate profits– Prepayment interest
• Each £10m turnover = maybe £750k gross profit
Low-margin businesses don’t come any lower
and for many of you the beautiful truth is….
the large academic consortia have for the most part negotiated ‘list-minus’ deals, so in effect agents actually PAY for the privilege of
supplying them!
<- would-be intermediary having head examined
Subscription agents - the new model?
• End-User E-Procurement systems started in the late 1990s• divine/Faxon - kStore• Swets Blackwell – SwetsWiseWise• EBSCO – EBSCO Corporate Services• End-User Ordering, Claiming, Renewals• All done electronically • Linked with B2B commerce platforms (Ariba,
CommerceOne, ERP’s (Enterprise Resource Planning), etc
• More labour-intensive for the end user (customer service support may be thin or non-existent)
• Agent levies per-line charge• Much interest in the corporate market
Is there a future for the intermediary?
• Yes. Well, probably. Depends: – On publishers acknowledging that there is a continuing
advantage in intermediaries aggregating administrative tasks
– On libraries accepting that ‘more for less’ is not a permanently sustainable situation
– On intermediaries continuing to develop and refine their services (and making enough profit to afford to do so)
As in most other walks of life, you get what you pay for
