TO: Customers of YBP and Lindsay & Croft

FR: Nat Bruning

RE: 2007/2008 New Book Price and Output Report

Each fall YBP publishes a report on price and output for new books published during our prior fiscal year. The data encompasses all new titles treated on the Approval Plan programs of YBP and of Lindsay & Croft, YBP’s division in the United Kingdom. These two offices regularly profile, with book-in-hand, over 65,000 distinct new titles annually. Since our Approval Plan programs are expressly designed to serve academic libraries, our data, which we have reported in a consistent way for over a dozen years, is a useful index to English-language publishing trends for scholarly, professional, and scientific books.

We are pleased to present, once again, these reports for our company’s 2007/2008 fiscal year.

As the YBP table below shows, last year for our Approval Plan program we profiled 62,705 titles, a 5% increase over the previous year and a new record year. While we added 19 new presses to the AP Press list, they only accounted for 3% of the title increase. The increase is almost entirely the result of a surge in publishing by our legacy presses. D.A.P, the art book distributor, increased their output by 46%. Springer (Verlag) raised their output by 265 titles to over 3,000 and CRC followed with an increase of 180 titles.

Title output was not the only thing that publishers raised. The average list price of YBP books increased by 5.2%, and reflects increases by 71% of our presses. Most of the increase we saw is just a repeat of publisher’s annual price increase. Prices have gone up in the last six consecutive years. Some piece of the rise, however, is attributed to UK publishers increasing their US list prices to offset the weak dollar’s impact on their profit margins. By subject, Agriculture (S) titles lead the increase at 13%, followed by Law (K) titles by 11% and Education (L) and Language and Literature (P) titles were both up 10%. The average list price for the "paper-preferred" bibliographic universe, where in the opposite way a paperback is counted in place of a simultaneous cloth edition, was $66.75, representing an increase of 7.5%.

The table below shows YBP’s data for publishing output and new book list prices for the past twelve years. (These figures, again, are "cloth-preferred.")

The next table shows output and price data over the past six fiscal years at Lindsay & Croft, YBP’s division located in their new home in Bicester, England. L&C covers new UK titles of interest to academic libraries around the world. L&C also profiles select titles from continental Europe and from Africa.

The Lindsay & Croft profiling output was off the previous years pace by only 2%. We expect publisher output to be relatively flat in 2008-09 as well. As for average UK prices, we saw an overall increase of 3.5% with Agricultural (S) titles leading the way with a 14% increase and Technology (T) titles up 8%.

 Three years ago YBP partnered with NetLibrary to offer an integrated e-book service. Since then we have established similar relations with both ebrary and EBL. Last year was our first full year of working with ebrary and EBL. The table below displays the number of e-book aggregator titles that we loaded into GOBI and profiled. The collection of titles we loaded from all three partners share a similar subject matter spread of about 19-24% Social Science titles (H), 17-19% Science titles (Q), 13-14% Technology titles, 10-13% Medicine, and 5-7% Philosophy titles. As they are competing for library sales, it is not surprising that their prices are similar.

After year three of our partnership with NetLibrary, it is possible to make a reasonable year over year pricing comparison. We see that the average list price increased by 2.6% last year. While lower than what we reported for print books, it is calculated on a significantly smaller number of titles from a more limited press list and includes many titles that would be considered backlist in the print world.

All the print and ebook data we have presented is aggregated. Libraries will find a review of their own purchasing history to be the best indicator of the inflation rate they will experience. The 2007/08 book price inflation varied widely among YBP and L&C customers. Subject emphases, binding preference, changes in budget, and the method for acquiring UK and other English-language books from around the world are some of the factors that made one library’s experience different from another’s.

All of the data cited in this report, as well as aggregate and local data configured in many other ways for hundreds of bibliographic categories, can be obtained at any time in GOBI. For the past several years, GOBI has offered reports enabling librarians not only to track their own library’s YBP and L&C buying patterns, but also to track the corresponding bibliographic universe in ways that make sense locally. GOBI’s "New Title Reports," a subscription feature which can be found under the "Approvals" menu, offer on-demand and highly customized access to the same Approval Plan data that we use to create this annual output and price feature for YBP and L&C. We think all academic libraries will find GOBI a powerful tool in budgeting and planning.

Each year librarians ask YBP for a forecast of the inflation rate of book prices. We do our best to consider our historical data, collect insight from buyers and publishers, and review general economic data when developing our forecast. We are hearing from large publishers that they will be raising prices as they always do, but they are sensitive to the threat of shrinking library budgets and want to be careful not to over price their books. There are other indicators that publishers will hold the line on price increases. The US Producers Price Index reports that the price for "Book Publishers" increased by 3.2 %...slightly lower than the previous 5 year average of 3.8%. Faced with a weakened economy and threatened library budgets, publishers will be under pressure to keep prices from rising. We predict that book prices in the US will increase at a rate between 3 - 4%. Our international customers will have to factor in the value of their currency against the US dollar. It has recently risen against the Canadian and Australian dollar, held steady with the Mexican peso and dropped against the Hong Kong dollar.

In the UK, the Producers Price Index reports that the price of "printed matter" has increased 3.5% in the past year. This is about the same rate of increase that the PPI reported for the previous year and is the same rate of increase that YBP reported for FY07. The economy in the UK is also in trouble. There too, publishers will be pressured to keep further price increases low. We predict that list prices in the UK will increase in the range of 3- 4% as well in FY2009. Again, the rate of exchange between the pound and the currencies of our customer’s countries must be considered. Recently the pound has fallen against the US, Canadian, Hong Kong dollars, and Mexican peso, while it has risen against the Australian dollar. The strengthened currencies will reduce the impact of book price inflation, while the weakening currencies will magnify its effect.

We believe that eBook pricing is closely linked to print book pricing and will be influenced by the same factors. We expect publishers to maintain a fixed relationship between the prices of the two formats; therefore, we suggest eBook list prices will also rise 3-4% in the next year.

As for title output, we see no evidence that publisher output of academic titles will increase this year. Our buyers have completed their purchasing of fall 2008 titles and their count is even with last year. We are not forecasting an increase of new titles out of the UK, either.