Annual Book Price Update

• By subject under the Library of Congress, Dewey and National Library of Medicine classification systems.
• By publisher.
• By non-subject parameters which include categories like format, interdisciplinary descriptors such as "Women’s Studies", and geographic descriptors.

All of these reports are available on our website in Excel format. PDF versions are available on demand in GOBI.

YBP’s US operation profiled 64,473 titles, a 2.8% increase over the previous year and a new record year. Some of this increase is attributed to the addition of 22 new presses to the AP Press list, but the other contributor is the increased output of our legacy presses. We experienced increased output from 43% of our presses with the leaders being Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Nova Science and Springer.

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 seven fiscal years at Lindsay & Croft now well settled 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. We profiled nearly 15,000 titles last year. Based on our year to date profiling output, we are forecasting flat to slightly stronger output in 2009-10. As for average UK prices, we saw an overall increase of 11% with History (D) leading the way with a 13% increase and Science (Q) and Technology (T) titles both up 12%.

We have enough history with our ebook Notification Plan service with ebrary, Netlibrary and EBL to compare average list prices year over year. Our record for each is displayed in the following table. The average list price of an ebook across all vendors in FY2008-2009 was $99.78, a decrease of 6.6%. This drop is largely explained by the mix of backlist to frontlist titles and, to a lesser degree, the publisher mix. These mixes aside, publishers can be expected to increase the list price of their ebooks this year and the aggregators will pass these increases on. While we are selling ebooks hosted on the Gale Virtual Reference Library, Wiley Interscience and other publisher platforms, we don’t have enough history for comparative purposes.

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 2008/09 book price inflation varied widely among YBP and L&C customers. Subject emphases, format preference, budgets, 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. GOBI offers 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 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. Over the past thirteen years, YBP has only reported a drop in the average list price of a book twice. One might think that with academic libraries reporting unprecedented budget woes, with weak public library and retail markets, with material and production costs down and little threat of inflation that 2010 would be a year when book prices would hold. However, weak sales at a time when publishers are investing heavily in digital strategies while still maintaining large print book infrastructures is putting pressure on their bottom lines. Expect further price increases in FY2010. Based on recent conversations with publishers, we expect to see average list prices of US print books to increase by about 3%.

Our international customers will have to factor in the value if their currency against the US dollar. After a period of strengthening against major currencies, we are witnessing its weakening today.

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. 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, customers will have to keep an eye on exchange rates. 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.

E-book 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 e-book list prices will also raise 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.