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Weekly News Digest
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February 12, 2019 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
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'Amazon Sells Way Fewer Books to Academic Libraries Than People Think' by Adam Rowe
Adam Rowe writes for Forbes about a new study from Ithaka S+R, “Library Acquisition Patterns.” “Ithaka S+R gathered acquisitions data from 124 U.S. higher education institutions in fiscal year 2017 along with data from 51 institutions covering between 2014 and 2017,” Rowe writes. “The report has more than one interesting takeaway about the under-examined world of academic literature, but here’s the big one: Amazon isn’t anywhere close to controlling the academic library market.” He continues, “The study found that the academic book vendor GOBI Library Solutions provides 68.7 percent of print book sales and 86.4 percent of ebook sales to academic libraries. Granted, Amazon took second place in the print book category, but it was by a massive margin, with just an 11-percent piece of the pie compared to GOBI’s 68 percent.” Rowe quotes the study: “The slight increase in spending to acquire ebooks is not high enough to offset the decline in spending to acquire print books. Nor does the increase in ebook expenditures necessarily mean that libraries are acquiring more books in digital format. Rather, ebooks appear to be becoming more expensive (including ebooks costing more than $350), making it costlier for libraries to acquire the same number of digital materials.” For more information, read the article.
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Brandi Scardilli
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