2013 Charleston Conference

A good part of the market--indeed, in some instances the entire market--for such materials as journals and scholarly monographs lies in sales to libraries, which represent their communities. Some journals publishers report that 85% of their sales go to libraries. Even academic book publishers (e.g., university presses) report sales to libraries in the range of 25%. For a number of reasons, including the tightening of library budgets, many publishers are now seeking to get access to an academic audience without restricting their sales to libraries. This kind of marketing is called "direct-to-consumer" and often abbreviated as D2C.
This panel will explore initiatives to sell academic materials D2C. There is no one way to do this; the panel represents a wide range of D2C options. Some D2C services are for materials that have found receptive audiences in libaries, but some are tailored for the direct sales market without any history of selling materials to institutions. What they all have in common is that for these services, the customer and the consumer are one and the same.