Inside Higher Ed :: A Dogged Pursuit

Inside Higher Ed :: A Dogged Pursuit:

...Easier on the eyes, but no less appalling, are the latest reports from the Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University, in the UK. Every six months, LISU crunches the numbers regarding British and American academic book prices. Since 1987, the statisticians have been compiling and analyzing the prices of books in 64 subject categories that are “closely relevant to acquisitions librarians’ needs.” Categories include law, engineering, medicine (both human and veterinary), the various arts, and several branches each of the humanities and the social sciences.

Thanks to LISU’s analysis of how prices are varying, librarians in charge of research collections have some sense of how to plan their budgets. Claire Creaser, the deputy director and senior statistician for LISU, has kindly provided me with the latest reports, covering the first six months of this year. (A more extensive presentation of the material is available for sale in CD-ROM format, including masses of data in Excel spreadsheets, if that sort of thing does not terrify you.)

First, the bad news: During 2004 to 2005, the overall average price for an academic book from an American publisher has gone up 2.2 percent compared to the previous year. “This compares to a slight fall in prices for UK books over the same period,” as LISU notes, “and continues the recent trend for prices to rise rather more rapidly in the US than the UK.” Indeed, the report focusing on British prices notes that they have gone down 4.8 percent over the past five years. A comparison with the comparable table for American academic titles shows prices increasing by 35 percent since 1999-2000.

Then, the rest of the bad news: “There is no consistency or pattern in the half-yearly price changes [for US titles] over recent years, which can only make budgets more difficult for librarians.” Prices in a few areas have gone down. (The 761 philosophy titles from American presses between January and June were 2 percent cheaper than the previous lot.) But the vast majority of subject categories have shown an increase in price. A graph covering the past two decades shows that, sometime around mid-1996, the average cost of academic books began to shoot ahead of the retail price index. The gap between them is now wider than at any point in LISU’s record....