Hi Beth,

You have a fundamental misperception in how subscription agents price. By and large, they are not able to get lower prices due to bulk ordering. Usually, bulk ordering requires that the journals, etc. all be delivered to the same address. Rarely, that is available to large public libraries with many branches, or for consolidation services that are used by international libraries. But for libraries like yours and mine, not so much.

The price you pay is determined by the discount (or absence of one) that the agents are given by publishers. EBSCO and all other agents have personnel who negotiate with all publishers for better discounts. The higher the discount a publisher gives an agent, the lower your service charge. At some point, you’ve probably heard an agent representative say something about the “mix of your list”. The agent evaluates all the titles in your list – some with high discounts, some with low discounts, some with no discount – and assigns a service charge (or even, in the case of public libraries, a discount!) based on the profitability of your list.

As for those titles which offer a 25% off cover price if you renew direct (mostly trade or consumer oriented titles, I’m guessing?), it’s not that EBSCO won’t match that. It’s that they can’t. The publishers will not let them make that offer.

And as for the print+online packages, again, agents offer what the publishers allow them to offer.

As Dana Belcher mentioned in another response, record keeping even for 300 titles is a chore. I wouldn’t want to do it without an agent!

Hope this helps.

Katy G.

PS I used to work for EBSCO, but I left them in 9/2007.  J

Katy Ginanni, Collection Development Librarian

Hunter Library

Western Carolina University

176 Central Drive

Cullowhee, NC 28723

ksginanni@email.wcu.edu

828-227-3729 office

library.wcu.edu

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Hello list!

I know this is a question that has come up over and over in the history of serials management (and yes, I am searching the list archives!), but I still thought I would ask the collective wisdom of the list. We currently use EBSCO to order most of our serials. However, over the years we have noticed that EBSCO no longer offers monetary benefits it used to (since we apparently don’t count staff time as a benefit). Day after day we are offered deals directly from publishers (renew now for 25% off cover price!) that EBSCO either can’t or won’t match. I thought that one of the benefits of purchasing through an agent was that they could negotiate lower prices due to bulk ordering, but it doesn’t seem like this is the case with EBSCO.  Furthermore EBSCO seems to be offering less and less print + online packages. I don’t know if this is because the publishers are being greedy or what, but titles we used to get both print + online for $200 we can now get a print copy for $200 and a separate online subscription for $150… We are a relatively small library (around 300 serials). So my questions to the list are: Has anyone gone from a vendor back to ordering direct? Has anyone read a good study on a cost benefit analysis of publishers discount offers vs. purchasing through a vendor? Even though we are relatively small I would rather not go title by title to figure out if leaving our vendor would be worth it.

Please reply off list.

Thanks!

Beth Vernaci

Library Assistant

AFSCME Information Center

bvernaci@afscme.org

202-429-1057

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