> Server costs have already been considered in the discussion.

Just for the record, I sent that posting yesterday afternoon -- it got
delayed for some reason, and that's why it was still beating that particular
dead horse.

> The publishers
> don't call each of the users.  The only increase in phone calls has nothing to
> do with the number of users.  The number of mailings only has to do with the
> number of institutional and/or individual subscribers, and I don't see what
> the FTE has to do with the number of mailings.

You're right, I carelessly conflated "customer" with "end-user" in my
message.  What I should have said was that more end-users means not only
more pressure on servers (which is not an inconsequential expense), but it
also means more customer service work that has to be done.  More users means
more complaints (and thus more phone calls _to the provider_), more
maintenance, more customer support, more piracy, etc.  It simply costs more
to provide an ongoing service to a large group of people than to a small
one.

Again: this isn't to say that a publisher should charge 10x the price to an
institution with 10x the users -- the increase in costs doesn't work that
way.  But the question was whether it makes sense to charge more at all for
a larger population of users, and it does.

--
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library
Univ. of Utah
rick.anderson@utah.edu
(801) 721-1687