DPLA Agreement Amazon Publishing Ebooks

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Announces Agreement to Make Amazon Publishing Ebooks and Audiobooks Available to Libraries

Gary Price

https://www.infodocket.com/2021/05/18/ebooks-digital-public-library-of-america-dpla-announces-deal-with-amazon-publishing-to-make-their-ebooks-and-audiobooks-available-to-libraries/

Library patrons will be able to access Amazon Publishing titles through SimplyE, the library-developed and managed e-reader app founded by New York Public Library. Amazon Publishing is now one of more than 1,000 publishers in the DPLA Exchange and one of more than two dozen with whom we are working to provide libraries greater choice and flexibility in ebook lending models.

ebook prices

Amazon and major publishers colluded to keep e-book prices high, lawsuit says from r/books

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-and-major-publishers-colluded-to-keep-e-book-prices-high-lawsuit-says/

Amazon and major publishers colluded to keep e-book prices high, lawsuit says

The same Seattle law firm that once sued Apple for propping up e-book prices to the detriment of consumers filed a nearly identical complaint against Amazon

Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster — together known as the “Big Five” — agreed not to allow retailers to sell e-books at lower prices than could be found on Amazon.com, the complaint alleges. More than 80% of all e-book sales occur on Amazon.

Federal and state regulators last year stepped up inquiries into anticompetitive practices by software giants Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook.

Ironically, today’s relatively high prices for e-books — on Amazon, some e-books cost more than hardcover editions — are, in part, the result of the incredibly low prices Amazon formerly charged, multiple media outlets have reported.

 

Incentivizing faculty for OER

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099133320301117

This survey assessed the experiences of faculty who participated in a textbook affordability program at Rutgers University. The program provided incentive awards in exchange for replacing commercial textbooks with affordable course materials such as open educational resources (OER), self-developed course materials, course reserves, or library-licensed content.

indicate that even participating faculty vary greatly in their knowledge and use of OER and their interest in authoring open textbooks. Ultimately, these survey results indicate the lack of a “one size fits all” approach to incentivizing the adoption of affordable course materials, the use of OER, and the creation of new open resources.

Open Access

Reassembling Scholarly CommunicationsHistories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4933/Reassembling-Scholarly-CommunicationsHistories

Chapter 7. Peer Review: Readers in the Making of Scholarly Knowledge
David Pontille and Didier Torny

p. 120

If open science has become a motto, it encompasses two different visions for journal peer review. The first one, which includes open identities, takes place within the academic closet, where the dissemination of manuscripts is made possible by small discourse collectives that shape consensual facts.29 This vision is supported by the validation processes designed by Robert Boyle, one of the founders of the Royal Society, who thought that disputes about scientific facts needed a specific and limited “social space” in order to be solved.30 By contrast, following Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan conception of sovereignty, the second vision urges a multiplication of points of view. The disentanglement of peer evaluation cuts through the ability given to readers to comment on published articles, produce social media metrics through the sharing of documents, and observe the whole evaluation process of each manuscript.31 In this vision, scholarly communication relies on a plurality of instances that generate a continuous process of judgment. The first vision has been at the heart of the scientific article as a genre, and a key component of the scientific journal as the most important channel for scholarly communication.32

Chapter 13: Libraries, Museums, and Archives as Speculative Knowledge Infrastructure