ProQuest recently announced that it will be changing its business model to move away from print textbooks and monographs, solely to ebooks via a subscription-based model similar to a “Big Deal”. Kevin O’Donovan assesses the causes for this move and its implications for the academic library sector.

Academic libraries in the UK and across the world were taken by surprise by the recent announcement from Jeff Anusbigian, VP for Product Management at ProQuest, informing customers that the company will be exiting the global market for print book sales in August of this year, and similarly stopping title-by-title perpetual ebook sales in October.

ProQuest, a business focusing on information services for libraries, was founded in Michigan in the 1930s, and is a recent acquisition of Clarivate, a large international parent company headquartered in Philadelphia and London. Clarivate came into existence only in 2016 and has established itself as a dominant force in the academic and research marketplaces. Other notable companies and products under its umbrella include EndNote, a citation management reference tool; and ExLibris, the leading supplier of Library Systems in HE in the UK and US.

ProQuest currently accounts for 40% (£26.7m) of the spend across the UK higher education regional purchasing consortia under the SUPC-managed Books, e-books, and e-textbooks framework agreement. ProQuest’s acquisitions of products and services that cover the entire Library ecosystem, with discovery, metadata, record management, purchasing portals and content supply, is an approach of dominance in some ways similar to that of Google.

Following the planned closure in 2025 of their traditional purchasing options, ProQuest will instead offer customers “the world’s largest subscription of high-quality, multidisciplinary scholarly ebooks essential for students’ academic success and learning, [w]ith over 700,000 titles”, moving away from the ownership model that Libraries have employed, and towards electronic-only leasing for key titles, which has become commonplace since the pandemic.

Commercial publishers prefer institutions to sign up to a leasing subscription model, as they offer little in the way of perpetual rights

This practice of “bundling” is also used by some academic publishers for their book packages, forcing institutions to pay for (often unwanted) additional content, to secure access to titles required by academics. Subscription costs to these packages are usually based on the number of students at the institution, rather than a price per title. This results in a long tail of low or zero-use titles, and a high cost per user of the titles that are required. The same content must be leased year-on-year, rather than the Library acquiring it outright once and it being available to subsequent cohorts.

Commercial publishers prefer institutions to sign up to a leasing subscription model, as they offer little in the way of perpetual rights. This means that if a Library decides to cancel, they have no owned content to show for their expenditure. As Siobhan Haimé discusses in an insightful analysis, this development also changes the relationship between publisher and library, with implications for curating collections, bibliodiversity and ultimately teaching and learning. Another supplier moving into nebulous negotiation territory, rather than transparent title by title pricing, has been met with frustration and disappointment across the sector, mostly communicated through LinkedIn posts, Jiscmail,  and similar lists.

Another supplier moving into nebulous negotiation territory, rather than transparent title by title pricing, has been met with frustration and disappointment across the sector

This shift in strategy may have several reasons behind it, both from an operational and strategic perspective. When you consider these factors, the decision seems somewhat less surprising.

The margins on providing print books to HE institutions would be tiny, given the associated costs with warehousing, transport from publishers, servicing (printing and sticking those small labels you see on the spine of every book on the shelves of the Library), delivery to customers, and all the staffing that involves. Given the shift towards predominantly electronic content provision over the last five years, which was happening organically anyway, but given a massive acceleration with the pandemic, it is likely that someone high up saw the writing on the wall, and decided to call a halt to further investment in this area and get out now, rather than in ten years’ time with little profit to show from it. ProQuest’s print ordering portal “Oasis” (imagine a dated and more complex version of Amazon), is creaking at the seams and requires considerable modernisation, and has never quite functioned at optimal levels following ProQuest’s own previous acquisitions and mergers of smaller companies.

Similarly with one off ebook purchases, there is a lot of corollary administrative work generated from that. Metadata record delivery for each book via FTP or an API, which needs to be set up with technical staff, manual invoicing processes, individual upgrades of existing licenses, and so on – and the staffing costs associated in liaising with customers, almost all of whom have different local requirements, would have hurt the bottom line. It would be far easier for them to simply give customers one invoice, once a year, for all the content. The metadata for this content can be made available to all customers through their ExLibris arm in the “Community Zone”, with a flip of a switch.

Another likely factor feeding into the decision is their development of AI tools.

ProQuest lost ground in the marketplace during the pandemic to smaller “Etextbook” suppliers, such as Kortext and Bibliu, who already provide high-demand taught course content via the leasing model. It was only a matter of time before Clarivate looked at this, and tried to claw back some of this revenue. Their recent attempt to break into this space with their ill-defined “Course Reserves” model never got off the ground, with low interest from academic publishers. Their software arm has finished the development of a device Reader app, replacing the antiquated Adobe Digital Editions. This will likely be able to give them more of a competitive edge against the Etextbook players, with associated analytics providing deeper insights into reading habits and user behaviour with the content such as downloading and annotating.

Another likely factor feeding into the decision is their development of AI tools. These have already appeared in Clarivate’s “Web of Science” and “Primo” products, branded as Research Assistants; with more AI offerings in the pipeline for other platforms such as Leganto (reading list software) and Specto (digital collections). Using the enormous library of academic content already in their Ebook Central platform, as the source to teach an LLM rather than using the open web, likely offers them a strong future selling point for their new PQE package, with a similar Research Assistant potentially providing more detailed and reliable responses to queries from students and researchers.

Other print and ebook suppliers on the framework agreement (Ebsco, Browns) will attempt to corner this part of the market, as ProQuest exit it. Ebsco sent a circular to customers less than 24 hours later, to “reinforce EBSCO’s unwavering commitment to supporting your library’s distinct book acquisition needs… we understand that access to information in various formats is crucial for your students and patrons, and we remain dedicated to providing a comprehensive range of options.”

UK HE institutions are already under financial strain, with many reconsidering their commitments to existing costly “Big Deal” subscription packages. Other regions and countries have collectively taken cancellation decisions in the past, when negotiations with academic publishers broke down over access and pricing. How this decision from Clarivate adding another large subscription package to Library budgets will be viewed by the global customer base remains to be seen; but given the previous turmoil over Ebook pricing in the marketplace, it is unlikely to be welcomed with open arms.

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