Creating a Consolidated Online Catalogue for the University Press Community

This essay derives from a feasibility study into the possibility of creating a consolidated online catalogue for university presses and was underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and sponsored by The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education; the essay is an abridgement of the report submitted to Mellon and MITE. For more information on the background, see the acknowledgments and disclosures at the end of this paper. The aim of this study was to identify a means by which university presses could sell more books and, specifically, whether the creation of a consolidated online catalogue of press titles would help in this regard. The presses at this time vary considerably in terms of size, resources, and familiarity with online marketing, though all of them are active to some degree online and most identify Amazon as their largest customer. Despite this activity, however, and even for the very largest presses, a press-wide catalogue would augment sales by exploiting greater scale, enabling mor...