xISBN v2 pricing discussions
In case you didn’t see the comments on yesterday’s post (which you should), or read some discussion of this elsewhere, I thought I’d point out the new xISBN pricing sheet. The main page about xiSBN says, “The xISBN Web service is free for non-commercial use when usage does not exceed 500 requests per day…. The service is also available on a subscription basis for non-commercial and commercial use for usage that meets or exceeds 500 requests per day.”
There was some discussion on the code4lib mailing list following Eric Hellman’s announcement.
In What’s a Web Service Worth, Richard Wallis of Talis said, “OCLC are dipping their toe in the water on behalf of many of us who will be watching this service closely.”
I wish I knew more about how OCLC made the decisions it did. How did they decide on their pricing? What have they seen in the xISBN v1 usage logs? Who do they expect will pay? Who’s already paying?
You might not expect a change in the license on an obscure FRBR-related algorithm to generate this much discussion, but there’s more here than just ISBNs. OCLC, an enormous American non-profit organization made up of member libraries, had a free service that now they’re charging for. Talis, a UK for-profit company with a large union catalogue of its own but no xISBN-equivalent service, is watching to see how this evolves.
LibraryThing, a small American for-profit company that charges very little for its services, has thingISBN, which is free. Tim Spalding, who runs it, said on the code4lib list, “I’d love to see LT’s member-driven data mashed up with more traditional work-set analysis. At this point everyone is free to try that on their own, but we’ll move to a more traditional copyleft license, so improvements like that have to be shared.”
Behind some of the discussion about all this is the feeling, which I share, that all bibliographic metadata should be free. If it were, it would be simple to build a free xISBN replacement. Of course, it isn’t. But some of it is. Perhaps enough. My Pride and Prejudice experiment is one start along that path, and I’ll get back to it tomorrow and give you something to do over the weekend.
How do we decide on pricing? OCLC is a complex organization. We have a “pricing committee”. We have idealists, programmers, bean counters, marketing people, sales people and librarians. We have a mission to help libraries, and so we feel it’s important to offer a level of free service. But in the end we have a spreadsheet with income and expenses and we plug in numbers until we get to a place where we are not a “for-loss” organization.
Have we seen the logs? Yes!
Who do we expect to pay? Everyone who wants assured access to the most reliable, deepest, highest quality service of its type. Everyone who wants to support further development of the service and other services like it.
Who’s already paying? OCLC member libraries have put a lot of resources into developing up the service and the infrastructure to support it.
Eric
Comment by eric hellman — 10 May 2007 @ 10:48 am[...] See Also: xISBN v2 pricing discussions (via FRBR Blog) [...]
Pingback by ResourceShelf » Briefs: The WorldCat xISBN Service Becomes Available to Commerical Users — 11 May 2007 @ 6:41 pmHas anyone looked at the storage and sharing terms? Can William fire up the 500/day and keep the data forever? Can a dozen Code4Lib people make a “Seti project” for xISBN, and farm and aggregate it?
Comment by Tim — 14 May 2007 @ 9:24 am