A couple of posts on the Law Librarian Blog today caught my attention. The first was Victoria Szymczak’s post on the recent letter sent by Lexis to law school dean’s concerning academic pricing for 2010. What caught my eye was her last comment:
And while I am on the topic of the 3 year volume purchase, I’d like to make a point. In other areas of our life when we buy in volume we are typically rewarded with a discount. In legal publishing land, instead of getting a discount, we get an offer to keep price increases in a certain range. So, while the offer seems like a pretty good deal, we should remember that it is still contrary to the way the “real” world works. Isn’t this why Costco is so popular?
I’ll admit, CALR pricing may seem a bit strange (i.e., the idea of signing contracts to keep lock in guaranteed price increases), but it’s certainly not uncommon. There are plenty of contracts we enter into to “protect” ourselves from market fluctuations. For example, I signed a multi-year private garbage contract for our neighborhood association that ties increases to the CPI and fixes prices for diesel fuel. It guarantees a return to the garbage company, but protects the neighborhood from big spikes in gas prices (which happened a couple of years back).
To Thomson West and Lexis, you’re already getting a discount. They aren’t charging you retail, well, their idea of “retail.” If you were charged retail, or even a Costco discount off of retail, you’d probably still be paying a lot more than what you’re paying now. Would you feel better if your CALR vendor just set pricing 12% higher and agreed to no price increases over four years?
And this brings me to the second item that showed up in Mark Giangrande’s post Is the Kindle a News Publisher’s Dream Device?, and ties in nicely to the discussion on CALR pricing generally:
[Image (cc) by jtjdt]
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