This week OCLC announced the production release of their xISBN web service, and answers my question from February as to what the commercial model will be - with this price list.

The good news is that if your use is below 500 searches per day and your use is also non-commercial, the service remains free.  Higher volumes attract license fees which reach as high as $3,000 per year for up to 10,000 queries per day or even $16,000 for 10,000,000 individual accesses.

10,000 queries per day sounds a lot, but if you use the service to add value to brief results on your OPAC, and you display 10 results on a page, that translates to 1,000 pages per day for your annual license.  I suspect that 1,000 searches per day is well within the usage range of many an OPAC.

The value the xISBN service adds to a user interface is very attractive to a library - the use of the prototype service bares witness to this.  How much are they prepared to pay, or are able to pay, for it is a different question.  A dilemma articulated by Jonathan Rochkind on the cod4lib mailing list by :

I am, however, worried that I can’t do what I want to do without breaking 500 querries a day, and my institution is not going to be willing to pay for it. So I’m interested in exploring other opportunities.

No doubt OCLC wrestled with this one as they put their pricing policy together as this is fairly virgin ground.  Pricing a whole application such as a Library System is fairly well understood.  Pricing a service to add a bit of value has only really been attempted with book jacket services, and even then it is often rolled in to a subscription to a Library System vendor.

This problem of ‘worth’ for a web service is not just one for OCLC, any commercial supplier of web services will have to get this equation right.  Come to that, this is an issue for so called ‘free’ open source alternatives - if the effort required to create and maintain such a service is greater that the perceived value gained by the libraries funding the staff doing the work, it probably won’t get off the ground.

Another aspect that is not immediately obvious when you first look at the licensing and pricing of web services is defining who is the consumer of the service. 

In the pre web service world it would be the consuming library, and you could probably nail its use down to the individual ip address of the library system server.  In the Web 2.0 world of Ajax clients, browser plug-ins and the like it is quite possible that the system doing the consuming is the PC that the user’s web browser is running on.

This is not only a problem for licence calculation but a problem of understanding for vendor legal departments.  As OCLC’s Eric Hellman acknowledges in his response to Godmar Back’s statement about his LibX plug-in “LibX is a client-side tool. We’re not a user of xISBN, we provide clients who have installed it the option to use xISBN.”:

I know, and I had to explain that to the legal department!

If a library embeds Ajax calls in its user interface which cause the user’s browser to call the xISBN web service directly, will those browsers be considered as low volume non-commercial users of the service and hence probably be within the limits of the free service; or will the library who’s interface is causing the calls to happen, even if indirectly, be responsible? - an interesting question for the legal guys!

OCLC are dipping their toe in the water on behalf of many of us who will be watching this service closely.

(Photo taken by material boy displayed in Flickr)

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Technorati Tags: Talis, Library, xISBN, Licensing, Web Services, NGC4LIB, OCLC, LibX

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