For Librarians

As an integral part of a research library itself, University of Michigan Press endeavors to advance the values of the library community and adhere to best practices in how we create, sell, and present our titles. In short, we aim to make our books available as broadly as possible on library-friendly terms while still meeting our parent university’s mandate to be largely self-sustaining financially.

Print books from University of Michigan Press (UMP) are available through a wide-range of library wholesalers and retailers or directly from the press’s distributors. Libraries interested in providing access to ebook editions of UMP titles are encouraged to purchase the UMP Ebook Collection (UMP EBC), more information about which can be found below.

University of Michigan Press Ebook Collection (UMP EBC)

Coming soon, the UMP Ebook Collection (UMP EBC) is a comprehensive collection of the University of Michigan Press’s scholarly ebooks for sale to libraries. The ebooks are hosted on the next generation Fulcrum platform, developed by Michigan Publishing with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support emerging forms of digital scholarship as well as simple ebooks. UMP EBC is being exclusively made available to libraries via LYRASIS. The collection includes at least 80 new books every year as well as a growing backlist, starting with at least 1,000 titles on launch.

UMP EBC is attractive to libraries because of three unique selling points:

  1. Comprehensive: It presents complete coverage of all academic titles published by the Press for any new copyright year. It only excludes titles for which the Press has been unable to negotiate ebook rights and the products of the Press’s English Language Teaching division. This comprehensiveness means that libraries won’t have to “hunt and peck” for UMP books currently spread around third-party platforms in different formats in order to acquire a complete collection.

  2. Library-friendly: It adheres to the Charlotte Initiative principles that require ebook collections to provide: irrevocable perpetual access and archival rights; allowance for unlimited simultaneous users; and freedom from any Digital Rights Management (DRM) including (but not limited to) use of proprietary formats, restricted access to content, or time-limited access terms.

  3. Enriched user experience: It offers the best possible version of UMP titles, which will increasingly take advantage of the digital enhancements that Fulcrum supports such as zoomable online images or embedded audio and video.

For further information about the UMP Ebook Collection please contact the LYRASIS Outreach Team.

Other options for Libraries to buy UMP Ebooks

We recognize that in the current funding environment not all libraries will be able to acquire the full collection of UMP ebooks and need some flexible options to acquire smaller collections or individual ebook titles.

UMP makes our “short discount” specialist ebooks available in JSTOR and Project Muse collections on terms that adhere to the Charlotte Initiative principles.

UMP also makes ebooks available for purchase on EBSCO, ProQuest, and OverDrive. However, we require varying level of digital rights management on these platforms that include “one simultaneous user” terms for books that we consider to have classroom or trade potential.

UMP EBC is the best option for libraries that wish to acquire the complete academic output of UMP on the most library- and user-friendly terms.

UMP publishes an increasing number of Open Access books which we aim to make as widely-available as possible through retailers and platforms including JSTOR, Project Muse, OAPEN, HathiTrust, and the UMP EBC. For all the platforms we partner with we work to make sure that libraries are not charged for books that are open access. Further information can be found on our Open Access page.