The document supply industry: supply and demand

Mei-yu Wang

Introduction
The document supply industry continues to undergo considerable change due to rapid alterations in global markets, education and research environments and advances in information technology. An industry is a group of firms or institutions that ``offers a product or class of products that are close substitutes for each other'' (Kotler, 1994). The document supply industry comprises not only profit-seeking firms, such as commercial publishers, subscription agents, and information brokers, but also non-profit-seeking institutions, such as libraries and academic institutions. ``Documents'', the product of the industry, have several characteristics. First, unlike electricity, oil, water, etc., documents are not a necessity. Second, documents are deemed to satisfy psychological needs, such as membership of groups of communities, ambition, and relief from anxiety. Based on Maslow's theory, the need for documents is motivated by the pursuit of safety, esteem, or self-actualization. Third, documents are perceived as being important to any society, because a society's capacity to absorb and use information determines the level of its competitive development. Fourth, timeliness determines the value of a document. A user may be willing to pay a high fee for the right document delivered at the right time. After that specific time range, even if the document becomes free of charge, the user does not want it any more. Fifth, the production process of original paper-based items includes editing, printing, binding, etc., and the cost will keep increasing due to the requirement of labour, materials (such as paper and ink), machines and equipment. However, the reproduction of an original item is not expensive. Since most of the documents requested are journal articles, reports, part of a book, etc., they can be photocopied or scanned from the original items and then delivered to customers. All these may have some effects on supply and demand. Many papers and reports have discussed the issues with respect to performance, technical and copyright problems, customers' behaviour, and documents requested, but there have been few clear analyses of supply and demand and their implications for both profit-seeking and non-profit-seeking decision-makers.

The author Mei-yu Wang is Assistant Professor, Department of Library and Information Science, Hsuan Chang University, Taiwan. Keywords Document supply, Supply and demand, Suppliers Abstract This paper describes the characteristics of the document supply industry and its products, and the factors underlying supply and demand. In order to cope with possible supply and demand shifts, appropriate adjustments that profit-seeking suppliers and non-profitseeking suppliers may adopt are also discussed. Electronic access The research register for this journal is available at http://www.mcbup.com/research_registers The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com/ft

Library Review Volume 50 . Number 3 . 2001 . pp. 128131 # MCB University Press . ISSN 0024-2535

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The document supply industry: supply and demand

Mei-yu Wang

Library Review Volume 50 . Number 3 . 2001 . 128131

To present a thumbnail sketch, this paper will report the factors underlying supply and demand, and then discuss future trends.

switch to electronic publishing and electronic document delivery if they have a reason to expect changes in future prices. Change in technology Advances in information technology have made it easy to produce digital documents and transmit them electronically, resulting in higher productivity, which usually decreases the cost of a given level of output, or increasing the level of output for a given cost. Thus information technology has the effect of increasing the supply of documents. Change in number of producers Advances in computer and telecommunication technologies and the emergence of networks means that anyone can be document producers, so there is an increase in the number of producers and this causes the supply curve of documents to increase. Demand shifters There are also five generic factors that can have an effect on the demand of any product (Peterson, 1986). Change in money incomes Although an increase in money incomes of customers results in an increase in the demand for many products, including documents, it will not cause a steep increasing demand curve due to the concern of timeliness and usefulness. Change in prices of alternative products Since the prices of paper-based journals, monographs, etc. have spiralled up, many buyers, such as libraries, have switched from holdings to access by depending on remote document supply to fill gaps in their own collections. Change in users' expectations regarding future prices and incomes Anticipated changes in future document prices and personal incomes will affect present demand to some degree. However, since users want documents at the right time, the possible change in user incomes and document prices will not cause critical influence on the demand for documents. Changes in tastes and preferences Although some publishers expect printed journals to remain their primary product and some library collections will continue to be largely paper-based, customers will demand

Factors underlying supply and demand

Price and quantity It is well-known that, if price is not at equilibrium, there will be surplus and shortage, which will push price and quantity toward the equilibrium. Only at equilibrium price and quantity will buyers take off the market exactly what sellers place on the market. Supply shifts and demand shifts can result in changes in price and quantity. For example, when supply is increased, the equilibrium price decreases but the quantity increases. When demand is increased, both the equilibrium price and quantity increase (Peterson, 1986). Supply shifters There are five generic factors that can cause effects on the supply of any product (Peterson, 1986), and this section will discuss how these factors affect the supply of documents. Change in the prices of alternative products The supply of documents is closely related to the prices of publications, and many publishers have also engaged in the business of document supply. If the prices of publications keep increasing, more of them will switch to supply individual articles, causing an increase in the supply of documents. Changes in prices of inputs The increase of implicit and explicit marginal cost has the effect of decreasing supply. Conversely, a decrease in input prices will increase supply. Although the production cost of paper-based documents has increased, the ubiquitous Internet and PCs enable anyone to generate an electronic document, to reproduce a surrogate, and to disseminate it at a relatively low cost. Therefore, the supply of documents is expected to grow quickly and unsustainably. Change in producer expectations of future prices Since timeliness is of vital importance, an expectation of higher future prices would not lead to any big change in the present and future supply. However, more producers and suppliers of paper-based documents will

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much faster document delivery services from them. Thus, those document suppliers who produce digital documents or scan paperbased documents and then transmit them over high-speed, high-capacity networks become more and more appealing. Change in population The greater the number of individuals in the market, the greater will be the market demand. Measuring the Performance of Document Supply Systems strongly suggested that the demand for document supply depends on the size of the literate and R&D population (Unesco, 1987). Thus, in those areas where education levels and R&D expenditure are increasing, the demand for documents will also increase.

it was discovered that buyers usually do not comprehend thoroughly the differentials between the services' fees, and tend to favour a known service (Wang, 2000).

Therefore, a change in these factors may not precipitate an immediate response. On the other hand, due to the advances of technology and the emergence of various networks, the overall supply is probably outpacing the overall demand by a growing margin. The bad news is that the growing supply is expected to be a boom of inferior documents, so the prices of general documents will decline and the prices of valuable documents, which are produced or supplied by a few players, will probably rise.

Current status
It seems that the supply of and demand for documents, especially electronic documents, are increasing. As illustrated in Figure 1, an increase in both demand and supply causes quantity to increase, and uncertainties in price. If demand increased more than supply increased, the price would rise, whereas price would decline if supply increased more than demand (Peterson, 1986). Although it is hard to discover the degree of supply shifts and demand shifts, the demand for documents is not very sensitive to the above five factors for the following reasons: . documents are not a necessity and their timeliness plays a critical role in their value; . obtaining documents does not always generate very visible costs for end-users, because some institutions have chosen to bear or subsidise these costs;

Future trends
Having a business-oriented approach, profitseeking players not only cope with but also create demand. With the increased demand driving the market, profit-seeking players will likely design a service geared to the needs of the market and effective competitive strategy in order to attract more customers to obtain needed documents from their services. To create more demand, they will utilise new technology and adjust their marketing mix to generate new products and new services, which can induce customers to buy more documents. By contrast, non-profit-seeking players' concerns in document delivery services flow between passively satisfying users' information needs and sustaining their vital role as information providers. Facing the trend that many profit-seeking players are

Figure 1 The effects of demand increase and supply increase

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The document supply industry: supply and demand

Mei-yu Wang

Library Review Volume 50 . Number 3 . 2001 . 128131

fostering their performance and efficiency, if non-profit-seeking players fail to cope with the growing demand, users will definitely resort to the commercial players. However, if most useful and valuable documents are controlled and supplied by profit-seeking firms, pricing will be re-arranged commensurately. Under this condition, individual users will probably need to pay substantial fees for documents even when use conforms to ``fair use''. Thus, a key challenge for non-profit-seeking suppliers will be to decide whether their objective should be addressed in tandem with the commitment of providing their authorised users with needed

documents efficiently and effectively, in order to satisfy society's need for reasonable exchange of ideas and information.

References
Kotler, P. (1994), Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, Implementation, and Control, PrenticeHall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Peterson, W.L. (1986), Principles of Economics, MICRO, Homewood, IL. Unesco (1987), Measuring the Performance of Document Supply Systems, Unesco, Paris. Wang, M-Y. (2000), International Document Supply in Taiwan, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

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