The business model you state does make it more challenging to purchase yoru books than other books. These challenges often come at a cost to us. Often our acquisition department will send these orders to a specialty vendor who then charges us for the service.

Also, when I have placed orders, my acquisitions department says they are out of print and won't buy them. I know for a fact that I am missing a volume. I had placed an order when it came out and it was cancelled.

While I appreciate trying to keep the costs down, it does impede our purchasing of the books. I would not mind paying a bit more to make the purchase easier. I'm not sure my business office would do all the calling etc for a single book.

From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Nat Case <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 1, 2022 5:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Query from the Atlas of Design

This is an open question from the editorial team at the Atlas of Design (http://atlasofdesign.org). We love to sell our volume to libraries, and we do, but maybe not as many as we'd like. What would make it simpler for librarians to buy it? A couple possibilities have come up:

We do not sell through wholesalers, only direct (keeps price down), so we've never had an ISBN. Does this make sales to libraries more difficult? For that matter, does buying directly from us (an unregistered vendor) make this harder?
Our web portal does not easily handle tax-exempt web sales, so we have a kluge-y workaround where a library sends us the tax-exemption forms, and we phone them back and the give us a credit card over the phone while we type in the info on our phone on our sales portal's phone app as if it's an in-person sale, then go into the desktop version and enter the shipping address. This lets us elide over automatic sales tax calculations.

Any suggestions you have are welcome.

-- 
Nat Case
INCase, LLC
Minneapolis, MN USA
612-702-1333