Credo Reference Blog

Credo is a publisher-neutral provider of reference content and services to libraries of all types worldwide. While we may serve other markets in the future, libraries are the foundation of our business. Businesses in our industry often seek advantages by obtaining exclusive rights to the distribution of certain content to various library markets.

The advantages are obvious. If you have exclusive distribution rights to content then you can charge whatever you want. You have no competitive pressures or market forces that would set the price at its real value to customers. The exclusivity question is not specific to ‘for-profit’ or ‘non-profit’ library vendors. Some of the most prominent ‘non-profits’ in the world of reference publishing are some of the leading examples of businesses that employ exclusivity to their business advantage.

So why would Credo Reference make the conscious choice to eschew exclusivity in any of our content provider relationships? We are unabashedly a ‘for-profit’ company. But we are also a ‘for libraries’ company. And a ‘for employees’ company. And a ‘for learners’ company.

Our board of directors has always been very clear that building a really great company is analogous to creating a thriving ecology. An ecology is healthy if all constituents experience themselves as well-served by their participation. So if we were to seek and then depend on exclusive relationships to obtain important content, we would be creating a significant imbalance between what we’d charge for that content and its real value to customers.

Credo would rather obtain content on a non-exclusive basis. A non-exclusive relationship is basically a statement that we expect the content provider will have other approaches in their markets – and that may include library markets. We seek to provide excellent returns for our publishers—but if they can get better returns by including others in their distribution plans why shouldn’t they? By not obtaining exclusive agreements, Credo  indicates to our library customers that we’re not paying huge extra prices for the content we provide them and therefore can provide both content and functionality at a much better value.

This idea of a company being an ecology in which each constituent is served in a balanced way is not unique in the business world. But it does give us unique guidance on how we approach things like exclusivity in content relationships. We’ve also found that it resonates well with many experts in reference librarianship. We’ve heard from many reference experts about how libraries should be able to get the reference titles they need on the platform of their choice. Exclusivity agreements for content would be a direct contradiction of this vision.

The centerpiece of our company’s innovation is the platform on which we deliver reference content. We are sufficiently confident that we have done and will continue to do an excellent job on our interface that we don’t need to shore it up artificially with exclusivity arrangements. Ironically, by not seeking exclusive content relationships we may end up with publishers preferring to have their content on Credo. We’ll be glad for that vote of confidence, but it won’t be something that we seek to artificially prop up with exclusive content agreements.

John Dove