From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 22:08:19 -0600

I think there is another way to look at why open access is important,
aside from any effect it has on print sales.  Tony, when he was sales
and marketing manager at Penn State Press, shared my philosophy that
the primary mission of university presses is--in the famous words of
Daniel Coit Gilman--"to disseminate knowledge far and wide."  That is
the reason presses long ago started publishing scholarly books
simultaneously in cloth and paperback (until too many libraries
started buying the paperback editions) and why some presses started
experimenting with open access. Because of the constraint that Tony
mentioned--the requirement that presses be largely self-supporting
through sales--efforts to multiply the number of copies distributed
had practical limits.  But quite consciously US presses operated
differently from many European academic publishers, whose goal was to
maximize revenues from sales of hardbacks to libraries at steep
prices, without much regard to whether the works were ever made
available in cheaper formats.

The National Academies Press found from its early experiments with
open access in the mid-1990s that it could make its books available
for free online while still preserving a market for print copies. Its
model depended on technological restrictions that impeded downloading
(by requiring each page to be printed one at a time and by having the
print come out at a very low dpi so that it looked like bad newsprint)
and encouraged sales of high quality print editions. At Penn State we
adopted the general model for our Romance Studies series, but tweaked
the technology, so that all chapters could be read online and half of
the chapters  downloaded and printed out as PDFs, while the remaining
chapters could not be downloaded at all. This approach also helped
keep sales of a print edition at a reasonable level.  But the point
served by both models was that, instead of having these works
available just in a few hundred libraries, mostly located in the US,
anyone in the world with an Internet connection would have access to
the entire texts online, so that students and scholars in faraway
lands could also benefit from the knowledge these works conveyed.
Scholars benefited by having many more of their peers worldwide be
able to make use of their works, while students could access chapters
assigned for class online and not have to pay anything for this use.
Meanwhile, the availability of a print edition could satisfy the needs
of scholars whose P&T committees wanted to see the books in print
form, and enough copies could be sold to sustain the program. The idea
was NOT to maximize sales and revenues, but to generate sufficient
revenues to sustain the OA model and thereby maximize the distribution
and use of the works. That is the different between a non-profit
university press and a commercial academic publisher: the former wants
to maximize use, whether sales are generated or not; the latter wants
to maximize profit, even sometimes at the expense of use.

Sandy Thatcher

P.S. The piece about books appearing in college syllabi is indeed
interesting. I am conducting a very small-scale survey of what
students who are applying to Princeton read in their spare time. A
standard question I ask is what, outside of assigned reading for
school, they like to read for pleasure on their own.  I have been
doing this for several years now, with well over 100 students
interviewed so far. There are some interesting patterns emerging. I
will eventually compile a report, but I can tell you that in recent
years one of the authors whose works have proved to be most popular
among these high school seniors is Malcolm Gladwell, whose book
"Outliers" is often mentioned. Also cited frequently is Richard
Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman." Very, very seldom do I
hear any student cite a book published by a university press (although
after the interview I often have occasion to refer them to university
press books in the areas in which they have shown interest).



> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 24 Jan 2016 20:18:17 -0500
>
> The idea of using a free online version of a book in order to drive
> print sales is short-sighted. As ebooks get better (they already are
> much better than in 2007 when the Kindle launched) the line between
> the digital version and the print version erodes. What then? Do we
> deliberately make the digital version as bad as we can to keep the
> print business going?
>
> Personally, I read both print and digital books. This is not a
> religious issue for me.
>
> Open access is not the answer. See above. Also consider this: Why must
> the entire book be OA if the point is to drive sales for print? Why
> not experiment? Begin by making every page but one available online.
> Then drop two pages, then three. At some point you will have
> determined what is the optimal number of pages to be OA to drive
> sales.
>
> As for undergraduates and the use of books, our intrepid moderator
> published a piece some years ago entitled "BYTES: Books You Teach Each
> Semester." You can find it here:
>
> https://www.cni.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BYTES-AOkerson2001Stf.pdf
>
> University press publishing is a very big piece of the undergraduate curriculum.
>
> Finally, I hope everyone on this list has had the opportunity to read
> the piece in the NY Times yesterday on college syllabi by Karaganis
> and McClure:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/what-a-million-syllabuses-can-teach-us.html
>
> I have been probing this database all day--it beats shoveling snow.
> Some of the books that appear over and over at campus after campus
> will surprise you.
>
> Joe Esposito