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