Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Open access experiment

Here's an interesting promotional experiment. My friends at Exact Editions have worked with the US reference book company, Berkshire Publishing to make available their huge Encyclopedia of World History free online for a limited period of time. This has happened before with journals - and Nature uses the technique quite frequently but I'm not sure I've heard of its being used for books in any significant way. It will be interesting to see whether this helps or hinders sales. It's even got a mention in Open Access News although the first comment about monographs selling better when made available free permanently seems a bit off the wall to me.

Last week I mentioned the death of Trevor Glover. There have been some excellent obituaries in Publishing News and in The Times.

Glover

Got back late from Germany (again) last night. The plane was meant to leave Stuttgart at 7.00pm and arrive in London at 7.50pm. It left at 9.00pm and arrived at 10.00pm. Home by 11.00pm. The crew couldn't understand that the passengers were more interested in getting home for the evening than in the fact that we were terribly lucky to be flying a brand new Airbus. 'It still had the plastic wrapping on the seats' they told us excitedly. That was British Airways. This morning I'll be testing the other great British transport success, South-West Trains to Basingstoke. Will it be on time? Will it be a brand new train? Can't wait to find out.

 

#    |  Comments [3]  | 
9/25/2007 8:59:29 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
An early example of a free on-line book is Embarrassing Problems(1998)/The Must-Have Health Guide (2005). The text has been free on-line since we launched http://www.embarrassingproblems.com in April 2000. We have sold 30,000 copies of the two editions of the book and the site will make a modest profit this year - for the first time!
Sarah Redston
9/25/2007 6:46:41 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Hi Richard: The National Academies Press has been publishing dual (OA and non-OA) editions of its 3,600+ monographs since March 1994, and has found that the OA editions help sell the priced/printed editions. NAP director Michael Jensen described the practice and its results in the Chronicle of Higher Education for September 2001 [ http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v48/i03/03b02401.htm ] and July 2005 [ http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i44/44b01601.htm ], and in the Spring 2007 Journal of Electronic Publishing [ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0010.206 ].

Peter
Peter Suber
9/26/2007 9:11:54 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Peter, The problem with your logic from a publishing point of view is that you are giving electronic information away for free and you charge for print. Electonic is the future, print will decline. So your future is revenue free. Not a great strategic position.
Richard Charkin