In the Internet Archive Lawsuit, a Win for Publishers May Come at a Cost for Readers Everywhere | The Walrus

“Ostensibly, publishers and libraries ought to be on the same side: libraries aim to advance learning by providing free and open access to information; publishing literally means to disseminate to the public. Big publishers suing a digital library for furthering this common mission—during an unprecedented assault on libraries’ purpose and function—is a weird look. It’s also unclear what it actually does for writers. Most authors—some estimates say up to 70 percent—don’t earn royalties beyond their book advances and will never have the luxury of worrying about income from the sale of their works in digital formats. The funds under dispute, by and large, go straight back to the publishers.

This situation leaves writers awkwardly caught in the middle. Supporting libraries isn’t just an abstract feel-good principle: it can also have a material effect on a book’s fate. Libraries feature titles, offer programming, and choose how many copies to order. At the same time, writing is a financially precarious enterprise. The prospect of a library buying one copy of your book, scanning it, and lending it out ad infinitum is, admittedly, horrifying. But the Internet Archive decision doesn’t just prevent that outcome—it may also affect libraries’ rights to lend single scanned copies of books that they have already purchased….”

Readership boost for monographs after British Academy switches to Open Access | The British Academy

“The British Academy has published its first Open Access monograph as part of efforts to widen the reach of the scholarship it funds….

The British Academy Monographs series has been published since 1998 in partnership with Oxford University Press. It provides an opportunity for Academy-supported early career researchers to produce substantial contributions to scholarship. The Academy has published an Open Access Journal since 2013 but this is the first time it has done so for its monographs….”

Guest Post – Does Open Access Cannibalize Print Sales for Monographs? – The Scholarly Kitchen

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by John Sherer. John is the Spangler Family Director of the University of North Carolina Press. He is the chair of the Association of University Presses Open Access Committee and is the Primary Investigator in the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded, Sustainable History Monograph Pilot.

Within the scholarly book publishing community, it’s not particularly controversial to claim that free digital editions of monographs will erode print sales. After all, who would pay for something they can get for free? These books already sell so few copies, and the economics are so unfavorable, that further revenue erosion could easily shatter an already precarious ecosystem. That said, there’s a growing body of research indicating that readers strongly prefer print formats for these publications (for example see the 2018 Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey and Naomi Baron’s Words on Screen). And there’s anecdotal reporting that in open access (OA) experiments at university presses, print sales have been stable. Can we review sales data for OA titles to find out if the claim of print cannibalization is true?

University of North Carolina Studies in Germanic Languages and Literature – UNC Press

“The Press and its partners, UNC Chapel Hill’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and the UNC Library, are pleased to make available 124 monographs, translations, and critical editions. This is the first time these works will be available as ebooks, which will be accessible in open access PDF and EPUB (with a few exceptions) formats, as well as in new paperback editions. The digital editions will be hosted on the Carolina Digital Repository, Project MUSE, JSTOR, OAPEN, and a number of other open access platforms….”

Small Publisher Embraces Controlled Digital Lending to Connect with New Readers  – Internet Archive Blogs

“I think in the end, [Controlled Digital Lending] drives sales because you are finding readers you wouldn’t normally have. Those readers aren’t getting a copy that they keep forever — it’s a copy that’s going to lead them to want to own it.”

How academic libraries can support humanities monographs

“These differences make the publishing process for monographs distinctly different. They impose greater responsibilities on the author and the press and don’t support some of the cooperative benefit of a large-scale operation that processes thousands of articles.

What I’d like you to consider, though, is that these differences also provide some amazing opportunities for libraries to be leaders and innovators in supporting the value of the humanities and OA monograph publishing….”

Scholarly E-Books and University Presses – Part Two – The Scholarly Kitchen

“What happens to print when digital is available first and for free? Does print get cannibalized by free, open digital. Or does free, open digital lead to more print activity?

LB [Lisa Bayer]: Rather than a complement, which might imply subsidiary, I see e-books and aggregated digital content as equally important to print for scholarly books. For complex and diverse reasons, monographs are much less likely to be purchased in print editions by research libraries, especially given the enhanced accessibility, portability, and discoverability that digitally delivered content affords. When we send our content to aggregators, we join a huge network of scholarly publishers reaching thousands of institutions worldwide: that is mission-critical. At one of the last O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conferences I heard a smart person say, “The page is no longer primary.” For most of our customers, print books are still primary. But university presses operate in a file-based ecosystem, increasingly so with Open Access pilots and platforms such as Manifold, PubPub, Fulcrum, Humanities Open Book, and the Sustainable History Monograph Program….”

Steven James Bartlett, The Case against the Conventional Publication of Academic and Scientific Books – PhilPapers

An essay that weighs the main factors that lead authors of academic and scientific books to consider conventional publication of their work, with realistic and practical recommendations for these authors so they may avoid the contractual “imprisonment” of their books after the period of initial active sales has passed.

Steven James Bartlett, The Case against the Conventional Publication of Academic and Scientific Books – PhilPapers

An essay that weighs the main factors that lead authors of academic and scientific books to consider conventional publication of their work, with realistic and practical recommendations for these authors so they may avoid the contractual “imprisonment” of their books after the period of initial active sales has passed.

North Carolina press seeks sustainable open-access model for monographs

The University of North Carolina Press is leading an experiment to significantly lower the cost of producing scholarly books — an important step toward a sustainable open-access publishing model for monographs.

Many university presses have experimented with open-access monographs, but few have transitioned away from charging fees for most work, as they are unable to do so sustainably, said John Sherer, director of UNC Press….

One ambitious OA monograph initiative, Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), offers university presses subsidies of $15,000 per book. Sherer’s project aims to demonstrate that a subsidy of $7,000 could suffice….”

North Carolina press seeks sustainable open-access model for monographs

The University of North Carolina Press is leading an experiment to significantly lower the cost of producing scholarly books — an important step toward a sustainable open-access publishing model for monographs.

Many university presses have experimented with open-access monographs, but few have transitioned away from charging fees for most work, as they are unable to do so sustainably, said John Sherer, director of UNC Press….

One ambitious OA monograph initiative, Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem (TOME), offers university presses subsidies of $15,000 per book. Sherer’s project aims to demonstrate that a subsidy of $7,000 could suffice….”

Controlled Digital Lending Fact Sheet | Controlled Digital Lending by Libraries

“CDL is the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. A library can digitize a book it owns and lend out a secured digital version to one user at a time, in place of the physical item.

CDL has three core principles:

  1. A library must own a legal copy of the physical book, by purchase or gift.
  2. The library must maintain an “owned to loaned” ratio, simultaneously lending no more copies than it legally owns.
  3. The library must use technical measures to ensure that the digital file cannot be copied or redistributed.

Beyond these core principles, libraries may choose to implement CDL in different ways. …”

Open access books attract many more readers and slightly more citations – Leiden University

“Academics who offer their books free online reach many more readers and are cited slightly more often. Surprisingly enough, it has little effect on the sale of paper editions, positive or negative. …

Remarkably enough, offering books free online has hardly any noticeable effect on the sale of paper versions. ‘The assumption that publishing books via open access will generate a lot of free publicity, which will encourage readers to buy the books, doesn’t seem to hold water.’ But there is also little or no negative effect: an online version seems to have little or no impact on sales. That’s probably because online readers are a different public, Snijder suspects….

Offering a book free online does not automatically lead to optimum use of the work, Snijder stresses. ‘Most people rely on filter mechanisms to sort the wheat from the chaff.’  These could be library catalogues, mentions on social media, specialist websites or blogs by influential authors. ‘The use and success of open access books is mainly determined by language, subject, infrastructure and trust.’ “

michael_nielsen on Twitter: “Open access is often argued about in the abstract. I want to talk about a specific case study where I have detailed data – usage patterns for my (open access) online book/monograph “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” https://t.co/Kwy23b9E11″

“Open access is often argued about in the abstract. I want to talk about a specific case study where I have detailed data – usage patterns for my (open access) online book/monograph “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html …

Would any of this have been possible closed access? Of course some of it would have. I might have made more money. But on nearly every other metric, I suspect being open access was a 100x or more multiplier on the impact….

To sum up: open access makes material freely available to people who would otherwise never even hear about it. This amplifying effect is not small, it is enormous.  And it applies in parts of the world woefully underserved by the existing publication system….

Some additional calibration data: an editor at a major academic press tells me great sales figures for a similar technical textbook in a “hot” field are typically about 5,000-10,000 a year.  So open access has a factor 200x or more here….”

Permafree on Amazon: How and Why to Give Your Book Away, Plus My Results – Side Hustle Nation

“Why go through all the trouble of writing a book, only to give it away?

Answer: To build an audience.

As we’ve seen in case study after case study, doing business online becomes much easier and much more profitable if you have a built-in audience who loves your work.

I made the case that having a “permafree” book on Amazon is the equivalent of guest blogging on steroids. It’s one of the most highly-trafficked sites in the world, which means the potential to get tens of thousands of eyeballs on your book. You’ll never find a bigger “guest posting” opportunity.

And like a good guest post, your free book can lead people back to your site to learn more about you and opt-in for additional useful content….”