Re: In praise of reckless enthusiasm

["James D. Jordan" <jj2143@columbia.edu>]

One hesitates to cast a pall over the "semi success" of 
Gutenberg-e which involved the efforts of many talented people, 
and produced interesting results.  I for one wish it had begun 
with a business plan as intelligent and scalable as the one that 
drove Muse which has succeeded beyond the expectations of the 
original parties concerned.  Our good colleagues in the Columbia 
Libraries bore the larger share of its cost overruns.

Sandy may overestimate the capital capabilities of "the larger 
presses."  Yes, reckless enthusiasm with the capital to support 
it (but I think that's wreckless enthusiasm).

On Jan 14, 2010, at 8:34 PM, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> I think good examples of "reckless enthusiasm" were the ACLS
> History (now Humanities) E-Book and Gutenberg-e projects that
> sprang from the fertile imagination of Robert Darnton, famous
> book historian, former Princeton history professor, and now
> Harvard librarian. While some of us on the advisory committee for
> these projects (like me and Ann Okerson) advised Bob that they
> likely would prove to be unsustainable economically beyond the
> term of the Mellon Foundation grants that gave birth to them, I
> think we are all glad they happened anyway because we have
> learned a great deal from them in their semi-failure. (I say
> "semi" because they both live on in attenuated form.)
>
> I would add that, for university press publishing in particular,
> where capital is in very short supply for experimentation, it
> behooves most presses not to be the pioneers but to let the
> larger presses that can afford to do so, backed by foundation
> grants if need be, forge ahead with "reckless enthusiasm" and try
> out new things, which the smaller presses can then adopt, or not,
> once the concept has been proven and the bugs worked out.  Among
> such projects in the past couple of decades I would place in this
> category are the National Academies Press experiment with "open
> access" monograph publishing (which Michigan and Penn State are
> applying to humanities publishing), Project Muse at Johns
> Hopkins, and Chicago's launch of the BiblioVault (the last two
> also supported by Mellon).
>
> So I'm all for "reckless enthusiasm" just so long as you have the
> capital needed to take risks and still survive if you fail!
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press
>
>