Re: ACLS Humanities e-books

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Just by way of clarification, I know that the ACLS Humanities 
Book project has found a way to sustain itself, but the original 
vision was to make the publication of the new type of monograph 
that Darnton envisioned the primary driver and selling point for 
the whole database. This was to be the place that senior 
historians published their multi-dimensional documents, just as 
Gutenberg-e was meant to be for junior scholars. Instead, what 
happened is that the numbers of new documents, as with 
Gutenberg-e, proved insufficient to attract many licenses, and it 
was only with the addition of a large amount of digitized older 
titles that the package won enough subscriptions to make the 
whole enterprise sustainable.  The bottom line, for both 
projects, as predicted by the advisory committee, was that the 
creation of the new documents themselves could not make these 
projects work in the long term. Now, of course, the ACLS project 
wants to increase its salability further by becoming a platform 
for a large number of new monographs from multiple university 
presses and societies; but these are NOT the types of books that 
Darnton had in mind in starting the project in the first place. 
The challenge remains very real about how to make the publication 
of books that truly take full advantage of the technological 
possibilities economically feasible.

Sandy Thatcher


>Sandy Thatcher instances e-Gutenberg and the ACLS Humanities 
>e-books project as examples of "reckless enthusiasm" that live 
>on in "attenuated form".  Others should speak to e-Gutenberg, 
>which I believe has completed its run but keeps its books 
>available, but the ACLS project is alive and well 
>(http://www.humanitiesebook.org/) and sustaining itself and well 
>spoken of by scholars in a variety of humanities fields.
>
>Jim O'Donnell
>Georgetown University