Re: Interview w/Sarah Pritchard, Univ. librarian, Northwestern U.

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

There is a difference between books going digital and books going 
OA, of course, as Joe well knows. A number of university presses 
are now engaged in several joint efforts to launch e-book 
ventures based on the subscription model, and individual presses 
like Duke and Oxford have already gone ahead on their own. These 
may or may not turn out to be successful over the long term, but 
they will not succeed in providing much greater distribution for 
e-books than print monographs already have; there will still be a 
handful of "haves" and a multitude of "have-nots," and developing 
countries will continue to get the short end of the stick--unless 
publishers choose to give them a break, as some of the larger STM 
journal publishers have.

OA with books, however, can only succeed, in the short term at 
least, if enough revenue can be generated from sales of POD 
versions to cover the basic costs. If that model fails, there 
will be no OA for books--until universities decide to come up 
with the subsidies to support full OA as they now support OA for 
journals. But that appears to be a distant point in the future, 
if it happens at all. I have yet to see ANY provost or president 
advocate in a public forum that universities should fund OA for 
monographs the way some of them are now supporting OA for 
journals.

(I should add "in the U.S." as the president of the University of 
Athabasca in Canada whose press is an OA book publisher is one 
administrator of a university outside the U.S. who has made such 
a commitment.)  And there is no FRPPA legislation being proposed 
for books.  This means, of course, that implicitly administrators 
are accepting the reality of a growing digital divide between 
book and journal content in the electronic environment, as more 
journal content goes OA and almost all book content (with a very 
few exceptions) remains confined to the print environment, or 
locked up in subscription-based models.

Sandy Thatcher


At 8:05 PM -0400 6/4/10, Joseph Esposito wrote:

>Make the text free online and sell the print version?  How long 
>will that tactic last?  Is no one in the OA world paying 
>attention to what is happening with the Amazon Kindle, the Apple 
>iPad, and even the Barnes & Noble Nook?  And the gorilla has not 
>yet entered the market: Google Editions, due probably in July. 
>Book professionals are now forecasting that in five years, 25% 
>of the book market will be electronic. How can anyone expect to 
>sell print under these circumstances?  Is the academy the only 
>segment of the society that does NOT believe that books are 
>going digital?
>
>Please, test this for yourself. Buy an iPad, put 3-4 books on it,
>and then tell me what this will do to your future consumption of
>print.
>
>Whatever the virtues of OA, financing it through anticipated
>print sales is not a long-term strategy.
>
>Joe Esposito