Re: open access textbooks? Yes, there are!

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

That's terrific! My only question is: how do you cover your 
overhead costs, which are usually about 70% of the expense of 
publishing a book?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> Dear All,
>
> several small-scale european university from the third wave 
> (founded with or after the event of the internet, with a strong 
> focus on electronic publishing and Open Access) publish text 
> books and put them online free of charge and without cash-flow 
> revenue for authors. One of our authors who wrote on the economy 
> of information receives from time to time free copies because we 
> do sell his book fairly well despite the free online version. 
> Other authors sell printed copies to their students to cover the 
> print-run cost, the university press serves the "long-tail" 
> orders from bookshop via print-on-demand without costs/revenues 
> for authors/editors.
>
> For us in the Goettingen University Press we observe as 
> followed: authors who know for whom they write their textbooks 
> (namely for their own students) are more likely to share them 
> Open Access as they see it as a fundamental part of their 
> teaching activity.
>
> Best
> Margo Bargheer
> Raum 2.21, Neubau der SUB Goettingen
> tel. +49 551 39-91188 | fax  +49 551 39-2457
> bargheer@sub.uni-goettingen.de