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

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

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

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Richard Poynder
<richard.poynder@gmail.com> wrote:

> *Q:* Does NUP plan to make any of its books OA?*
>
> *A:* I see a lot of advantages to the selective use of OA in 
> both monographs and journals. However, the question you 
> immediately face is how you get over the hump. For a small 
> press, your backlist is your ongoing bread and butter. So you 
> aim to have at least one big seller on your backlist, probably 
> a textbook. NUP has a couple of big selling textbooks in the 
> field of improvisation and the teaching of drama in classes, 
> for example. These have become staple texts in theater and 
> performance programs.
>
> The problem is that if your backlist is quite profitable and 
> you make it OA, which some people advocate, how do you make up 
> the lost revenue? Or do you just slash your staff?
>
> The truth is that you can't produce books from nothing, even if 
> you are printing them electronically. You still have design, 
> marketing, programming, editorial work, copy editing, and so 
> on. So OA raises a difficult problem for university presses.
>
> *Q:* The model that many advocate for OA books is making the 
> text freely available online but sell the print version, so 
> that etext will drive print sales. Do you see it as a viable 
> model for NUP?*
>
> *A:* Absolutely, I see that as a very logical model, and I 
> would envisage us moving to that model before we move to a 
> totally OA environment. By the way, we are currently in the 
> process of moving one of our journals to OA, which we are very 
> excited about TriQuarterly.
>
> http://www.infotoday.com/it/jun10/Poynder.shtml
> --
> Richard Poynder
> www.richardpoynder.com