PhysMath Central Blog
Open Access books from Bloomsbury
An interesting experiment has arisen from Bloomsbury - the people behind the Harry Potter books. They are about to launch a venture offering full-text of research monographs online for free. This company, Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, has adopted some of the facets of open acccess journal publishing and applied them to the peculiarities of academic book publishing.
Authors of a weighty tome on some esoteric area of science are often horrified to find out that - due to sales figures and print runs likely to be in the low hundreds - costs need to be recouped by charging very high prices for their work. In a field such as mathematics, this can often be around $150 for a 300 page book. Unfortunately this prices it out of the reach of students and postgrads, and increasingly even libraries are questioning the value of the more highly-priced books.
However, Bloomsbury have decided to offer the full-text of these books online for free - and with no author charges payable either. They hope to make their money from print-on-demand versions available for libraries.
It is early days yet, and the website is still short on a few details - like how much the print-on-demand books will cost (costs still need to be recouped - but there are no upfront print costs at least), and it is notable that they are - for now at least - concentrating on easily marked-up text heavy subjects (humanities and social sciences, no mathematics or physics), but should it succeed it will open up the way for many more books to be published which are simply not economical to proceed with at the moment. What surprises hide in the long tail? We'll just have to wait and see. At least, due to their open access nature, we will be able to find them easily as they will all be indexable by Google and other search engines too.
Posted by Chris Leonard at 11:58 Comments (0)
