Indeed, perhaps this approach could even drive sales of e-books, e.g., the full book in an easy-to-view PDF.

I have to point out that down here in Argentina, I’m more than glad to buy an academic e-book since the print version likely will never make it through the international mail or may take months.

It’s worth going and taking a look at the Pittsburgh digital library site. It’s hardly a threat to immersive reading, with an interface only a librarian would love. Looks to me like it’s optimal only for browsing, sampling, tasting.

It took a lot of work to get to the books themselves; I had to browse hard before finally getting to a book — and note that the Contents are “below the fold,” nearly invisible. The presentation is page scans, not XML or HTML, so it won’t work well with handheld readers.

The URLs are hideous, navigation tremendously clumsy — it’s an advertisement for the “non-optimal interface” that I’ve written about elsewhere, that promotes the “real” interface that the work was written for — the book.

Overall I’m more heartened by this project than see it as the beginning of the end. Latin American Studies monographs — heck, even most scholarly monographs — don’t sell well enough to justify or allow significant marketing and promotion efforts. A few hundred to 800 copies is about all the market seems to bear these days. The best promotion of the book is the book itself.

I’m also heartened to see strong university/library/press relations — academic publishing is undergoing huge transformations, and having skilled publishers on staff, striving to make public the fruits of scholarship, is exactly the mission most presses were founded to manifest. University presses need more support-in-kind from their institutions.

For university presses, this model, tiptoe-y as it is, makes sense to me. For other publishers, the Google Book Search approach may be better. But regardless, getting their books visible, link-to-able, and socially promotable, seems to me the only way small-market publications can find their audiences — which will be much larger than they could ever get with print only.

If the AAUP newsletter did change, it would appear to be a correction on the AAUP’s part, rather than a reconsideration on Pittsburgh’s. The U-Pittsburgh Press’ own press release (which is easily found on their site) says “Ultimately, *most* of the Press’ titles over two years old will be provided through this open access
platform.” (Emphasis added.) I can find contemporary quotes from this in various blogs, so it’s doubtful that this was changed after the fact.

As we in libraries often recommend, going to the original source, rather than relying on secondhand sources, can often save you a lot of time and trouble.

I have a standing challenge to consumer publishers to be told of just ONE book where excessive availability of free text online could be shown to have injured book sales. In a world where — even WITH the Kindle — we can’t persuade people to consume the product on screens, it would seem you’d win much more through discovery than you’d lose in cannibalization. Nobody’s shown me that book yet. Clearly, Michael Jensen would know of some examples from his world that would meet my challenge.