University Presses Stepping Up e-Book Efforts

(By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2009)

In separate announcements, a coalition of four university presses have received a planning grant to study the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book program, and the University of Chicago Press announced a multi-faceted program to make 700 e-books available immediately.

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners. (A spokesperson for Temple Univ. press noted that TUP plans to immediately release 50 new e-books that are not a part of this announcement or coalition study.)

The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

Steve Maikowski, director of the NYU Press, is co-principal investigator on the grant along with Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press. “This is a very ambitious planning grant and we are thankful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting the research,” Maikowski said.

For its part, the University of Chicago Press is well under way with its e-book program, announcing plans to partner with BiblioVault, a Chicago digital book repository, to immediately make 700 academic titles available in e-book form. The e-titles are available through the University of Chicago Press website and can be downloaded to a variety of laptops, desktops and mobile devices and read using Digital Editions, a free software reader available from Adobe.

Patti O’Shea, executive director of information systems at the Univ. of Chicago Press, said the press also plans to release more backlist e-book titles as well as begin simultaneous print and digital releases of its books. O’Shea said the press is offering a variety of purchase/rental options including “perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership at about 50% off or 30-day owernship for $5.” O’Shea said the rental options were aimed at students and noted that using Digital Editions allows the e-books, “to be used on up to six unique devices registered to a single users. Readers can seamlessly transfer their e-books between different computers and e-book devices.”

Dean Bobaum, e-commerce and marketing manager at the press, said the press will continue to distribute e-books through vendors like Amazon and suppliers such as NetLibrary. However, Garrett Kiely, director of the Univ. of Chicago Press, said that seeing “big players like Sony and Google in the e-book game, “has lit a fire under academic presses,” to get into the e-book business.