Publishing an open access book?

The options are not mutually exclusive, why not sign with a publisher to create the hard copy and also make it freely available on the web?

Have you tried asking the publisher himself about the option of having a free pdf online (mybe saying, e.g, that it’s a fundamental condition for you)?
See the following book: it is well-regarded and it’s published by Cambridge UP:
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/AT/ATpage.html

Short-run printing is almost certainly ecologically worse than printing larger runs – although the equation is complicated by the carbon-cost of delivering the final book from the printers to ‘end user’ vs delivering the paper.

On the other hand, eBooks will become a lot more ecologically friendly. (Right now, the savings in paper are mitigated by the huge industrial complex required to produce even a simple eReader).

In terms of format – the most recent eBook I purchased came in PDF, ePub, and mobi format.

The key difference between PDF and eBook formats, is that a PDF is very much like a printed book – i.e. the page layout is fixed, right down to how each word is hyphenated. A better metaphor would be that a PDF file is like a type-setters plate – it specifies exactly where all the text and images will go, but has no concept about things like paragraphs. The only thing you can really do with a PDF is display it at smaller or larger sizes.

ePub, on the other hand, is more like the manuscript (or HTML) – which makes it a lot easier for devices to layout text in a form that’s appropriate to the size of the screen, allow the user to change the font by preference, read via text-to-voice, etc.

Which makes it sound like the answer is obvious, but the problem with ePub is for any kind of book where design and layout are important.

Most of the questions that come to mind are to do with reputation and profile.
– If you have a high reputation, you do not need the stamp of authority that being published by a reputable publishing house gives you, and publishing open access will let your disciples audience gain access to more pearls of wisdom from your brain with minimal work on your part (no editing cycles!), pushing your reputation to even higher altitudes.
– If you do not have a high reputation, an open access book will be viewed, if it is seen at all, as unvalidated ramblings that get you no credit and stir little interest.
– If you have a high profile, you have a read-made audience of thousands of people you can contact when the book comes out. Who needs a publisher?
– If you have a low profile, your open access book will be swamped by the flood of other material on the Internet.
I’d like to say that the benefit of going with a publisher, in addition to validation, is that a publisher can promote the book in such a way as to reach an audience you could not reach by yourself. But unfortunately it seems that publishers are looking for the same qualities that make an open access book viable (see here).

These considerations are void, of course, if the book is so obviously brilliant as to need no external validation or promotion.

My understanding is that both Yale University Press and the University of Michigan Press (and maybe MIT, too) have been experimenting to various degrees with open-access on-line publishing. I don’t know the details at all, and (literally) 30 seconds of googling just brought mentions of it more than details, but it might be worth contacting these presses. Given your status in the field and in the particular area it might be the sort of high-profile project that one or more of these presses would like to take on to promote this sort of work, if they are in fact doing it.

One thing publishers do that I don’t think any online/ self-published/ open-access option can replicate is to signal, to people who aren’t already in the know, that this is wheat not chaff.

Sure, to people who already follow the capabilities approach literature, your name alone will carry the relevant weight. But a student trying to figure things out, or even a scholar venturing into a new field of reading, needs something else in order to distinguish vetted works by people who know what they’re talking about from wikipedia articles, stolen term papers, and cranks.

And for my part, I still find that it’s hard to replace going to the stacks and looking through the books shelved together as one stage of figuring things out in an intellectual area I don’t know very well.

Academic presses aren’t, in principle, professional credentialing agencies; their purpose isn’t to bolster our CVs. That’s a side effect of their ability to vouch for quality *to the readers*, whether through peer review or through knowledgeable professional editing, etc.

I published an online book as a textbook my classes. I just made each of the (eight) chapters into both pdf and html so students could choose and put up links to each of the chapters at the class website. I also gave them the option of buying it as a “real” book through Lulu.com–though only 1 out of 90 students did that. There really is no problem at all in online open-access publishing: the problem is as in #11 the vetting and credentialing issue. This is why we have hardcopy journals–when almost everyone is reading articles online and almost almost everyone puts their papers up at their own websites.

Generally, I think it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do provided you have the time for, or can get someone to spend the time on, the publishing issues. Publishers do real work in producing a book: editing, design, and marketing take time and computing resources. If you can find people willing to do them for you, more power to you. If not, you will be doing them, and this will take away from your other work.

In terms of internet distribution, consider offering all of the following three formats: HTML (for online readability), PDF (for printing), and ePub (for mobile use.) (If this is starting to seem like too much work, well, this is part of the work of publishing.) Put out a tip jar: at least it might help defray costs. You will also have to consider hosting: as an academic, I suppose you get free web space so that is not a short-term issue, but the space will have to be maintained through your job and career changes, and again, this takes time, so it’s best if someone else does this. Finally, consider archiving; I would hope your book would end up in research libraries for the indefinite future, and this somehow has to be arranged.

Ask Cory Doctorow how it’s been working out for him. Pretty well, by the look of his career.

Having worked for an academic publisher for several years, I would say the most important service they offer is proofreading and copy editing. Having someone who understands the rules of publishing and is reading the copy from scratch (so they are reading what it actually says and not what it’s supposed to say) is more important than having the press to print the book. As far as typesetting goes, the only thing that is particularly complicated about academic publishing is getting the tables and math right.

You can set a printable book using TeX, or using an editor that uses tech, and the process is relatively simple and looks okay. From what I understand, it also includes a digital version of the actual text (which means the PDFs would be parsed by Google or other search engines) and the system is already used by a large number of academics in math and computer science.

It is possible to get a publisher to agree to making a book available as a free ebook as well as commercial paper book. Cory Doctorow does it all the time. Several academics have taken this approach, with some success (Larry Lessig, Yochai Benkler). You can also adopt a scheme in which both paper and ebook are sold for the first year or so, after which the ebook is made available for free. Baen has taken this approach for many of its SF authors: newer ebooks are sold, older ones are moved to the free library.

Underline what everyone else has said re the advantages of ePub and mobi formats. They allow people to read books on screens of any size (smartphone to Kindle DX) and to choose the size of the font. All books can be large-print books.

An academic publisher reviews, edits, designs, copy edits, proofreads, typesets, manufactures, markets, publicizes, sells, fulfills, and inventories books. All of the above activities require staff and cost the publisher money before any books are sold. Every title must sell a certain number in order to get to a break-even point to cover costs. Publishing is not paper, print, and bind, which accounts for only 1/3rd of the unit cost of an average academic book.

I’m married to an editor, so the copy-edit part of the publishers service wasn’t that important to me. But the editor and readers gave very good comments, Princeton’s publicity has been great and of course the cover is superb.

I put up a near-final draft at zombiecon.wikidot.com, but at $25 retail (and about half that for the Kindle edition), you would have to be fairly cash-constrained to prefer this to the book.

That I suppose is a relevant point – the big difference is between academic hardback and trade (especially paperback) or commercial quality e-book. If you can find a decent publisher who will put the book out cheaply, that beats an online version.

Traditional publishing adds much value when done well – acquisition of books worth the trouble, editorial, arranging for peer review, copy editing, design, plus the mechanics of distribution and discovery. (And negotiating open access or a creative commons license is not as easy as it sounds.)

BUT – so many books these days sell what – a few hundred copies? That seems like a lot of effort lavished on precious few copies. And much as I appreciate good design, many readers seem not to miss it when they buy e-books. (There is no page design, or rather only a one-size-fits-all design, for a Kindle text.

To my mind, the future of academic monographs is for libraries to invest at the front end in collaboration with publishing professionals, to create open access books and stop trying to emulate the trade book industry, which is extremely full of fail. Make print-on-demand copies available at cost. Let discourse communities do the discovery and publicity.

And anyone who wants to just do it without going through some gatekeeping and value-adding – why not? You have nothing to lose but your time and effort. The ISBN will cost you $150 – but honestly, if you’re not trying to make the book part of a retail stream, do you need it? (I am not asking that rhetorically – I really don’t know. It’s nifty for inventory control, but apart from that – ??)

Ecologically speaking, you have to consider the possibility that some (maybe even many) readers will read it electronically, saving 100% of tree and ink expenses. I much prefer to read ebooks, especially for intellectual writing where the infinite margin space is valuable for my own notes.

Your format has to be dictated by what you believe your readers will do. If you expect them to print it off, make a PDF. ePub/mobi/Kindle formats are preferred for ereaders, for reasons explained above. Baen publishing, also mentioned above, releases their library in all available forms, and let’s the reader pick PDF vs ebook vs professionally published book.

I agree that editing and proofreading are among the most important services a publisher offers, but don’t let that consideration bind you to a publisher; most of their editors are part-time/freelance, and you could hire them directly for yourself.

I’ve been thinking of doing this too, for a biostatistics textbook. The plan would be to sell copies on squashed trees through one of the on-demand printing services such as Lulu, and e-books as PDF. The deadline issue is a real problem, though. For my previous book, deadline nagging was the most useful service that my publisher provided.

Some colleagues have published books through CRC Press for which the ebook is free online. These aren’t people with any particularly great celebrity status (even compared to other statisticians). I don’t know how well this worked from the publisher’s point of view.

One thing to keep in mind about books versus various digital formats is that a well made book that is properly taken care of has a demonstrative lifetime that measures into centuries. Hard drives last for five years and CDs may make it as far as 25. Publishing online has many advantages; the marginal cost of production being the biggest one. However, if you want the book to last, make sure there are some actual books about.