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Kevin Kelly reports on his blog about an experimental book publishing model. In this model you first sell a required amount of (hard cover) books (in this specific case 200), enough to cover for the costs of the print run, after which the book is made available online for free as a downloadable PDF. Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model. Stressing the importance of patronage they state on their website:
“We’ll post a PDF online, free for everyone—but only after we sell this run of 200 real, physical objects. So think of it this way: You’re not just buying a thought-provoking, take-it-to-the-coffee-shop book for yourself. You’re buying access for everybody. You’re a patron of the new liberal arts!”
Of course, as Kelly also says, you need an audience big enough to be able to offer both a print run and on online edition. And here’s where word of mouth marketing comes in handy. And it definitely worked in this case where the print edition sold out in less than eight hours, as the website again states:
“New Liberal Arts, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is the beginning of an attempt to describe topics, disciplines, and methods of inquiry essential to any 21st century education. Ranging from “attention economics” to “video literacy,” New Liberal Arts is a glimpse into the course catalog of an idiosyncratic new school—a liberal arts college 2.0 New Liberal Arts went on sale on July 7 in a limited edition of 200 copies at Snarkmarket. The initial print run sold out in less than 8 hours.”
Revelator press, which publishes e-chapbooks for the masses, maintains another business model, where they put their books online for free, hoping they will gather enough response and attention to be able to sell print editions. Probably a saver model to use where there is a lack of an audience from the start, and even a small print run of 200 copies can already be a huge financial failure. Maybe POD, as its quality is improving enormously at the moment, could offer some more possibilities for similar presses. Revelator Press has an excellent Q& A section where they explain their choice for a free model. I love it so I have added it underneath. Also be sure to take a look at there beautiful designed e-chapbooks consisting of poetry, drama and short stories. I for example loved this one: Nine Poems by Gavin Graig.
Q: What is Revelator?
A: e-chapbooks for the masses.
Q: What the hell does that mean?
A: I’ll level with you. We know some people. These people write. Good stuff. It’s really hard to get things published (yeah, I know, cry me a river), so we’re going to put some of this stuff out there. Free.
Q: Free?
A: Sure, the first one is always free.
Q: What’s the catch?
A: No catch. We’re betting that you’ll like it, and you’ll come back to read more.
Q: So this is like one of those record club things, where you’ll start mailing me stuff I don’t want, and charge me if I don’t return it?
A: Nope. We’re not in it for the money. We want to get people talking, and maybe if enough people get talking, or the right people in the right places, then maybe you’ll see some of these people in Poetry, or The New Yorker, or on the new release table in your local bookstore. You can buy stuff then.
Q: Real publication? You think these people are that good?
A: Who am I, Harold Bloom? These people are good writers. Read them. Tell them what you like and don’t like.
Q: Tell them? This thing is interactive?
A: This is a blog, isn’t it? Join the 21st century.
Q: How do I keep up?
A: Subscribe to our rss feed (http://revelatorpress.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default). You can keep an eye on the discussion there, and we’ll post original work, in PDF form, every four to six weeks or so.
Q: Anything else?
A: Yeah. Tell your friends.
Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog.
Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before here. Basically their business model revolves around the same idea I wrote about yesterday in my post on Martijn Aslander: giving away free ebooks online will not harm print sales, it can even increase print sales. Although technically speaking, in the case of Remix, Bloomsbury Academic is working with a form of delayed Open 
Access. So in this case one should speak about an embargoed Open Access model (where the book was already available in print for half a year). Thus the question remains whether Bloomsbury Academic will continue with such a delayed Open Access business model (which according to many Open Access purists isn’t real Open Access), or whether they will present their print and free online releases at the same time from now on.
In any case, I am really glad Remix is now available as a free download and I can truly recommend the book! You can download a PDF of the book here.
Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows, it is all about creating networks in the online environment, based around the value you create. This value is again based on your previous actions and doings (focusing on integrity and trust) and the selections you make and present to your networks, which again creates more value.
Aslander states he is fascinated by value. We should focus more on value and not on profit. Aslander has not asked any money for his services for years, as he believes people can only decide what he is worth after he has delivered his services. As he states, he does not work for people he works with people.
Martijn Aslander on bookhacking op InCTformatie 2009 from henkjan on Vimeo.
Filmed by Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat, via Marketingfacts.
Filmed by Henk-Jan Winkeldermaat, via Marketingfacts.
At Lifehacking.nl he started with disseminating books free online. These books generated a lot more print sales than expected, based on the idea that if people like a book, people buy the book, they don’t print it. The added value also lies in the fact that this model gives you the opportunity to connect on a closer level with your customer base. Unlike bookshops, in the online environment you know who your customers are. Lifehacking.nl simply asked for an email address before any download and 70% of the people actually filled in an email address. This of course created a huge marketing potential. You can for instance send an email to your customer base, Aslander states, when you have a new free book to download. In this way the free book does not have to be a threat to the print sales. You can even make more money by giving the book away for free.
The trick is creating some noise around your free content. People start blogging about it and its fame is spread. This of course in combination with the power of selection: you create a trusted base, a network around the content you provide. As Aslander states, this is the basis of the network and information society; you create a network which again creates network effects. Through your network you are able to move (other) networks of people. This means, according to Aslander, that we should no longer look from the old business paradigms to profit and value. The new online paradigm is about engagement, it is about listening to the people. Communicate with your network, ask them for suggestions, engage them. Aslander has created, as he calls it (referring to his great example Seth Godin) a tribe around himself. Things start spreading from there: you create value and movement and you create a relationship with your customers, within your network. You build profiles around the people in your network. Thus an ecosystem rises up not based on money and profit but on value and network effects. Aslander remarks that Web 2.0 is about a radical change, it is about new ways of working together and engaging with your customers: it is (again) about creating value and listening to your customers. As he says: ‘I deliver value and then I just see what happens.’ In the online environment an IOU is worth more than money. Aslander thus thinks and works foremost from an idea of access and not from an idea of possession.
These ideas are maybe not new and not even as innovative as Aslander might present them, I like the way he is trying to promote them to make people enthusiastic about thinking ‘out of the box’ and thinking from the idea of free as a basis and a reality in today’s online networked culture. And then see what you can do from that position and where it can bring you. That I find inspiring. You can find more passionate thoughts from Aslander on his website.
You can find an older interview with Martijn Aslander in which he also summarises his views on book publishing below.
On the second and final day of APE, Sebastian Mislej of the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, talked about videolectures.net, a website streaming online video lectures that can be viewed for free. All the content on videolectures.net is scientifically approved (it has been peer reviewed) so in its entirety it forms a complete scientific repository of free top conferences’ content. The site is hosted and supported by well known academic institutions, where some of the content partners and contributors are for instance MIT Open Course Ware, the Mellon Foundation and the University of Cambridge. The site makes use of semantic web applications and additional functionalities like streaming video with synchronized slides. They also add links to other resources. As Mislej states, the website functions as a learning culture, the links that are necessary to understand the topic will and can be added. In this way videolectures.net can be seen as a kind of scientific YouTube, a portal to high quality scientific video content on the web.
As Mislej explains, 99% off all people giving the lecture are very interested in putting their video online; they really want to put their videos online. Publishers of conference proceedings are also positive, since it is good promotion for their content. In the future videolectures.net will improve the web portal (redesign, improve navigation, automatic knowledge object linking), it will be extracting semantic information (speech indexing, text mining, video mining, automatic ontology construction, user tracking and profiling) and it will focus on solving some important issues regarding intellectual property on content, and problems regarding video formats, mobile platforms and accessibility.
Hans Pfeiffenberger, from the Helmholtz Association, gave a lecture on publishing data, focusing specifically on “Earth System Science Data”, a data publishing journal. As Pfeiffenberger stated, in polar research the incentive is to preserve the data and their meaning for centuries in the future. This data preservation is best done by publishing them. The question is how publishing can help comply with the requirement of quality assurance for research data. As Pfeiffenberger remarks there are of course different kinds of data and this means we will also need different methods to take care of them. According to him review guidelines for data should focus on originality, significance and data quality. The peer reviewers will have to look into the data itself and look at its quality and the connection to the article. Articles can then be seen as interpretations of the data.
Pfeiffenberger states that it is also important to have incentives for researchers to publish data. We need to have rewards for data publication, it needs to be citable and it needs to be part of the impact factor. And, as stated before, it needs to be quality assured data. Preservation and (open) access to data are also critical issues. The aim should be to reuse and reproduce the data. The data will be provided by the scientists but who will provide the infrastructure? And what about licensing and long-term preservation? Pfeiffenberger concludes that these are issues that we will need to consider in the future.
During the afternoon panel on Open Books, three panellists from the publishing world, Eelco Ferwerda from Amsterdam University Press, Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic and Barbara Kalumenos from STM publishers, where asked to discuss two questions.
The first question focused on the Academic book in the digital age: What it is now and in 5 years – what will users expect?
Eelco Ferwerda first said a few introductory words about the OAPEN project and afterwards replied to the first question by stating that users will in the future expect to find, access and search within books online. He stated that it was Google that changed the whole idea of books for us. Because of Google, books have now become an integral part of the Internet and in this way have gained a new future. Now where is the book heading? Ferwerda recalls Robert Darnton’s pyramid model, in which the book is seen as a pyramid consisting of different layers: the book itself and comments, updates, e-learning, primary sources and datasets in other connected layers. Ferwerda gave the example of the Driver II project, focusing on enhanced publications, where research data, extra materials and post-publication data will be added to the primary publication. The moment scholars recognize the value of these types of additions, they will become the norm.
Frances Pinter from Bloomsbury Academic went on to compare the old publishing model with a new future model, The old model is based on printed content, on publishers as gatekeepers who verify and brand the work, and on publishers as bankers. In this model costs can be a barrier to dissemination together with a limited range of formats. In the new model however, she states that there can be multiple versions and formats of content, on different locations and channels. In this new model here will be competition with free versions and it will be uncertain who will pay for the publishing process.
One existing online business model revolves around publishers charging for the premium content and putting free content around the premium content in order to generate the traffic. Pinter asks what would happen if you inverted that model? What if you would offer the free premium content online (with a CC license) and then would charge for the activities around it, like the print edition and a variety of other services and activities.
According to Pinter, this is what academic authors will want because they do not need publishers anymore. Publishers need to find some new models that sustain the user needs whilst still upholding the quality added value system and rewarding structure.
Barbara Kalumenos from STM Publishers, states that STM has focused mostly on journals. The problem, as she sees it, with future forecasts when it comes to digital books has to do with the fact that there is still way too little hard factual material available on digitized books. She also states that the term books is way to general, we need to differentiate between textbooks, monographs etc. and then focus on these categories specific. What Kalumenos especially regrets is the lack of numbers on the amount of books that are already digitized. As she states, we need to do some basic empirical research on what the status quo is at the moment. Only then can we speculate what will happen in five years. And it also depends heavily on the discipline. The users however are in the centre of this development. What does the user want? The user wants its content easy, directly and with very few clicks, as Kalemunos remarks, you loose users after more than three clicks as user interaction research has shown. This kind of research can also show how the users search and interact with the material. Kalemunos doubts that monographs in HSS will only be used in digital environments, which means that web 2.0 tools will be developed for books too, but maybe not for the full catalogue of books. So she concludes that we should look at user behavior and what they expect of electronic books in the digital age.
During the discussion that followed after the first question remarks where made about the book format, the development to more article use and production in HSS and the possibility of the emergence of a middle category in between the article and the book.
Next to that the funding possibilities of monographs were discussed. As Eelco Ferwerda remarked, the book is different in this respect: the economic model of distributing books is becoming impossible. Academic publishers suffer selling proper monographs. An Open Access motive for books might be to come up with a new business model to keep the book alive as a research format. Frances Pinter made the point that with books, whether they are expensive or not, we need to look at, what are the actual costs of reading a book in print and online.
The second question focused on Open Access publishing models for books: How will they work, change scholarly communication and change the market?
Eelco Ferwerda starts by talking about the IMISCOE series. The basic Open Access model for this kind of series, he remarks, is a hybrid model, where on both focuses on online and print. The basic online edition is free and the printed edition is sold, where the author retains the copyright. OAPEN wants to expand this model; they want to develop a common approach or model to fund the Open Access edition, in collaboration with research councils. In their view a network is needed and funders need to see this as a service. Funding model will revolve around a fee for direct costs and revenues from additional services.
As Frances Pinter remarks, the situation for Bloomsbury Academic is rather different. Bloomsbury Academic is a commercial company so needs to cover its costs completely. Printing editions appear simultaneously with the online edition. They are offering traditional publishers service along with free online access and added value services.
As Pinter mentions, this is also a start up: additional added value services to sell around the content still need to be developed on top of that. What about licensing contracts? Authors do no longer need the publishers, so we will no longer have exclusive licenses between author and readers in both ways. The big question is whether people will really pay for the added services. According to Pinter that is a risk for the publisher to take. But who is going to fund the added value services that the publisher provides? Pinter asks what would happen if we would not see publishers as people who take the risk? What if they become more like the service arm for scholarly work? Pinter imagines an independent party that tenders between different publishers for a service contract to put in that added functionality. It would be a more streamlined system in this way according to her.
Barbara Kalumenos however remarks that putting a layer between publishers as Pinter says, might not work well in a system made up of all kinds of different country policies and it will probably only lead to extra bureaucracy. Kalumenos thinks more in the lines of Open Access as part of the research costs. Open Access should be paid as part of this process. Afterwards remarks were made concerning the degrading of the publisher in these kinds of new models from the value adding / risk taker to a service offering party. Important in this respect is the second process of reviewing for the commercial sustainability of a monograph. This also has an added value for it helps to bring out the better publications. What will happen with this when publishers will be service providers: what about the needed commercial filter to see if this book is fit to be published? Finally Eelco Ferwerda remarks that publishers will always be in competition for content, based on their reputation.
During last Thursday’s Round Table on ‘Digitisation and the Trade Book’, organized by the department of Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University, the focus was on the future role of ‘intermediaries’ (distributors, booksellers and librarians) in the age of the digital book. What kind of value will these ‘old players’ still add to the value chain of book production in the digital era? Three representatives of the book field where present to defend their position: Hans Willem Cortenraad, from the Centraal Boekhuis (the main Dutch book distributor), Dennis Eijsten from Bibliotheek.nl (library.nl) and Erik Rigters from ebook.nl.
Some of the main issues concerning the transition from the book to the digital medium were fiercely discussed during the round table, at which the audience was highly participatory. Hans Willem Cortenraad defended the efficient distribution of the paper book in the Netherlands, which, according to him, will pave the way for an equally efficiently coordinated system for digital books, because it has the efficiency and the system in place to create standardization in a digital world. Next to that he argued that the world is only slowly changing into a digital world, estimating that it will take another 10 to 15 years before there will be more Ebooks than print books. Cortenraad argued that this will give them enough time to develop the way the trade book value chain is organized now into a similar digitized one. The knowhow and the expertise of the old will also in the future allow them to develop services for the publishers’ content.
Dennis Eijsten stated that the main task of the library is to provide easy access to reading. This means that the library needs to make sure books are available, be it on paper or on e-paper. In his vision, POD is only a step on the way to a fully digital reading culture. Thus POD is just a form of migration to digital reading: it makes the transition to digital reading easier. Eijsten argued that within ten years everything will be digitized and we will do (almost all) our reading from gadgets.
Erik Rigters emphasized, amongst others, that in the transition from print to digital booksellers ought to do more to extend their customer relations to a digital environment. There are some obstacles they fear though in this transition. Rigters argues that Ereaders will convince people that reading from a screen is possible. 
One of the main topics addressed during the following discussion revolved around the question ‘what is the value of scale in the digital age?’ Will there be a few major players (Google, Amazon) or will there still be a role for the smaller players and intermediaries?
Dennis Eijsten argued that Google will certainly play an important role as search engine and in this respect will serve as the front office. However, there will be a second layer of services and information brokers that will come up from these searches that will distinguish themselves by their selection and quality mechanisms which will enable the survival of niche markets.
Another issue that arose was ‘what is the value of these platforms in a digital age when in theory everyone can be a publisher?’ The platforms, be it in the form of publishers or other intermediaries can serve as advisors, they can take care of selection, enrichment, administration and marketing of the content. Next to the selection and marketing mechanism, the platforms can also serve as a community building mechanism. These communities of book readers can take care of further selection and enrichment. This is where a possible future for intermediaries can lay: in the creation of platforms that make a selection of the immense data available on the web and at the same time host all kinds of community building opportunities and user interaction services.
This development was also reflected in the discussion about possible future Ebook business models. Erik Rigters defended the advertising model, in which content can be free to the end user by means of advertisements in or next to the content (comparing it to the Google model). Next to that he (and others) argued that in the future the most important issue is access to data: with all these massive amounts of data the issue no longer revolves around ownership but around accessibility. New Ebook business models will revolve around access to databases instead of access to items, be it single books, pages or chapters. And this access is where we will pay for. And in this respect, the players with the most data will play the biggest roles as information brokers in a digital age.
A few other interesting remarks that came up from the discussion:
- The fixed book price will disappear since the digital knows no borders.
- Authors want to be read more than to be paid: it is the secondary services (lectures, tours, promotions) that come with the fame after being read that make authors’ income in the new model.
- Copyright is old fashioned. This means that the business models modeled around copyright feel old fashioned too. We need to find new ways to ensure the author and the publishers get paid for their added value. Copyright makes this change slower.
These are just a few reflections of a round table that in my experience offered some very fruitful discussions. The next round table will be organized at the beginning of 2009.
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