langreiter.com plain, simple: 2006-08-21-bookThings

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2006-08-21-bookThings

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 6697 days AGO

The National Academies Press is the publication arm of the U.S. National Academies (NAS, NAE, IOM and NRC).

Since 1996, the NAP has been providing free page-by-page access to all their publications; in the meanwhile, many books have been made available as downloadable PDFs as well, partially free, partially for-pay.

Remarkably (and quite fortunately), this includes (pretty darn good) Joseph Henry Press titles like Einstein Defiant, Prime Obsession and Unknown Quantity.

It's quite obvious that the NAP is an institution passionate about their mission to widely disseminate research results - to make them truly public; a mission, however, as they write, "tempered by the requirement of being self-supporting. [...] We give away [...] online versions freely for the public good, and in the belief--proven generally true so far--that it will mean that customers who otherwise wouldn't have found the publications will do so--and will order books they find, thereby enlarging our customer base sufficiently to pay for the added (and significant) expense of doing what we're doing."

And that's not just the usual hand-waving; the NAP did a fairly extensive (and extremely interesting) study on the quantitative aspects (cannibalization effects &c.) of open access back in 2003.

Let's hope that their plan continues to pan out and serves to inspire other publishers to follow NAP's lead. Strong buy (some)!

National Academies Press

About the Open Book Interface

Michael Jensen (Director of Publishing Technology)

Another amazing book thing I found out about recently is LibraryThing, a social network of bookshelves. Check out the tour.