Re: Print-on-demand

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

At 5:56 PM -0500 1/24/08, Jean-Claude Guedon wrote:

> Thank you, Sandy, for this precious information.
>
> What I am wondering is what would happen to the POD phase if the 
> book were also available in OA electronic format? Surely, the 
> revenues from the POD phase are minor and it may be that the POD 
> sales would be stimulated by the OA electronic version 
> available.
We expect the revenues from POD sales to be sufficient to cover 
the basic costs of producing the book (including overhead). We'll 
break even by selling about 100 to 150 cloth (to libraries) and 
300 or so paperbacks. This should be achievable, given what we 
know about NAP's experience. We are not, unlike NAP, selling any 
PDF version; in fact, we are giving away the PDF right now, and 
the big question is whether that will be enough for some people.

> As for the Romance Studies: bravo!! And i would very much like 
> to see how this experiment is faring. Your site is OA but 
> obviously favours browsing and I suspect that many people will 
> be tempted to buy. Yochai's Benkler experience with an OA 
> electronic version of his book (Wealth of Networks) was quite 
> spectacular: the spike in sales after the book was announced to 
> be in OA on the OA lists was bigger than the spike he got from 
> the review in Time Magazine.
We'll see. These books are quite different from Benkler's of 
course (or Larry Lessig's, which similarly was offered free 
online); they are priced higher and have a much more specialized 
audience. Part of what we are testing is the sensitivity of 
different price points. The first three titles have purposely 
different price structures, though they are all similar in length 
and content. This is about as cloe as we can come to a 
"controlled experiment" in publishing!

> Incidentally, I wonder whether one big file for the OA 
> electronic version is not better to incite buys than sections. 
> The issue is not owning or not the book, but being able to read 
> it online. By breaking it up in sections, you may be unwittingly 
> inciting people to read sections online and not buy the paper 
> book.
As you'll see, you can download and print from the PDFs of only 
the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Conclusion. We needed to break 
it up to control print capability. (It is, however, possible to 
cut-and-paste the other chapters into a Word document and print 
from that, although the result is pretty unappealing, as you'll 
see if you try it.)

> Have you announced the PSU Romance series on Peter Suber's blog? 
> I bet this would create some stir.
Yes, Peter knows about it. The series and our ODSP also get a 
paragraph toward the end of the Ithaka Report.

> I have sent the news to Athabasca U. Press and to Jean Kempf who 
> is part of the new European project OApen and head of Presses 
> universitaires de Lyon in France.
The University of Amsterdam Press, which is part of this European 
consortium and is a member press of the AAUP, is well aware of 
our project.

> Again, and incidentally, if POD had mirrors across the globe, 
> the cost of shipping would go down drastically. A group of 
> university presses, worldwide, ought to be able to organize such 
> a network.
We do POD printing through Lightning Source UK and are 
considering opting out of our distribution arrangement there 
since the number of copies we sell in the UK is small anyway and 
can readily be supplied via POD through LSUK. I understand that 
Book Source, now a subsidiary of Amazon, has set up POD 
facilities in several foreign countries.

> Thanks again for the fascinating information.
You're welcome.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press