Gutenburg-e books now OA: experimenting with interfaces and business models
I’ve been trying on different dissertation topics over the last couple of weeks and blogging about the ideas at Lifelong Learning, but today I read some good news/bad news about the Columbia University Press, American Historical Association and Columbia’s Library Gutenburg-e collaboration, with respect to the very subject I wanted to explore, week-before-last, as noted by Peter Suber, Open Access News: innovative interfaces and business models for e-monograph publication and distribution.
Peter Suber’s post quotes at length from the Robert Townsend post at the American Historical Society Blog, about the aims of the original project (Gutenburg-e), how they were grant-funded, and how those sponsoring or undertaking the project feel that it has failed in very important respects — no viable sustainable business model has emerged, and scholarly journals would not review the monographs that the Press published in the Gutenburg-e series.
Geez. These are pretty serious failures. Pretty depressing failures. But on the other hand, I visited the project’s OA portal for these books and had a look at one on sewing and wow, the interface is really cool with very well-done features, finely crafted, very functional, and elegant. The scholarship would have to be first rate, wouldn’t it, given the pedigree and the process Gutenburg-e put in place. Putting on a scientist’s hat, a failed experiment is just as valuable as one that succeeds. In fact, from what I’m told, failure is the norm, and it advances science just as steadily as success. So, hurray? No, not hurray. This just does not feel right.
If Columbia University Press and the American Historical Society can’t motivate scholarly journals to even *review* its innovative e-books, whose authors were chosen in some cases from among the best history dissertations in the country, what does this say about humanities support for presses? Presses are on the ropes. Can their authors really afford to turn their backs on efforts to find a viable way forward? I really am, quite simply, appalled. Maybe I’ve misunderstood what this story says. I hope I have.
