Aileen Fyfe responds to our question: Is digital the future for academic books?
Is digital the future for academic books?
By Aileen Fyfe, @AileenFyfe, [email protected]
As a historian who writes and reads academic books, I have a fond attachment to hard-copy books. Moreover, the physicality of books is intrinsic to my own historical research, because what I study is the editors, printers, publishers, distributors and retailers who have enabled authors to communicate with readers.
But that said, I do think the future of the academic book should be digital. Why? Because digital distribution is the way that we – as academic authors – can reach far more readers than we do with the old print-only system. When you realise that the print runs on many academic books are only 300 or 400 copies, then sometimes you have to wonder what the point is. Most of those few hundred copies will be bought by libraries, where they may – or may not – be read by multiple users. Few will reach individual readers, due to a combination of lack of local availability and the increasingly high pricing of printed academic books.
Digital distribution transforms the accessibility of our research (and I think that’s true independently of arguments for Open Access – for the free availability of our research). We should encourage our publishers to issue digital editions as well as print editions, not just for new books but for old ones that have become difficult to acquire. I recently asked my publisher why there was no ebook edition for an edited volume of essays from 2007; all it cost me to make it happen was the time taken to send four emails to the rights holders of images used in the book, to get the permissions extended. That book is, in fact, still available in print, while stocks last, and if you’re willing to wait for delivery, but now it is also available anywhere in the world, to unlimited numbers of readers, at the click of a button.
Edited volumes of essays, like my one, are an area where I think digital editions will be particularly important in increasing readership. There are so many reasons to publish in these volumes (arm-twisting from a friend, flattery from a colleague), yet the essays in them often disappear without trace, not included in the digital databases of journal articles, nor easily find-able when listed in library catalogues only by the book title. My own disciplinary learned society has recently launched an innovative response to this problem: as well as our regular journal, the BJHS, we now have a second ‘journal’ which issues one thematic volume per year. Essentially, it’s a series of edited book volumes, but dressed up as a journal, with an ISSN, and with DOI for the chapters (the annual periodicity allows more pages, thus more essays, than in a regular special issue). It so happens that BJHS Themes is also open access, funded by a bequest to the society; but to me, the key point is that it is digital, and fully integrated into the increasingly sophisticated systems for locating research on the web.
I also learned recently that much international book distribution is already done digitally – rather than shipping books around the world, distributors send digital files to printing units located in distant parts of the world. The Victorian publishers I study tried hard to do something similar with physical stereotype plates and steam ships, but digital files transform the scope of the exercise. Readers in South Asia can now get easy, cheaper access to British-published books, printed locally.
And that point about printing locally applies to all digital books. I am arguing that digital is an essential delivery system to get books to readers. Whether those readers read them on screen or in hard copy is entirely up to them. Ebook readers will get better; and print-on-demand book-printing facilities will become more common. We may still choose to read hard copy; but the distribution will be digital.