David Glenn, Yale U. Press Places Book Online in Hopes of Increasing Print Sales, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Discusses the advantages of making books available online. His examples include Jack M. Balkin’s Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (book chapters online in pdf) and Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which Yale published in May. The book is also available online together with a wiki so that readers can respond.
“The real question,” Mr. Balkin says, “is what the vocation of academic publishing is. Academic publishers saw themselves as trying to spread knowledge â?? high-quality knowledge â?? as far and wide as they could … not just as a service that they provide to the universities that they’re associated with. Well, now they can promote that vocation even better than they could before. And they may even be able to make money off of it, which would be all to the good.”
Without a substantial investigation of a wide selection of material it will be difficult to claim the effects of online material on book sales. Any reports without such a study are anecdotal. But there is also another problem with that kind of study. It is the question of whether the specific book would have sold more or less without the online site.
I believe – a subjective opinion based upon my limited anecdotal evidence – that books sales generally increase when material is placed online. But this requires an important caveat: if the publisher prices the books too high then putting material online will not promote sales.
High-cost academic books are only intended for libraries and therefore online material will only prevent researchers from asking for the book. But high-cost academic books are a bad idea. They cannot claim to be about spreading knowledge (as Balkin states above).
Finding the right price for a large group of potential buyers, then placing material online will first create interest in the book and second ensure that the book is more easily found by those interested in the material. If the book is moderately, or reasonably, priced most (not all) still prefer to read a book in it’s traditional form rather than on a screen.
The problem is arguing with the publishers about this…