Two years ago I was confronted with a problem faced by many academics. An author of three previous scholarly books, I had written a manuscript intended for a much wider and more general audience. Called Government is Good: An Unapologetic Defense of a Vital Institution, the book was a response to the conservative campaign to label government as “bad,” and the ongoing Republican effort to cut taxes, slash social programs, and roll back regulations protecting consumers, workers, and the environment.
Unfortunately, I could not find a popular press to take it on. And while a few university presses expressed interest, I was concerned that their relatively small budgets would mean little advertising and thus little readership by the general public. Then it occurred to me that there might be another way to get a larger audience for the book: put it up on the Web. Not just a sample chapter or two, but the whole book. It took a while to get comfortable with this idea. It would mean giving up royalties and losing the academic imprimatur of a published book. But the potential payoff of a much larger readership was tempting, so I took the plunge.
I quickly realized that simply putting up 300 manuscript pages onto the web as a plain PDF file would be pretty unappealing to most potential readers. So I got a small grant from my college and hired a Web design firm to turn the book into a Web site with an esthetically appealing format. ...
I launched the site – Government Is Good – in the fall of 2007 with absolutely no idea of how it would do. Today, I’ve had over 75,000 visitors to the site. Only half of those stayed long enough to read some of the material, but that is still an impressive number. I can safely say that more people have read this online material than have read my other three books combined. Two of these books were published by university presses and were considered successful. But for these publishers, good sales are often measured in the hundreds – numbers which now seem very modest in comparison to the tens of thousands of readers who have visited my Web site.
Besides the larger readership, there have been several other interesting, and unanticipated, advantages to going this route. For example, I’ve had readers from over 50 countries. ... This kind of broad geographical readership would clearly not have happened with a conventionally published book.
I have also received a surprising amount of feedback on my work. ...
Even more intriguing has been seeing how my site has been talked about in online discussion groups. ...
Web publishing also makes the material much more accessible for classroom use. Other political science professors have been able to assign parts of this book for their courses without having to get permission, charge a fee, or put in on reserve in the library. They merely put the Web address in their syllabi – simple and cheap. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/19/2009 12:35:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
