Michael Jensen, the always-ahead-of-the-curve Director of the National Academies Press gave a stunningly original speech at the recent AAUP (American Association of University Presses) which, in his words, "allowed me to talk about the two issues that matter most to me: saving scholarly publishing, and saving civilization. In 16 minutes."
Bookish is a new online service for discovering and purchasing books. It's a joint venture of three of the largest trade publishers: Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Penguin. (Penguin will shortly be merging with Random House.)
Concern the the Google-AAP settlement gives Google an unfair advantage wrt to orphan books and may inhibit scholarly access to these out-of-print works.
Short-form publishing is becoming more popular as the financial impracticalities of publishing something at this length become a moot point, thanks to the digital era.
"'Open' accounting doesn't make you an accountant; 'open' long-haul trucking doesn't make you a long-haul trucker; and 'open' science doesn't make you a scientist. It takes more than permission to become competent."
U of M Press will publish monographs only in digital form with an option for POD. The money quote "I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken,"
"What I believe—and this is what we're putting to the test—is that as you're putting something online free of charge, you may lose a few sales, but you'll gain other sales because more people will know about it," said Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic's publisher.
She would like Bloomsbury Academic to demonstrate that publishers can add editorial value to scholarship without having to choose between locking it down or giving it all away.
I think the writer touches on two things that are very important for Internet readers: they want to see something else and they want to see what's next.
Yahoo, Drudge, Google -- these sites update regularly, and they update frequently. Readers/users who visit these sites are looking for something new, something close to whatever they were previously reading, and they are looking for it to come to them quickly.