The Chronicle: 9/14/2001: Academic Press Gives Away Its Secret of Success

By MICHAEL JENSEN

It's been a bad year financially for nonprofit publishers, according to most reports. High returns from inventory by booksellers closing their doors or trimming their stock, combined with sagging sales of what are considered discretionary products in a slowing economy, have forced many nonprofit publishers to rethink their plans and budgets. Even some of the largest and most well-known university presses are whispering about deficits.

So it's almost embarrassing when I tell colleagues that the National Academy Press is on track for a record year in book sales. And it dumbfounds them when I mention that we make every page we publish in print available online -- free.

Ever since new technologies began to hint at the possibility of reading books digitally, publishers have been haunted by the prospect that e-books would make print versions obsolete. The publishers have been trying encryption schemes, lockout mechanisms, and restriction systems to prevent unauthorized access to online material, with limited commercial success. For nonprofit presses, which operate close to the margin, the electronic future has looked like a minefield.

Our experience may calm a few jitters. And it may suggest some ways that nonprofit presses can expand their influence in the electronic age, with relatively small investments and limited risk.

Our press is the publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. We publish more than 200 book-length works per year, and are required by our charter to perform a dual task: to disseminate as widely as possible the works of the academies and to be self-sustaining through book sales and fees for services we perform for internal and external customers.

Those two mandates may seem contradictory, but we have found that, at least for a publisher of scientific and technical analyses and policy reports, doing the first encourages the second: Making our material easily and freely available helps us sell books. Our Web site (http://www.nap.edu) makes more than 2,100 books -- comprising 400,000 book pages -- fully searchable, browseable, and even printable by the page, all free. The material is made available in easily navigable page images, and we are in the process of providing even more easily readable and quickly downloadable page-by-page HTML text. Expanded research tools are in the process of being developed.

Our site is very busy -- from January through mid-August of this year, more than 3.2 million people had viewed more than 28 million Web pages, including 15 million book pages. While those are great numbers in terms of wide dissemination, the more remarkable thing is that, over the same period, we have sold more than 40,000 books through the same site -- something approximating 25 percent of our overall book sales, and already surpassing the number we sold during all of last year. Moreover, our other sales -- via bookstores, an 800 number, fax, and mail -- have apparently not been cannibalized, staying pretty much in line with industry sales.

It would seem axiomatic that giving away pages means that fewer people will buy the books, but that confuses the content with the product. Sugar, butter, flour, eggs, and vanilla are the contents of a pound cake, but quite obviously more than those contents is required to create something pleasing to the palate. It's clear to us that the material we publish -- the final printed book -- has a value quite distinct from the content itself, and a utility independent of any particular page. The handy, readable, formatted, bound volume is still the way most people want to read a book-length work.

Comparing books to food is dicey, of course, but the appetites -- whether intellectual or gustatory -- have similarities. For some kinds of hunger, quickly digested information -- the fast food of the Internet -- serves a number of useful purposes. Doing research on facts, addresses, news, and the like has never been easier. However, in the olden days, before the Web, few of us actually purchased books to learn that kind of information anyway. We went to the library, we consulted an almanac or an encyclopedia, we asked friends, we called the operator, we subscribed to newspapers or magazines.

We bought books we wanted to savor, not data to munch. We bought books we wanted to own, books we wanted to sink into. That's still the case.

Book-length material tends to posit an attitude, a position, or a conclusion; it may hypothesize, assert, or persuade; it may entertain or enlighten; it may surprise or delight. It has, in short, its own context. Extract a page or a chapter, and it's no longer the same product. That's part of the reason that Web technologies, whether they offer page-by-page representations or chapter-by-chapter material in Web-ready form, can rarely compete effectively with book-length works in print.

People are happy to find and browse through online material, but nobody -- and I mean nobody -- seems to be interested in devoting lengthy periods to reading for meaning online. Our server logs indicate that most people skim a book -- they choose a few pages, perform a few searches, print a few low-resolution pages. Apart from the act of printing, that is just libraryor bookstore-browsing behavior, not a threat to our livelihood.

There is mounting evidence that people will read for facts online and, while they'll read small chunks of material -- articles -- for perspective, few will read anything that runs for more than 30 pages onscreen. And when they do, it's unsatisfactory. Researchers at Ohio State University reported on a study last year indicating that even for college students who are making an effort to absorb as much as possible, material read on a screen is harder to understand than the same material read on paper. Last year, Forrester Research released a report showing that dropout rates for online courses can be as high as 80 percent. Why? In part, the Internet-research company found, because retention is 30 percent lower for material read online than for material read in print. A few months later, Forrester forecast slow growth for both e-books and e-book readers. Why? Because the company found that not only do people generally dislike reading text-heavy documents on a computer screen, but they also retain less of what they read.

The Web's promise is vast and still mostly unrealized, because the dot-com gold rush diverted energy from what the Web is best at: connecting people with ideas. From our perspective, the Web is already the best dissemination engine ever, which has the side benefit of providing vast new markets and audiences for our work. Scientists or program assistants or policy analysts in G–teborg or Kampala or Tulsa can find a policy recommendation or an expert conclusion in our publications -- from a book that they probably wouldn't have found before the advent of the Web. A student in Lubbock can explore Science and Stewardship in the Antarctic, and a teacher in Kiev can browse Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. If any of them want to, they can purchase the book at hand. Enough do so to support our program.

Does all this mean that every book publisher should put its books online at no charge? Alas, few for-profit book publishers are willing to invest money in giving content away. Their business models have profit maximization as the main goal, within which framework good people have to do good work. Opening content up, without locks or timers or payment, is just too outside the paradigm to be considered.

Most nonprofit book publishers I talk with would like to be able to do something similar to what we are doing, and a few are doing so. The Brookings Institution Press is making more than 100 recent books available for browsing via its Web site (http://www.brookings.org); to date, more than one million visitors have browsed those titles, and online sales of the books have more than doubled. The MIT Press, the University of Illinois Press, the Columbia University Press, and other innovative publishers have initiatives that include free access to some book-length material. To my knowledge, no book by any publisher has ever sold less than expected because it was available free online.

Only a few nonprofit book publishers have actually undertaken the risk, however, because most have very limited financial flexibility. They aren't blessed, as we are, with a parent institution willing to support a grand experiment, and any loss in today's straitened circumstances would take a big bite out of limited resources.

The "crisis of the monograph," much discussed over the past decade, is at heart a crisis of limited resources. When the editing, production, and marketing costs of a book exceed income from sales, a press loses money. But a large proportion of a publication's cost is its marketing and promotion; if it were easier for books to find their own audience by being more freely accessible, presses might be able to afford to publish the scholarly monographs that are beginning to be too costly to produce. Free online access to the books might help us out of the crisis of the monograph.

It therefore would behoove universities and the other parent organizations that sponsor, support, or otherwise give room to nonprofit publishing houses to consider a small investment that could have a big payoff. With an injection of $100,000 or $200,000 for initial staff and digitization costs -- and, perhaps more significant, a clear statement of institutional support for experimentation in scholarly publishing -- a lot more university presses could make a lot more of their publications available online in ways that would enhance scholarship and knowledge worldwide. It could even enhance their financial status. Successful initiatives like the National Academy Press's seem to show that the risks are not as great as once was feared, and that nonprofit publishing may flourish best when it is most open.

Michael Jensen is director of publishing technologies at the National Academy Press.

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