Comments on: Two Bits at Six Months

By: Savage Minds Rewind: The Best of 2009 | Savage Minds

Savage Minds Rewind: The Best of 2009 | Savage Minds — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:32:48 +0000

[...] Of course, online technologies constitute our media of choice, and SM had plenty to say about that. From Finding Anthropology on Twitter, to Virtual Worlds as Area Studies, to the profitability of social networking sites and a rereading of Imagined Communities in the digital and multinational age. Plus, Chris gave a rowsing, ‘the internet is dead, long live the internet’ cheer in recounting how his book has faired in the online creative commons. [...]

By: Two Bits – first Duke Press OA book « Free Our Books

Two Bits – first Duke Press OA book « Free Our Books — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:41:45 +0000

[...] transfer into print sales unless a lot of work is put into it. Kelty’s January analysis is here. The bit that i didn’t know, and hence this old-new-but-new-for-me post, is that it has gone [...]

By: Digital Humanities in 2008, II: Scholarly Communication & Open Access « Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 11:54:58 +0000

[...] of the book; comment on the CommentPress version; or download and remix the HTML. Reporting on Two Bits at Six Months, Kelty observed, “Duke is making as little or as much money on the book as they do on others [...]

By: Lecciones pendientes « Grafos y accidentes

Lecciones pendientes « Grafos y accidentes — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:31:42 +0000

[...] Christopher Kelty, observó que la relación entre copias bajadas y copias vendidas era de solo 3 a 1. Sobre ese dato, del que podrían hacerse muchas interpretaciones, Kelty sacó las siguientes [...]

By: Laura Wimberley

Laura Wimberley — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:01:44 +0000

@ckelty:
bq. It’s obviously not sustainable to expect each academic to create and maintain the digital version of their own publications. We are already our own secretaries and any number of other things. And yet, will this ever become something university presses routinely do? I certainly hope so, but I don’t see much movement it that direction yet. I know that within a year or two, I will have reached the maximum number of websites I can maintain for these purposes, and I will either have to stop publishing or find another way to make my digital me available…

This is a role for university libraries – probably the home institution of the author, but I suppose it could also be the library of the university affiliated with the press.

Lots of librarians have been working terribly hard to start institutional repositories to make their faculty’s work openly available, but faculty haven’t had a lot of knowledge or incentive to contribute to them. (See pretty much anything written by Dorothea Salo.)

Your experience points out why repositories are useful – open access is good for scholarship, but creating the access is a lot of work. Maybe your next book can be online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/escholarship/?

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:40:44 +0000

Papers looks lovely for those who have access to repositories via their universities. This independent scholar is still looking for someone who will package access to them at a reasonable flat flee.

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 23:50:57 +0000

Wow just playing w/Papers its really fun and useful — just about the right weight of app for me. Thanks for the recommendation Monica!

By: Monica McCormick

Monica McCormick — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 20:37:29 +0000

Terrific post and comments. Kudos to Duke UP (hi, Ken!) for this. Very hard, as you all say, to measure these results precisely but good to have more evidence.

I work with NYU Press and NYU Libraries in a new (just one year old) position to develop digital publishing services. Very early days, but we’re envisioning projects that to publish scholarly materials in *both* print and online, with their distinct affordances. Such press/library collaborations are beginning to emerge. The challenges are many but the opportunities enormous. Time will tell…

@ John McCreery and Craig: Check out Mendeley (mendeley.org) a tool that lets scholars organize and share PDFs, including a way to grab the citation. Still in beta (and funded by venture capital, so who knows where it will go) but looks promising. Also see Papers http://mekentosj.com/papers/ (now in version 1.8.6) which is Mac-only and winner of an Apple design award.

Both built by European grad students looking for a solution to manage their research material and connect with people working on similar stuff. Copyright issues may emerge if publishers object to the public posting and peer-to-peer sharing these tools seem to enable. But obviously a need waiting for a solution.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:55:07 +0000

Adobe’s Digital Editions is, I suppose, meant to serve your PDFs in a more useful (or at least visual, bookshelf like) way – an iTunes for eBooks. But last time I used it, it wasn’t quite where I needed it to be to actually find useful.

The thing I find most profoundly irritating about PDF versions of print media (journal articles) is that the content providers do not fill out the Metadata fields for the files they serve – I download something from JSTOR, look at the file properties and find the Title, Author, Subject and Keywords fields blank, blank, blank and blank. If they were filled out and I had a filter for my Bib software I could scan all of those files on my HD and autoimport the lot. Does anyone know if something does this?

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:58:19 +0000

A thousand dead-tree books is not bad at all. It has been some years ago, but I vividly remember a piece in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ in which the author, an editor at Harvard University Press, let drop the remark that the average sale for a monograph in the social sciences or humanities was 700. My own book, _Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers_, U. of Hawaii Press, 2000, has sold a bit over 3,000 copies. That is, of course, in part because it was written deliberately to appeal to people who do business in Japan as well as academics in a variety of disciplines associated with Japan studies. The most positive reviews have been from a Japanese sociologist and an Italian political scientist. It certainly didn’t hurt either that the Japanese ad agency that created the research institute whose researchers provided the eyes through which I was looking at social and cultural change in Japan bought 250 copies and distributed them to its clients.

I note with interest Craig’s remark that,

bq. Such problems could probably be solved quite easily through some clever software that serves our pdf collections more dynamically.

We are already very close. I am currently using a combination of Evernote (for random stuff picked up off the Net) and Zotero (for more systematic note-taking and bibliography generation. Now, if somebody could find a way to do for PDFs what Zotero does for library collections, i.e., grab and catalog the references, ideally with filtering to sync just the new ones, it would then be possible to quickly assemble the network of references to which a particular PDF belongs….It could then become the mark of serious scholarship to have looked at least two steps out from the primary inspirations of one’s own research…

Again, just brainstorming.

By: ckelty

ckelty — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:29:44 +0000

3000 to 1000, so far. The first number is the number of hits on the pdf, so it doesn’t count any of the other formats online. The book sales includes, according to duke, a relatively high number of hard-bound copies as well. The interesting thing to watch will be to see whether the ration stays at this level or steadiily increases… but that depends a lot on whether my book is forgettable or simply forgotten :)

By: Casey

Casey — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 21:43:22 +0000

…so what are those 3:1 figures? Exactly how dead is the internet, how dead UPs, and how do your numbers stack up against UP books that aren’t marketed as heavily by Duke to the New Yorker Blog, The Times Higher Education Supplement, Technology Review, Inside Higher Ed, and others?? Has “normal” changed, in your remark that we have returned to normal?

By: john.paganetti - The Subjective Web

john.paganetti - The Subjective Web — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:34:27 +0000

[...] a post about the results of releasing a book in print and online (for free) at the same time, Chris Kelty writes, “The Internet is dead.” Ok, that’s a bit out of context, but what he does [...]

By: Craig

Craig — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:14:27 +0000

I really like John McCreery’s observation of actual bookshelves vs. digital archives of pdfs. I know the library community has had lots to say on the benefit of serendipity in browsing open stacks. For my own experience of the library this has been tremendously important (and frustrating when faced with closed-stack libraries in Russia). Amazon and other on-line booksellers try to replicate this through things like “what other people who bought this book bought”. Such problems could probably be solved quite easily through some clever software that serves our pdf collections more dynamically.

Chris’ experiment is also interesting to me because we are on the cusp of an actualization of portable/readable electronic books. It seems this year or the next we’ll see a host of new e-paper/style devices that will offer both affordable and powerful alternatives to traditional books. When that happens we’ll really see the circulation and sale of digital books ramping up. For now, I still prefer reading from a conventional book itself than from a screen.

By: ckelty

ckelty — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 06:26:10 +0000

You’ll notice that I (pointedly) said of the website that I “created and maintain it”… I would have loved for Duke UP to be the subject of these predicates, but they do not yet have these capacities, and as far as I can tell in my recent experience, neither do Cornell University Press, NYU Press, Palgrave or Paradigm, and probably most other university presses. This fact is, at minimum, troubling. It’s obviously not sustainable to expect each academic to create and maintain the digital version of their own publications. We are already our own secretaries and any number of other things. And yet, will this ever become something university presses routinely do? I certainly hope so, but I don’t see much movement it that direction yet. I know that within a year or two, I will have reached the maximum number of websites I can maintain for these purposes, and I will either have to stop publishing or find another way to make my digital me available…