How to publish an academic book but make the PDF freely available online?

Question

Background

I like the idea of writing an academic book.

• It currently looks better on a CV when applying for jobs, grants, promotions, etc. than a blog post, or a website.
• Libraries and people archive the work
• Most of the best academic content currently seems to end up in books and journal articles, rather than on websites.
• People have an attractive physical copy to engage with if they want.

However, I don't like the constraints imposed by a book. In particular, readership is limited to those who buy/borrow the book or have access to a library.

Aim

In some cases, I'd prefer to write something like an "open access book".

• If readers want the physical copy, they can purchase the book. Ideally some of this revenue would go to the author, but I'm not too fussed if the publisher just uses this money to fund promotion, editorial assistance, production, etc.
• However, access to a PDF of the book is free online.
• The book gets an ISBN, archiving, availability on Amazon, etc. and all the academic recognition associated with publishing an academic book.

Questions

• So, are there any options for doing this, and what might be best option?
• Are there any case studies of others who have done this?

Answer 1

Cambridge University Press allows authors to freely distribute electronic copies of the books that it publishes, at least in mathematics and computer science. (Of course this has to be explicitly negotiated into the publishing contract.) Two good examples are Allen Hatcher's Algebraic Topology and Steve LaValle's Planning Algorithms.

You could also just release the book on the web, let people create their own physical copies through a book-printing service like Lulu or Blurb, and rely on the quality of the text to bolster your reputation instead of a traditional publisher's imprimatur. See, for example, Pat Morin's excellent Open Data Structures. However, I don't recommend this route unless (a) you write an amazingly good book, and (b) you already have tenure.

Answer 2

OTexts

I just remembered that Professor Rob Hyndman had spoken about his upcoming textbook Forecasting: Principles and Practice

The entire book is avail­able online and free-of-charge. Of course, we won’t make much money doing this, but text­books never make much money any­way — the pub­lish­ers make all the money. We’d rather cre­ate some­thing that is widely used and use­ful, than have large pub­lish­ers profit from our efforts.

Even­tu­ally a print ver­sion of the book will be avail­able to pur­chase on Ama­zon, but not until a few more chap­ters are written.

The publisher is called "OTexts". It says on their website.

OTexts represents a new approach to university textbooks. All our books will always be completely and freely available online. Why spend hundreds of dollars on printed books which are soon out-of-date when you can have continually updated online books for nothing!

At time of posting Rob's book appears to be the first text book to be published with this publisher.

It says at time of posting under the "For Authors" section

Print royalties are shared 50-50 between the author and OTexts.

Reflections

On the face of it, this sounds perfect for an author keen to maximise academic impact.

However:

• This is a very new company.
• I'm not sure what the implications would be for grants, promotions, jobs relative to publishing with an established academic publisher.

Answer 3

For instance, you can try with INTECH.

From the website:

InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Since 2004, InTech has collaborated with more than 60 000 authors and published 1720 books and 13 journals with the aim of providing free online access to high-quality research and helping leading academics to make their work visible and accessible to diverse new audiences around the world.

Answer 4

One possibility is to self-publish. DH Fremlin published his extremely well-respected treatises on Measure Theory with Lulu.com. The books (in fact, the TeX source files) are available on his website for free; all the while his books are well-enough received that many university mathematics libraries have purchased physical copies of the books.

Answer 5

You may wish to investigate http://re-press.org/ in Australia. They are an academic press that is, I believe, affiliated with an Australian University. They appear to do exactly what you describe -- make the PDF freely available and simultaneously offer a print version. We will be offering PDFs of our books through Google Play, but haven't yet found a way to subsidize this; at this stage of our development, we still have to charge, both for print versions and for PDFs.