John Unsworth’s take on the scholarly publishing crisis, entitled “The Crisis of Audience”:
When my daughter Eleanor, now 15, was about three years old, she had an imaginary friend. One day I asked her friend’s name. “Audience,” she said. Today, Eleanor has real friends: it’s the humanities scholar who has an imaginary audience.
Unsworth suggests that not even professors or graduate students are reading much university press output anymore, and argues instead for an electronic open-access model of humanities publishing, with print (or print on demand) as an offshoot function. In particular, he suggests that humanities publishers should tap into the Web’s propensity for fostering niche communities—online there’s an audience for anything and everything, perhaps even humanities scholarship in all its jargon and splendor.
Posted by mgk at October 5, 2004 03:54 PMI don't know about the humanities, but we did something like this at my old press (the National Academies Press, www.nap.edu, technically considered a university press). All the books are available online for free, in a form which I believe is searchable but which is not easily printable. While I was there we started offering all the books in PDF form at a slightly reduced price (free to scholars in developing countries)... it was a logistical nightmare, but it started taking off to some degree even during my tenure there.
Here's a 1999 article by the director on putting the texts online: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-04/pope.html
and the results of the "PDF experiment," which was intended to plumb people's interest in PDF books:
http://aaupnet.org/resources/mellon/nap/