An interesting story about an academic imprint from Bloomsbury with a different business model ….
The imprint will use Creative Commons licences to allow non-commercial use of all its titles on publication. Pinter described it as “a major commitment to spreading knowledge more easily throughout the world, with a sustainable business model”.
She said it was the first time a major publishing company had devoted a whole imprint to this model. “We think it will work for certain kinds of books: it will promote our titles, which will be known because the students will have easy access to them in a digital form, and we will be relying on the institutional market and library sales.” Titles will be sold as books using short-run technologies and print-on-demand. [theBookseller.com]
It will be interesting to see how this develops and in particular how ‘commercial’ use is defined. Will it be OK to add the titles to various emerging aggregations of ebooks? And what will the attitude towards the library promoting use of the free versions by putting records for them in catalogs and so on?
The story claims that 50 titles will be in circulation by the end of 2009.
Via PersonaNonData.
