Greg Restall reports on his “plans for his next book”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/18/publishingabook/index.html.
bq. On and off, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do with my next book. I mean, I’m planning to write the thing, and to see to it that it is published by a decent publisher. So much is required for it to get the kind of institutional recognition that is necessary for people in a position like mine.
However, I’m looking for something more than that. I’m looking for my book to be read. Getting read is more difficult than getting published, given the avalanche of academic material published each year. I’m hoping for this book to be read, for it to be assigned as a textbook, for it to corrupt the minds of the youth, and for it to shape the field for years to come. (I may as well aim high.)
I have come to the conclusion that one very good way for me to do this is for me to give the book away for free: I plan to post the book chapters, as they’re written, online here, to have them indexed by search engines, to get people like you linking to it on your website, glancing through it, giving me feedback, helping me to improve it, etc., and to link to it, making it appear higher in search rankings, and giving other people more ways to stumble onto it, etc.
He points at one remarkable precedent:
bq. Allen Hatcher, the topologist at Cornell, has published his Algebraic Topology textbook with Cambridge University Press, and he still offers the whole thing for a free download at his site. This is unbelievably smart, if Allen’s aim (as I suspect it is) is to be read by readers. Allen’s distribution rights are more restrictive than some public distribution conditions: he, and Cambridge University Press, allow you to print a single copy of the book from the files for personal use, but not to photocopy multiple copies. This is not exactly simple for them to enforce, but you can understand why they make this restriction.
I looked at Allen’s page about the book. One thing that is revealed by the bye is that he is not being paid royalties for the book. Perhaps, that’s the part of the deal that is allowing him to make the book available online.
An arrangement like Allen’s deal with CUP and like the one Greg is after is precisely what I am hoping to do with my book project(s). I would want to retain the right to post chapters of my monograph on conditionals on my website as I see fit. I am also thinking of recycling some of the material for an undergraduate textbook on semantics and pragmatics, which I will try to find a publisher for who will let me maintain a continually updated electronic version, freely downloadable, in addition to the printed commercial product. So, this would mean that I need to retain the right to reuse the material from the monograph in such a form.
Via the relevant series editor, I have asked the prospective publisher of the monograph whether they would agree to such an arrangement. If not, there are other publishers to try. Obviously, Cambridge University Press has a precedent with Allen Hatcher’s book and MIT Press has precedents with William Mitchell’s City of Bits and Robert Barsky’s “book on Chomsky”:http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/.
There are other important developments in online publication of scientific work, which are regularly reported in Peter Suber’s brilliant “Open Access News”:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html.
Thomas McKay has a draft of his forthcoming book on plural quantification on his website. I do not know who his publisher is, however.
March 21st, 2004, at 10:57 pm #