Friends: It may sound counterintutive, but the fact is books that are made available free on the web sell more copies in print! That is the experience of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, whose more than 3,000 reports are available on the web for free. And now, the University of Michigan is going to follow a similar policy. See the following entry from Peter Suber's blog. I would recommend that publishers of books in the government sector such as CSIR-NISCAIR, NBT, ICAR, Publications Division, Planning Commission, etc. adopt this model. Already this hybrid model - print for sale and the electronic version for free - is practised by the Indian Academy of Sciences and INSA for their journals. MedKnow, a private publisher based at Bombay, and the National Informatics Centre, New Delhi, bring out free electronic versions of journals owned by other publishers, mostly scientific societies in the area of biomedical research. MedKnow has shown that the hybrid model has led to increased revenue for the publishers, improved quality and a very large increase in the use made of their journals (as seen from download and citation statistics). But as far as I know very few Indian books are available for free on the web. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] --------------------- U. of Michigan Press, Library, Scholarly Publishing Office Launch Digital Studies Imprint, Web Site, Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 11, 2007. Excerpt: With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press's new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website.... As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press's decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an "open and participatory publishing model" that seeks to "build a community" around its content. "Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline," MacKeen explained. "The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity." ... Pochoda stressed that there is "more than a business model at stake," however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press' chance "to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation." Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales. ___________________________________________________________ Now you can have your favourite RSS headlines come to you with the all new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html