Parlor Press/Glassbead Books Launch
We've published a new book and launched a new imprint at Parlor Press that I hope will be of interest to Kairosnews readers. The book is Looking for a Fight: Is There a Republican War on Science? and it has been published under the new imprint Glassbead Books. As you'll see at the book's website, it's a Crooked Timber "book event" and collects respsonses to Chris Mooney's much-discussed The Republican War on Science. Many more such books are planned.
The book has been published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License and is available as a PDF ebook for free and as a low-cost printed book. That makes this somewhat of an event, I hope, since we've all been interested in ways to find new ways to address the so-called crisis in scholarly publishing. John Holbo, the Glassbead editor, and I, have been working together for a while to see how we might collaborate, to see what's possible with lots of enthusiasm, no budget, talented writers, and interested readers. John and I actually met at the MLA session that Clancy Ratliff, Kris Blair, and I were on ("Digital Scholarly Publishing: Beyond the Crisis") last December and that Clancy wrote about at CultureCat. So, nine months later, progress!
If you want to read more about the philosophy behind it all, check out the Glassbead page or read this news release, "Parlor Press Launches Glassbead Books, Initiative to Publish Low-Cost and Free Books under Creative Commons License" (PDF format). And don't forget to download your free book here. Or, if you want a physical copy, it's available for sale at Amazon or for a discount at the Parlor site.
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Comments
Go Dave!
Congrats on the move to CC licensing for this text. Definitely demonstrates how very progressive Parlor Press is in thinking about the future of academic publishing.
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Charlie | cyberdash
This is great news;
This is great news; congratuations, David. I read part of Benkler's Wealth of Networks <http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Download_PDFs_of_the_book> as a PDF, and then I went out and bought the hardcopy book. I really appreciated Yale's making those options available, and I've been wondering, with reference to a book I'm working on, whether any comp/rhet publishers would be willing to do the same. Glad to know the answer is "yes."
Parlor/WAC Clearinghouse too . . .
Thanks for your nice note, "senioritis." You know, we've already tried a similar project with the Parlor/WAC Clearinghouse collaboration. All of the Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition (Charles Bazerman's series) appear in printed versions and on the Web (at the WAC Clearinghouse). So far, the response has been terrific, with lots of downloads. The books sell pretty well, so the presence of the free online versions doesn't really hurt sales that I can tell. However, sales are nowhere near close enough to support production costs, which are high, especially when you factor in what Chuck likes to call "sweat equity."
Believe me, there's a lot of that in all of these these books. What keeps us going, I guess, is that we have a degree of autonomy and the hard work has a more direct impact on the field. If feels like we're not doing the work of a big journal distributor or press, but the hands-on work of scholarly dissemination. We listen very carefully to outside reviewers, and the degree of collaboration among the editors, reviewers, and the press is high and rewarding in its own right.
Dave