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Wednesday, November 19, 2008
University Press, With Amazon, Revives and Sells Out-of-Print Books
By JENNIFER HOWARD
Like homesteaders sitting on land with untapped oil reserves, many university presses possess a rich but underused resource: out-of-print titles. The challenge has been how best to drill into that resource—how to let readers know about books that have been out of print for years or decades, and then make it easy for them to buy a copy.
Many presses have been testing out print-on-demand and other ways of delivering old books to new readers. On Thursday, the University of Minnesota Press will formally announce a new program to put almost every book it has ever published back in print and make them readily available. The program, Minnesota Archive Editions, comes out of a partnership with Amazon.com, Google, and the Minneapolis-based company BookMobile, and is notable for its scope and how it outsources much of the heavy lifting to commercial partners.
Under the arrangement, Amazon has agreed to digitize the files of the press's out-of-print books; the full texts will be browsable using Google Book Search. If a reader comes across one online and likes what he sees, he can click through to Amazon.com and order a copy to be printed and shipped to him using Amazon's BookSurge publishing program. Or he can click over to the press's Web site and place an order, which Minnesota's distributor, the Chicago Distribution Center, will forward to BookMobile for printing and delivery. That option may be more appealing to library and bookstore clients who have specific warehousing and distribution accounts.
Either way suits the press just fine, says its director, Douglas Armato. The point is to get as many books as possible out there, and at very little cost to the press. It paid no money upfront to Amazon; the online book seller will recoup the cost of digitizing as copies are sold.
About 660 books are already available through the program, and Mr. Armato expects that number to reach a thousand. From the press's perspective, the hardest part has been researching the rights to everything it has published since it opened its doors in 1925. Contracts had to be unearthed, and living authors or heirs had to be contacted and informed about the plan. "It has familiarized us in a remarkable way with our backlist," Mr. Armato said. "It really amounted to an archaeological dig."
Most authors have been happy to hear that their work will be back in print, he said, but "they do have questions"—most involving what kinds of royalties might be involved.
That, of course, depends on sales and on the original contracts. Mr. Armato isn't expecting Minnesota Archive Editions to leave the press's coffers overflowing, but he already has evidence that a market exists for at least some of those books.
Without any publicity, the program has already generated sales through Amazon: about 200 units so far, with the highest concentrations in history and philosophy, where a classic is perhaps more likely to remain a classic than in more newfangled fields. A modest Minnesota Archive Editions best seller has even emerged: Essays in Ancient Philosophy, a 1987 collection by the late Michael Frede, who taught philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, has sold 12 copies.
The most surprising sale to date? One copy of a 1949 volume, Therapeutic Group Work With Children.
Copyright © 2008 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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