Calling open access academic book publishers: How authors and publishers could make a modest profit | British Politics and Policy at LSE

"Now is the time for you to seize the moment and make a small-to-modest profit while performing a useful academic function. Okay it’s not quite a passionate rallying cry, but I’ve been thinking about open access book publishing recently for two reasons. The first is that on an almost monthly basis I get emails from colleagues/peers/random people asking me about my experience of publishing with Bloomsbury Academic because they are writing a book proposal and want to go open access. They’ve either been told no by established publishers or ‘yes, but it’ll cost you £20,000 – will your university funding’. To which the answer is no, or ‘eff off you cheeky money grabbing …’, depending on the author. This indicates to me that there is a market for more open access book publishers out there. While we’re here, I’ll answer the query about Bloomsbury – my experience was very positive, they did a professional job on copy editing, they were prepared to go to several designers to get a cover we liked, they produced a good web site for the free online version, and were brave in giving it a CC-NC licence. So, I’d commend them to any authors. The second event that set me thinking about OA book publishers was the recent FlatWorld Knowledge debacle. Once proclaimed as a model for sustainable open textbooks, they recently announced that, erm, they weren’t offering books for free anymore. I don’t know FWK’s business model but it seems to me they went too ambitious. They were after that big US set textbook market. This means you have to have a big product. Which means you can then get venture capital (of $26 million), which means you have to have a really big product, and so it goes on. They developed their own platform to allow annotation of books, and sales system. But when you’re doing that you get through a fast money burn rate, and then the idea of, you know, giving books away seems less appealing to the VCs who’ve piled their money in. But I think the more modest market of academic text books could be accommodated by a far simpler model..."