Publishing E-Books
Making its books available on the Internet for free has helped to increase hard-copy sales for the National Academies Press, according to NAP director Barbara Kline Pope. Speaking Feb. 21 at a session called "How Can Scientists Thrive with Paperless Publishing?" at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pope said, "We publish all of our books in paper format and electronic format simultaneously. The text is up online for free for anyone who wants to read it. Most of the people visiting our site come to search, browse, or read our text. Others come and buy hard-copy books. For example, this past Friday [Feb. 18], we had 7,000 unique visitors who read 15,000 pages of our books, and we had 62 orders for hard-copy books on that day," compared to two orders per day when NAP first went online. The Internet publishing ...
