How I published a book, thanks to The Open Laboratory

Sep 1, 2010 Alun Digital Academia, Science 5 Comments Communication, Physics, Publishing

Avail­able at Scribd & Lulu

I’ve been busy in August, and one of the things I’ve been work­ing on has been out for a couple of weeks and I for­got to blog it. I’ve pub­lished a book.

I haven’t writ­ten a book, or edited it or any­thing requir­ing any aca­demic input. I just worked on the pub­lish­ing. The book is the first volume of the Pro­ceed­ings from the GIREP-EPEC and PHEC 2009 con­fer­ence. In Eng­lish, it was a Phys­ics Edu­ca­tion con­fer­ence. I had noth­ing to do with the con­fer­ence, but my Head of Depart­ment men­tioned to a col­league at McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity that he was going to pub­lish a pro­ceed­ings volume and she remembered I’d worked on the cover for the first Open Labor­at­ory book, and so must be an expert in publishing.

I’m not, but as Shawn Gra­ham has shown, the actual pro­cess of pub­lish­ing a book via Lulu is easy and pain-free if you’re will­ing to make some com­prom­ises. The draw­backs are things like a lack of pro­fes­sional type­set­ting, but these days pub­lish­ers often insist on camera-ready copy any­way. There’s also no mar­ket­ing. For some con­fer­ence volumes this will be a line in a cata­logue and an email and, pos­sibly a dis­play at the next con­fer­ence meet­ing of the pre­vi­ous pro­ceed­ings. You do lose some help by bypassing a pub­lisher, but you can poten­tially gain a lot more too.

Firstly we set the price. We went quite high. The print ver­sion of the book is £20. That’s about 6p a page so it’s a sim­ilar cost to pho­to­copy­ing the book. It’s not extra­vag­antly high, but it’s higher than it strictly needs to be as we’ll also be mak­ing it avail­able via Amazon. We decided to do that because people are famil­iar with buy­ing a book from Amazon, they’re not so famil­iar with Lulu, even though it’s the same product. To release a book on Amazon we have to double the retail price, to allow their mar­gin. Des­pite this a 365 page aca­demic book could often be more than £50 so it’s a saving.

But we can do better.

The book is released with a Cre­at­ive Com­mons BY-NC-ND licence and we’ve put the PDF up on Scribd. You can read and down­load it for free as a PDF. Print out the chapters you’re inter­ested in and leave the rest.

After two weeks we have 900 views and a few sales. It’s likely that it’s not 900 unique views, but it’s still not a bad res­ult for two weeks. In the Human­it­ies print runs of 250 volumes are com­mon. I don’t know about the Sci­ences, where the pub­lic­a­tion cul­ture is dif­fer­ent any­way, but we have some­thing that I think will com­pete well in terms of read­er­ship in com­par­ison to a sim­ilar volume released via a tra­di­tional pub­lisher. It won’t be any­thing like as prof­it­able as a book pro­duced by a tra­di­tional pub­lisher, but none of the aca­dem­ics would see that profit any­way so for us that’s not an issue.

It’s also a lot faster to get to pub­lic­a­tion. Cheryl Hur­kett did all the LaTeX work on the file and when she was ready she called me in. I registered her with Lulu and we set up a new pro­ject. We tried upload­ing a PDF out­put Lulu, but that didn’t work. So we sent the out­put to a .ps file instead. That con­ver­ted pain­lessly. The cover took a bit more muck­ing about as we went with a vari­ation on the stand­ard tem­plates, but the whole thing went from LaTeX to book on one Thursday. The only gripe we had was that you have to choose to get the free ISBN num­ber right at the start of the pro­ject, and once you have that num­ber your title is set. The book on the Lulu page is lis­ted with the work­ing title, which is pass­able for a first attempt but not good enough for volume 2.

There will be a volume 2, as we could show how simple the pub­lic­a­tion pro­cess was.

It’s not a pan­acea for all aca­demic pub­lish­ing. There are plenty of pub­lish­ers who do add value to a book. How­ever, for con­fer­ence pro­ceed­ings the only reas­ons for choos­ing to pub­lish via a spe­cial­ist pub­lisher rather than Lulu are social. The aca­demic out­put is the same, it’s just that one is slower and more expens­ive and that’s the sys­tem we’re used to. The out­put can be traced dir­ectly back to Bora Zivkovic’s innov­a­tion with The Open Labor­at­ory so his blog­ging is con­trib­ut­ing to an observ­able dif­fer­ence in the sci­entific process.