posted 06-17-2006 09:07 AM            

Note as per appropriate disclosure, I am the first author of the free-access volumes.

posted 06-17-2006 11:11 AM            

How inclusive are your parameters? Nineteenth-century flatware, for example, is not too uncommon; are you interested in all such examples?

posted 06-23-2006 10:20 AM            

For the curious: It's an initiative to allow more efficient and affordable publishing of scholarly works that publishers expect to have a limited audience. Published traditionally, such books carry extremely high prices in order to try to recover the cost of production on limited sales -- which of course has the effect of further reducing sales, since fewer people can justify the expense. (Some years ago now, the tax law was changed so that publishers have to pay tax on their inventory; before that, they could keep old books warehoused for decades at virtually no cost, and took a long-term view to cost-recovery, but since then they have to turn them over more quickly.) Using this new model, which involves electronic delivery and print-on-demand technology, gets around that cost.

From the buyers' and readers' perspective, this is a great thing. From the authors' perspective it's a little more ambiguous: there's less likelihood of royalities, since many are likely to just download the work (although academic press royalties typically would barely buy you a good dinner out, there is still a feeling of reward that comes with them), but more importantly for academics, such publications are not likely to carry the same weight in dossiers for tenure and promotion as a "real" book from a "real" university press. Academic politics can be incredibly petty, and junior scholars can't take many chances - they have to go for what their departments define as "important" presses.

posted 06-23-2006 03:25 PM            

Cornell's D-Space project is a print-on-demand service, but with an academic focus. I've written for other PoD projects before, and I think it's a good system. The nice thing about D-Space is there's some regulation of the quality of the work, helping to solve the greatest weakness of most PoD services. There's nothing quite like sending off $40 or $50 for someone's PoD book only to get it and find that it's full of mistakes, or has no new information. Of course that can happen even with editorial oversight, but at least this improves your odds a bit....

posted 09-07-2006 02:38 PM            

Yes the Cornll DSpace does operate with print copies at cost usually with no author royalties(none for this book). This specific publishing program (Internet-First University Press)had been grant-supported to cover the graphic art costs, etc. Open-access digital publishing is really part of the university's land-grant mandate, etc. to get information to the public (as a tax-payer support institution).

I checked recently on the hard copy purchases of the Compendium which were being handled though the Cornell University print shop. They were concerned as the shipping costs to the UK (using their normal carrier) were costing multiples of the actual cost for the book. That was not particularly acceptable. Last week, the print book orders were transfered to the University Book Store (which is more accustomed to international shipments and may be able to use a book rate that can pertain internationally, etc.).

In response to questions on 19th century Scottish flatware included in the Compendium, it is one area that was not comprehensively covered. We made the decision to be more representative than comprehensive for something as common as pieces in that category. We obviously did not even begin to cover what has appeared on the markets for this category. We tried to provide representative styles and examples from various provincial locations of flatware as well as rarer earlier examples. Many of those flatware listings were in museums since we hope they may be a stable resource and potentially viewable by those interested in a particular piece, maker or mark. Obviously, it can be very difficult to determine whether a style of provincial-made spoons may be 12 separate spoons or the same single spoon appearing 12 times (if it lacks specific engraving). For this reason, the concentration was more on hollowware than flatware for pieces after 1800.