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Contrast these figures with the average print run of a monograph cited
by the British Academy. The PDF top five global downloads in 2008
were as follows:
El Lago Español
46,394 (28,041 complete book)
1
Ethics and Auditing
46,310 (22,354 complete book)
2
The Islamic Traditions of Cirebon
41,532 (19,692 complete book)
3
The Austronesians
38,750 (24,839 complete book)
4
Myanmar: the state, community
and the environment
5
34,876 (24,882 complete book)
Outside looking in or inside looking out?
One sometimes feels, however, that if it does not happen in the USA, it
doesn't happen. Thus Antipodean e-presses were somewhat taken
aback when various US educational outlets announced in March 2009
that University of Michigan Press (UM Press) was the first to move to
a digital free, online monograph model with POD sales. This was some
three to four years after the launch of Australian e-press initiatives with
the same model (Steele, 2008). Michigan's provost stated that 'a
university press should be judged by its contribution to scholarship and
that university presses have been “marginalized” by their economic
challenges' (Jaschik, 2009).
The UM Press release notes that 'digital publishing helps the UM
Press to adopt a business model more consistent with the university
research goal to disseminate information as widely and freely as
possible' (University of Michigan, 2009). The digital model will allow
'enhanced digital options, including hot links, graphics, 3D animation
and video'. Publishers have been changing content and formats to
reflect economic circumstances. Even major publishers like Oxford
University Press, however, are dropping or repositioning footnotes
because of costs. Digital e-books with hyperlinks not only to footnotes
but also to additional content, as at Michigan and Sydney university
presses, are the means of overcoming the restrictions of print.
Crane (2009) and his colleagues have commented: 'we must now face
the challenge of rebuilding our infrastructure in a digital form. Much of
the intellectual capital that we accumulated in the twentieth century is
inaccessible, either because its print format does not lend itself to
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