Digital access to recently-published scholarly books
involves three kinds of players: (1) university presses, which produce the
books, (2) university and college libraries, which seek to make the books
accessible to their faculty members and students, and (3) digital interfaces between
the presses and the libraries. The
digital interfaces include Project MUSE, Books at JSTOR, University Press
Scholarship Online (UPSO), University Publishing Online, EBSCO eBooks, Ebrary,
and ACLS Humanities E-Book. Some of
these interfaces have been around for a while, but several (as noted below)
have launched in just the last one or two years.
Depending on the interface and the terms of its subscription or purchase
agreement with the university or college at which the potential reader works or
studies, there is potential for an incredibly high degree of digital access to
books, approaching the level to which we’ve become accustomed for journal
articles. For me, the exemplar is the
purchase that my employer (Yale) has made of the e-book collection at Project MUSE, which launched in 2012. For recent
scholarly monographs from the 80+ presses participating
in Project MUSE -- including those at Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, MIT, NYU, the
University of California, U. Michigan, U. Penn, and UVA -- Yale faculty members
and students can read the entire book online and can download each and every
chapter as a distinct PDF document, thereby obtaining their own personal copy,
much as if they’d scanned or xeroxed the Yale library’s dead-tree copy. There are, of course, legal restrictions on what
you can do with the PDFs, just as there are legal restrictions on what you can
do with a chapter that you scan by hand from a dead-tree library book. But this level of access is far beyond what’s
offered by Google Books or Amazon “Look Inside” (in which you get only a
fragmentary view of the book) or by a trade-book interface like Kindle (in which each reader must pay
individually for the book and read it on a custom-built machine).
A serious limitation of Project MUSE e-books is that some
major university presses -- including Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, U.
Chicago, and Yale -- don’t participate.
But these presses do
participate in other interfaces. For
example, the presses at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale are among the many participants
in Books at JSTOR (launched in 2012). Meanwhile, Oxford University Press owns and
participates in UPSO (launched in 2011), as do the presses at U. Chicago, Yale,
and elsewhere. Cambridge University Press owns and
participates in University Publishing Online (launched in 2011), as do several
additional presses, mostly British.
Participation by the presses is only half the battle: it’s
also necessary for your university or college library to subscribe
to, or purchase from, the interface. At present, the
interfaces are so new that there isn’t yet an industry standard for which interfaces a serious university library should have. For example, both the Harvard library and the Yale library have purchased all of the e-book collection at Project MUSE, providing broad access for their faculty and students to recent books from the numerous presses therein, but those libraries have not yet bought access to Books at JSTOR. My guess -- not based
on any inside information -- is that this is likely to change soon and that
it’s going to become standard, at least for big university libraries, to buy
access to all the big interfaces so as to give faculty and students broad
digital access to recent books from the whole panoply of university
presses.
Thus, if you write a scholarly book, it’s increasingly likely
to be discovered and read in digital form, through an interface like MUSE or
JSTOR. I think this is a happy
development for the quality and effectiveness of research and intellectual
discourse. The readers who would find
your book relevant if only they knew
about its content will be much more likely to discover the book and use
it. This will make an especially big
difference for research that crosses boundaries between disciplinary
communities. When an author and a reader
aren’t in the same kind of department, don’t have the same mentors, don’t read
the same journals, and don’t attend the same conferences, a digital search is
often their most realistic hope to “meet” one another.
Apart from the sheer increase in likelihood that books will
be matched with interested readers, there are further implications that go to
the very nature of books. Significantly,
a digital interface tends to disaggregate a book into its component
chapters. When you do a word search of
the full text of all the books on Project MUSE, the results that appear are chapters of books. This disaggregation may go farther in the
future. As I was finalizing my book with Yale
University Press this past spring, I learned that the Press had
recently established a policy -- partly in response to advice from the
interface people -- of asking each book author to write an abstract and select
five “keywords” for every chapter. These
abstracts and keywords are being sent to all the digital interfaces in which
Yale Press participates. Indeed, UPSO presently
offers searches of books by abstract and keyword. Project MUSE doesn’t, but perhaps they will
in the future, especially if more publishers provide such info. (Not yet having access to Books at JSTOR, I
don’t know what kind of searches they offer.)
Writing an abstract and keywords for every chapter of my
book -- something I suspect many of you Legal History Blog readers will do for your next book
if you haven’t already -- was an interesting exercise. It’s familiar to people who publish articles
in social science journals or post articles on the Social Science Research
Network (SSRN), but it’s more novel for scholars oriented toward the humanities
and/or toward book-writing. The
chapter-by-chapter nature of the exercise forces you to think about how
different parts of your book might interest different audiences. Of course you hope that people will be
interested in the book’s overall thesis, but if (say) your chapters consist of
case studies, some readers may latch onto one of them from an angle quite
different from yours.
This is especially true for books that focus (as mine does)
on the development of the modern administrative state. Typically, a book on the administrative state
will (1) state a trans-substantive thesis about the general nature of bureaucracy,
politics, etc., while (2) supporting that thesis through case studies grounded
in particular substantive areas of administration. My book, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940, analyzes a
trans-substantive phenomenon (the fact that public officers once earned their living on a profit-seeking basis but were ultimately converted to salaries) through case studies of
particular areas of government work (naturalization, veterans’ benefits, state
and local property taxes, federal custom-houses, state and federal prosecutors,
naval warfare, and a few more). For all
of these case studies, the book offers extensive primary research that isn’t
available anyplace else. I therefore
hope the book will be of interest to readers who care about (say) criminal prosecution
but have no interest in official compensation per se. Chapter-by-chapter abstracts and keywords
help researchers recognize that a 500-page book contains (say) 50 pages that’s
highly relevant to their work, even though the case-study subject matter of
those 50 pages isn’t a big enough part of the book to be reflected in the
book’s title or its LC subject headings.
For my book, the LC subject headings are “Fees, Administrative--United
States--History” and “United States--Officials and employees--Salaries, etc.--History.” Neither of these reflects the topics of the
case studies -- an omission that can be remedied by abstracts and keywords for
individual chapters.
To be sure, there may be disadvantages to the digital
interfaces’ tendency to disaggregate a book into particular components that
don’t all have the same audience.
Perhaps there is a risk of undermining the integrity of the book as a
coherent intellectual product. But from
what I’ve seen, the interfaces make it easy for a researcher to jump from the
search-retrieved chapter to the book as a whole. And the chapter-by-chapter abstracts make it
easy for the researcher to situate herself within the structure of the book,
having entered it through a “side door,” as it were.
Still, as an author, you may feel some ambivalence about the
researcher whose general project is orthogonal to your own, but who
extractively reads a single chapter of your book because the obscure primary
sources analyzed therein prove to be highly (if accidentally) relevant to her
project, even though she little appreciates the remainder of what you’ve done. But in my view, a case-study-based book
should ideally make contributions at two levels: first, in terms of its general
trans-substantive argument; and second, in each of the substantive areas on
which its case studies respectively touch.
In using (say) criminal prosecution as a case study of officers’
monetary incentives, I sought to move things forward within the historical
study of criminal justice, and I’d love for scholars specifically interested in
that subject to “extract” Chapter 7 of my book.
Further, I think that an extractive style of reading is
inevitably common -- and sometimes (though far from always) optimal -- in
primary-source-based disciplines like history.
In the time that it takes you to read one book cover-to-cover, you might
instead “read” five books extractively.
The disadvantage of reading extractively is that you’ll engage less
deeply with each author’s argument, but the advantage is that you’ll have time
to engage with the arguments of more authors -- and benefit from seeing more
authors’ primary research. It may be
that the digitization of books will make this style of reading more prevalent, and I think it would be good for readers and authors to be more self-conscious about that possibility.
