Penn Press to launch e-books in January

Penn Press is about to join the digital world with plans to launch over 400 e-books in January.

“We think this will be a tremendous boost to the accessibility of university press books, and a tremendous boost to scholars and students who want to be able to search the entire corpus of university press scholarly books and journals,” said Eric Halpern, the director of Penn Press.

Penn Press is one of about 65 members in the University Press Content Consortium. Collectively, UPCC will launch “thousands and thousands of e-books” through the Johns Hopkins Project MUSE platform starting in January. The e-books “will be licensed to libraries in either comprehensive or subject-based collections,” Halpern said. “The first year’s worth of collections are now being sold to libraries — it’s exciting.”

At launch, the books will be available as PDFs with the ability to download them to devices and print a chapter at a time. “But the plan is to migrate to reflowable formats” where “the text loses most or all of the properties of the designed, printed page,” and can be modified to readers’ preferences.

“As a co-editor of The City in the 21st Century series at Penn Press, I am very excited about the prospect of eBooks,” Eugenie Birch, a professor of Urban Research and Education, wrote in an email. “As more and more people are moving to Kindle and other electronic readers, being able to access the kinds of books we publish is a decided advantage.”

Professor of Political Science Rogers Smith has already published e-books both through Princeton University Press and Cambridge University Press. “The benefit of publishing digitally is simply that it expands access to the works,” Smith explained. “I am personally purchasing more books in digital form because I can carry them around with me on my iPad. Since we academics write to get our ideas out, and purchase to get ideas in, anything that makes those processes easier is a good thing,” he wrote in an email.

Yet, some professors, like professor of American History Kathy Peiss, expressed a preference for printed books. Although Peiss is “glad that Penn Press is expanding in this direction,” she believes the two formats each offer distinct advantages.

“People read differently when they turn pages and can jump between parts of a book than when they scroll,” Peiss said. “I tend to read more quickly and absorb information better when I’m reading the printed page; younger generations may have an entirely different experience and prefer the screen. I hope we’ll have the choice of e-book or printed book for some time into the future.”

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