— Ch. 1 · Founding And Mission —
National Academies Press.
~3 min read · Ch. 1 of 5
The US National Academies Press was created to publish reports issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This organization publishes nearly 500 titles a year on topics ranging from sciences to transportation. Its stated mission appears self-contradictory at first glance. The press must disseminate works as widely as possible while remaining financially self-sustaining through sales. This dual goal has driven decades of experimentation with online publishing models.
Digital Publishing Pioneers
In 1993, the entity known as the National Academy Press became the first self-sustaining publisher to make material available on the Web for free. By 1997, one thousand reports were accessible as sequential page images starting with i, then ii, then iii, and continuing onward. A minimal navigational envelope accompanied these digital files. Their experience up to 1998 indicated that open access led to increased sales when page images served as the final viewable object. From 1998, the NAP developed Openbook, an online navigational envelope producing stable page URLs. This system enabled chapter, page, and in-book search navigation to images of book pages. HTML chunks increasingly replaced static images to allow users to browse books directly. This page-by-page navigation arrived long before Amazon's Look Inside or Google's Book Search existed.Open Access Experiments
In 2003, the NAP published results from an online experiment designed to measure cannibalization effects if all reports were given away online in PDF format. The project was developed as a Mellon-funded grant working with the University of Maryland Business School. Researchers interrupted buyers just before finalizing an online order. Participants received an opportunity to acquire the work in PDF for a randomly generated discount of 50%, 10%, 100%, or 70% off list price. If the answer was no, the press offered one more step off the price. The conclusion showed that 42% of customers would take the free PDF when interrupted during print book purchases. This meant 58% of potential purchasers remained willing to pay for printed copies. These numbers produced significant implications for publishing strategies within the context of the NAP's long tail experience. Giving away free access to PDFs for about half the list resulted in only 33% loss of sales over 18 months while enabling 100 times the dissemination.