The Case for Books by Darnton Robert

Author:Darnton, Robert
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Perseus
Published: 2010-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

2 . THE PROGRESS REPORT OF 2002

Now that the Gutenberg-e program has reached the half-way point of its six-year life span, I can offer some reflections on its progress. We launched the first e-books at the American Historical Association meeting last month in San Francisco. It was a happy moment. Superb presentations by two of the winners from our first class, Ignacio Gallup-Diaz and Michael Katten, combined with the announcement of the new winners, who make up our third class, produced a mood of triumphalism. That, of course, is dangerous. I think we may indulge in a modest amount of self-congratulation, but we have encountered problems. I would like to discuss them, and our proposals for solving them, leaving the details of the year’s activities to the report by the AHA staff, which follows these remarks.

From the beginning in 1998, we intended to set a fast pace and to aim high. I now think that the pace may have been too fast. The first competition took place in 1999; the first winners were announced in January 2000; the first workshops were held in 2000–2001; and the first e-books were published in January 2002. But there were only two of them. True, a third book was submitted in January, and a fourth should be completed by March. Moreover, those who missed the deadline had valid excuses (in one case, a son who came down with cancer, in another a pregnancy and childbirth). But I think the deadline set by Columbia University Press—originally one year, extended to two—was not realistic. The winners face the difficulties of publishing their first book while coping with many other demands, such as finding a job, moving house, preparing their first lectures, and founding families. We therefore decided to set a two-year deadline and to be flexible. There will not be an annual “launch” of six e-books, but Columbia will put them online as they become available. Some, in fact, will be finished ahead of time. Greg Brown from class three is only weeks away from submitting his final text, which will be published before some of the e-books from class one. Now that the first books have appeared, Columbia will turn out a continuous stream of products. That may create some difficulties for its marketing department, which had planned to sell an annual packet of six books (the current price is $195 for all six, very inexpensive, in my view). But there are ways around that obstacle. For my part, I think I made the mistake of setting the stakes too high. In the first years, I stressed the innovative potential of e-books as a new form of scholarly communication, and the first winners probably felt compelled to come up with something too elaborate to be feasible within a short time. In subsequent pep talks with the winners, I stressed the importance of sheer quality and the need to avoid the temptation of “bells and whistles” (please forgive that tired metaphor).

The second problem concerns our high aims.

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