In one of this blog's forays into the economics of publishing (rather than the publishing of economics), I spoke to Frances Pinter, the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic. An offshoot of Bloomsbury, best known for the Harry Potter books, it's a commercial experiment, a test of a business model for the online world.

The model goes like this. Scholarly titles will be available for free download under a Creative Commons licence – currently as pdfs but later in HTML format. There will be hardback versions, priced comparably to other academic publishers who sell to libraries. (The prices of the titles currently available on the website look high to me compared to most university press titles, but are apparently not representative of the forthcoming list). And there will be e-book versions for whatever devices are available, with additional material, perhaps further content, or multimedia content. These too will be priced close to the market median. Ms Pinter compares these different versions to a plain vanilla ice cream, an ice cream sandwich, and an ice cream sundae respectively.

The gamble in the model is that the free CC version will increase rather than decrease hardback sales. As the website says,

The debate over whether or not free availability increases or decreases
sales rages on, not just in publishing but also in the music and film
industries. Pilot projects in academic publishing indicate that book
sales are not harmed, and authors are happy to reach a wider audience.

If that proves correct, the hardbacks will do a lot of the work of covering costs – which it is intended will include a small royalty for authors – and the profit margin. For one novelty about Bloomsbury Academic compared to other experiments is that it's fully commercial and intended to deliver a commercial return to the parent company. Competitors are often subsidized in some way – perhaps through authors' research grants (at least for monographs, although not often for the full costs of originating a book), or through the publishers drawing a university salary as well as running the publishing operation. I think this is true of Open Book Publishers, about which I blogged a while ago.

Ms Pinter says Bloomsbury Academic is attracting a lot of 'stellar' authors who like the free download of their work being made available. There are not many titles on the website as yet – more will arrive after launch of course. Bloomsbury Academic was announced in the autumn of 2008 and will be fully launched early in 2010. Given the success of the parent company, this is definitely an enterprise worth keeping an eye on. At the scale of publishing planned, it will prove a real test of the impact of free downloads on sales in other formats.