Sarah Manekin invited me and others to contribute to a workshop on “Researching, Writing and Publishing History in the Digital Age” for graduate students in the Department of History, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia on Friday, November 16th, 2012. This workshop builds on a prior discussion we organized at the History of Education Society meeting in 2010, which served as a pilot for Writing History in the Digital Age (co-edited with Kristen Nawrotzki), our open peer reviewed volume that is freely available online and forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

My primary task at the UPenn workshop is to explain the rapidly-changing world of digital book publishing for scholars in six minutes. Given that time constraint, here’s the simplest way that I can think of presenting some key concepts with examples. If you have any better ideas or suggested revisions, post them in a comment below.

Four Publishing Models for Peer-Reviewed Digital Monographs

• E-books: Several academic publishers are producing proprietary e-books (typically designed to be sold and read via Kindle, Nook, Google Play, etc. devices), in formats that are very similar to print editions (some refer to e-books as “glorified PDFs”); some publishers are experimenting with shorter monographs (less than 50,000 words, such as Palgrave Pivot); a small number of enhanced e-books include additional digital content (such as Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark, enhanced e-book edition, UNC Press, with backstory at Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement).
• Companion sites: To supplement proprietary print or e-book sales, several publishers are allowing or encouraging authors to create their own companion websites, which offer freely accessible additional content beyond the copyrighted text (such as Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline book, UPenn Press, and the author’s companion website of maps, documents, links; and Christine Henseler’s Generation X Goes Global edited volume, Routledge Press, and the author’s companion site that expands on the book).
• Open draft for discussion: Some publishers have permitted authors to post draft manuscripts on the open web for public discussion during the developmental or review stages, with the final version available for proprietary sale only (such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence open-review edition from MediaCommonsPress, and final version from NYU Press; Trevor Getz and Thomas Padilla’s open-review volume, Subjecting History, with the final version to be printed by Ohio University Press).
• Open-access scholarship: A few publishers operate with business models that are not dependent on book sales revenue, which allows them to freely distribute the completed monograph on the open web, with or without print-on-demand copies for sale (such as the DigitalCultureBooks imprint of the University of Michigan Press; AnvilAcademic, a publishing experiment co-sponsored by CLIR and NITLE).

Start with a small step: All of this can be quite daunting at first glance, especially if the terrain is unfamiliar. For graduate students in history, my recommended first step is to experiment with a digital format for a writing project that you’re already working on, such as a conference paper, where you can plan ahead with other panelists to publicly share and discuss each other’s writing before & after the event, on the open web. Our edited volume, Writing History in the Digital Age (available online now and forthcoming, University of Michigan Press) originally began as a conference panel, “Writing History” (2010). Today, the technology for hosting your own open review on the web has become much easier, and I recommend using the CommentPress Core plugin for WordPress.

See additional resources on related topics, such as:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo, Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices, MediaCommonsPress edition, 2012.

Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty, “Introduction,” Writing History in the Digital Age, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press; Trinity College (CT) web-book edition, Spring 2012, http://WritingHistory.trincoll.edu.

Lisa Spiro, “Scholarly Communication, Open Education, and Digital Humanities Support Models.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, May 30, 2012. http://digitalscholarship.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/scholarly-communication-open-education-and-digital-humanities-support-models/.

Audrey Watters, Publishing Outside the Academy workshop notes, created for THATCamp Hybrid Pedagogy, October 2012.