Dear Madhukar,

In the interest of transparency: I work for Springer Nature, the publisher of one of your books. Thank you for your post. While I understand your arguments, I do believe we have already found solutions for the most important issues that you raise, and we are continuing to work on improving the book, be it in print or electronic. 

Books are an interesting topic, also from a scientific perspective. They are much more diverse than journal articles, and the reasons why researchers write books or contribute to them, or the reasons why readers read them differ very much from each other. Books have also seen a lot of change in the last couple of years. We have new business models that we didn’t know ten years ago, we have open access books, we have daily electronic updates in reference books, just to mention a few. I believe the changes will be even more fundamental in the near future, but let me come to that a bit later. 

You mention the unfavorable timeliness of books. I totally agree that it is not acceptable if an author contributes to a large handbook which will only be published many years later. We have introduced for large reference works (where there is a very large group of contributors with a high likelihood of delays) the possibility of publishing the early contributions in a “living” reference book online. Later, the book can be updated on a daily basis, either with additional chapters, or with updates for existing ones if a chapter gets outdated. Once a final stage is reached, the book is of course available in print as well as in electronic form. We therefore can combine the speed of a journal with the concept of a self-contained reference book.

Then, you are concerned about the affordability of books, and, related to it, accessibility. The books you mentioned are typically bought by institutions, not by individuals. Institutions to a large extent buy our books as eBook collections, and therefore pay a much lesser price per individual title as the “retail” price for a print book. These eBook collections also allow us to charge different prices for the same eBook collection depending on the buyer institution. Your wish that smaller, less wealthy institutions pay less for the book is already reality. Accessibility of these books for researchers in Africa and Asia is much higher today than it ever was (and in many cases accessibility is higher for certain books than for journals, because a library with scarce resources will not easily commit to long-term subscriptions of all journals of interest).

Additionally, we offer now the possibility to publish books in an open access business model, very similar to how it works in the journal world. Funders are more and more supportive for OA books, so I believe we will see much more of them in the near future. 

When it comes to usage and impact data, at least Springer Nature is very transparent. Please check out www.bookmetrix.com for all of our books and book chapters. You will find data how often the book was downloaded, cited, tweeted about, mentioned in other social media, mentioned in the news and many more indicators. Your Springer handbook was just published this June, and therefore could not collect any citations yet, but by browsing the database you may find out that books are actually much more used, downloaded, and cited than you probably thought. And this usage is brought in by libraries who subscribe the eBook collections that are used by millions of researchers and students all over the world – even if they are not aware that the book they are using online was bought by their library.

Don’t get me wrong. I will definitely not advocate that everything should be published as a book. I totally agree that some chapters would benefit from being published as journal articles. I also agree that authors should not work with a publisher who requires payments as a precondition to accept a book manuscript. But books still are the publication of choice if you want global accessibility & usage, long shelf life, self-containedness, and individuality. At least if publishers continue to develop books further, integrate print & electronic books, find appropriate and affordable business models for individuals and libraries, and continue to make full use of technology.

But if we do so, I would also like to see that books one day will count for tenure or promotions. Once we publishers make the societal and scientific impact of books transparent and comparable to a journal article, it should make a difference if you are a successful book author or not! Would you agree?

You say you enjoy good books, I do as well. Let’s then identify and reduce the flaws in books together and make books better. If you want to discuss further, I am happy to go more into detail.

Best regards

Niels

Dr Niels Peter Thomas

Chief Book Strategist, Springer Nature