From Princeton University:
Princeton University Press joins the Kindle age with ‘The Subprime Solution.’By Adam Grybowski
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2008 11:53 AM EDT
ON Aug. 15 Princeton University Press will release, two weeks ahead of its print publication, its first Kindle e-book, Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It (Princeton University Press, 2008). The Kindle is Amazon’s e-book reader, released with fanfare last November.
The subprime mortgage crisis that is currently dragging the U.S. economy into a possible recession will certainly inspire economists to spill a lot of ink debating its cause and possible solutions. With the Kindle, readers can experience Mr. Shiller’s take on it — no ink, paper or binding necessary.
Amazon spent three years developing the Kindle. The wireless device uses an electronic-paper display technology that may provide the closest experience to reading on real paper yet developed. It weighs 10.3 ounces and holds more than 200 titles, including newspapers, magazines and blogs, as well as access to Wikipedia and a dictionary. Users don’t have to locate a hotspot to buy and download media. The Kindle’s wireless connectivity uses the same network technology of advanced cell phones, not WiFi.
”Personally, I think this is the best we’ve seen, for an e-book reader,” says Priscilla Treadwell, electronic publications marketing manager for PU Press. “It’s a lot easier to use, the text is more eye-friendly, you can put 200 books on it, and you can download books in your living room.”
Back in the early 2000s, when the e-book market was beginning to develop, PU Press “decided to test the waters,” Ms. Treadwell says. They digitized about 300 titles and made them available for sale in the early e-book formats for Microsoft Reader, Adobe Acrobat Reader, and Palm handheld devices. Despite the introduction of the Sony Reader Digital Book, which was supposed to be an evolutionary step for the industry, e-books have failed to dent the market for traditionally printed books.
Amazon promotes the Kindle as a revolutionary product for the reading public, and PU Press is responding.
”We’re taking a big step back into this, now that the market has matured and it’s a lot clearer what’s likely to be successful,” Ms. Treadwell says. “University presses are seeing it as an important market to be in. More and more people expect information to be available online or in digital format.”
The Subprime Solution will be followed by From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role (Princeton University Press, 1999) by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International. Mr. Zakaria’s latest book, The Post-American World (W. W. Norton, 2008), which examines the rise of China and India, has been a best seller since its May release.
After that, Princeton University Press is planning to release about 400 backlist titles for digital distribution. And beginning in the fall, frontlist titles will regularly receive digital releases alongside the traditional print format.
About a year ago, PU Press began working on a contract to distribute its books electronically with Amazon. As for choosing Mr. Shiller’s new book as its first Kindle release, “It was a bit serendipitous,” Ms. Treadwell says. “It’s a timely topic, as we all know, and I like the fact that the title says ‘solution,’ and not ‘disaster.’”
In The Subprime Solution, Mr. Shiller, a Yale economics professor, examines the origins of the subprime crisis and outlines a response to solve it. He is also the author of Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000), a New York Times best seller that sold nearly 100,000 copies. In that book Mr. Shiller predicted the stock market crash that happened just one month after its publication.
Though the majority of books PU Press publishes are specialized or academic, it is introducing e-books to consumers before focusing on the university demographic. A device like the Kindle that can hold so much information seems ideal for students, who are required to read so much material at once. PU Press is developing ways to deliver textbooks on different, nontraditional platforms, and the Kindle will likely be one of them.
Not all books are available electronically. “You can’t assume any book on Amazon will be available in a digital version,” Ms. Treadwell says. First, they have to acquire rights, and that can be tricky when dealing with the likes of university presses that publish a great variety of art books. While a press may have the rights for the print edition, which is standard, they may not have the rights for the digital edition. The language of contract agreements may be catching up to a new modern publishing reality, but problems with rights for backlisted titles will likely persist.
The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do about It by Robert Shiller will be released in electronic format Aug. 15. It will be available in print Sept. 1; (609) 258-3897;
www.press.princeton.edu; For information about the Kindle, visit
www.amazon.com
