UW Press dabbles with Kindle, Amazon print on demand

The University of Washington Press is gearing up to sell books on Kindle — the first time it has made content available on Amazon.com's electronic reader — and plans to shift publishing of 100 books to Amazon’s print-on-demand service, BookSurge. The UW Press joins a number of academic publishers who are working with Amazon to spur sales and expand digital distribution. Amazon, for its part, appears to be showing a growing interest in the academic market.

The UW Press is starting to convert the 25-book Weyerhaeuser Environmental Series into Kindle format, and will look at whether to add other titles.

“We decided rather than to jump in with both feet, we would use this series as our entry and do an analysis of it,” said Pat Soden, director of the UW Press.

BookSurge is an Amazon print-on-demand service that does printing and distribution of hard-copy books on an as-needed basis. The UW Press sees it as a way to derive some revenue from slow-selling or out-of-print books that are not cost-effective to print itself.

It's not hard to see why Amazon is mining academia. The Association of American University Presses, an industry trade group, said its U.S.-based members published 6,000 titles and generated roughly $300 million in sales in 2008 (those figures don’t include sales by the U.S. arms of the Oxford and Cambridge university presses, which are the largest academic publishers in the U.S.).

On the Kindle front, Amazon's interest in universities may be broader. The company, which released the second version of its Kindle reader in February, is said to be at work on a Kindle 3 with a larger screen. It reportedly will be tailored to newspaper and magazine readers, but there’s speculation it could also be targeted at college students as a textbook replacement.

Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener declined to say how many academic publishers are working with Kindle and BookSurge, but said, “our goal with Kindle is to offer every book ever printed, in any language, so we are making an effort across publisher types.” Amazon, he said, is “seeing quite a bit of interest from academic publishers in Print on Demand.”

Princeton University Press, which began converting books to Kindle format in September 2008, has about 500 Kindle titles and plans to add another hundred this fall. Priscilla Treadwell, electronic publications marketing manager for the New Jersey-based press, said Kindle “sales are encouraging,” but added that her office doesn’t have enough data yet to make a full evaluation.

She declined to discuss the costs of converting titles to Kindle and how Amazon splits revenue from Kindle e-book sales. Amazon and UW Press also declined to specify financial arrangements.

For now, Princeton is limiting its Kindle titles to so-called academic trade books, and is not putting college textbooks on Kindle, fearing that could cannibalize textbook print sales, Treadwell said. She also said the Kindle isn’t ideal for books that include a lot of illustrations, which don’t reproduce well yet in electronic form.

The Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge university presses are all customers of Amazon's BookSurge, according to Amazon.

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