FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SUNY PRESS DECLARES “BOOKS UNBOUND”
First UP to offer simultaneous electronic editions of new hardcover books

(April 7, 2008) Albany, NY—With the launch of its new DirectText (DT) initiative this week, SUNY Press has become the first university press in the nation to offer both electronic and hardcover frontlist titles simultaneously.

“They are the pioneers with courage, the astronauts,” said Alex Gendler, Founder and President of Publishers Row, the company powering SUNY Press’s DT program. “We put them in the rocket ship and said ‘let’s go!’”

Now, for only twenty dollars, professors and students—or anyone, for that matter—can download and print electronic PDF versions of new hardcover titles directly from the Press’s Web site, www.sunypress.edu. A free preview option allows one to view the table of contents, the first two pages of each chapter, and the index of DT titles before purchasing.

Hardcover books, usually scholarly monographs, were once the mainstay of university press publishing programs; however, they have become prohibitively expensive in recent years and are often priced at more than seventy dollars. SUNY Press’s DT initiative is all about creating instant access to just-published scholarship at an affordable rate.

“If you want a prestige, jacketed cloth edition, you can still have it,” says Press director Gary Dunham, who joined SUNY in January. “But affordability and immediacy are really the cornerstones of this program.”

Dunham points out that researchers and students no longer have to hope or wait for a less expensive edition of a scholarly monograph. “DT enables scholars who publish with SUNY Press to make their work available in an affordable format to students and other readers at virtually the same time as the hardcover,” says Dunham.

An important target audience for the initiative is graduate and upper-level undergraduate students, who are natural recipients of scholarly content but wrestle with the high price of first-run scholarly books.

“DT encourages professors to assign monographs to their classes the moment they are published at a fraction of the hardcover price,” explains Dunham.

The DT initiative went live on March 30 with twenty titles. Approximately fifty titles will be available by the end of June, and an additional sixty will be available by the end of the year.

DT is just another first by SUNY Press in the digital marketplace. They were the first publisher to launch the Google co-branded full-text search function on its Web site, allowing visitors to do a full-text search across a 4,000 title list and read the complete first chapter of many titles.

“It’s an exciting time to be with SUNY Press,” says Dunham, who plans to evaluate DT seasonally. “We are looking forward to its evolution. This incredible initiative adds flexibility to academic publishing and provides scholars with more options for reaching those who need to read and learn from their research.”