Monetising the digital edition: Remediations and inventions in publishing and disseminating digital scholarly editions Anna-Maria Sichani & Aodhán Kelly European Society for Textual Scholarship Annual Meeting, Leicester, November 2015 Abstract: Digital scholarly editions are now introduced as a new type of scholarly product attempting to remediate the theory and practice of print-based textual scholarship within the Digital Humanities ecosystem. Although a vast amount of scholarly exertion is directed towards the exploration of digital editing as a scholarly enterprise (concepts, standards, technologies), significant discussions of sustainable models for publishing and disseminating the digital edition are rather infrequent. In which ways do digital technologies introduce new roles and methods within the communication and distribution systems of scholarly editing? If we want our digital editions to be sustainable in the long-term, how do we strategically plan and anticipate development and maintenance costs or revenue generation strategies (eg digital subscription models, value-added services, customised formats etc)? And, finally, how does a digital edition fit into the new digital agendas of publishing entities, mainly oriented towards open access strategies and smart - but limited-functional - formats? In this paper we intend to address these issues using empirical evidence gathered from a range of existing digital publications.

1. Monetising the digital edition:
Remediations and inventions in publishing
and disseminating digital scholarly editions
ESTS, Leicester,
November 2015
Anna-Maria Sichani and Aodhán Kelly
@amsichani @aodhankelly
Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

2. Scholarly editing, scholarly editions and
publishing economics
Humanities often wants to distance itself from the sphere of monetary exchange
BUT
print-culture outputs & procedures are embedded into publishing market economics

3. “A scholarly edition is a thick book (five hundred to a thousand pages)
printed on acid-free paper guaranteed for 350 years, in sturdy bindings,
with a list of ten or twenty editors and advisory editors, published by
reputable academic press and costing a minimum of fifty dollars but more
often over one hundred”
(Shillingsburg 1996, 23)

4. “the digital editions produced so far are both products aimed at a more
or less specific public, and experiments, a way to test what is possible
within the new medium and to establish new ways for scholarship”
(Pierazzo 2015, 217)
Digital scholarly editing and digital editions:
between process and product

5. ● project-based scholarship
● multiple stakeholders (institutions, editors, DH specialists, libraries, archives,
publishing houses…)
● (limited) time funding
● project plan : encapsulated by the duration of the funding, mainly focused on the
creation of the edition
● sustainability plan ?
Digital scholarly editing and digital editions:
project economics

6. DSEs budget plan

7. The big "ta-da!" moment of publication

8. viable economic model
technical preservation
robust impact & re-use strategy
Holistic re-definition of sustainability for DSE

9. costs | price | value

10. subscription-based model

12. Price Discrimination
○ 1st (optimal pricing): charging different prices
for each unit sold to capture the entire
consumer surplus of the market.
○ 2nd: charging a different price for different
quantities, such as quantity discounts for bulk
purchases.
○ 3rd: charging different prices for different
segments of the market

13. long-term sustainability plan asked by funders (Andrew Mellon Foundation)
from the very beginning
BHO’s collection: 1,250 volumes, 20% premium content, 80% free = 1,063 v.
2nd&3rd PD: individual and institutional subscriptions, gold/ 5year/ 10year
Subscriptions to the 20% allows them to make the other 80% freely accessible -
“as a compromise”
currently 9000 registered users, 10% of whom are individual subscribers, 1.2
million page views per month

14. ● 3rd PD: available for purchase by libraries, schools, and individuals
● 2nd PD (discounts): Customers acquiring two or more titles in the 19th Century
Literature and Culture collection will receive a discount of 10% on total purchase
price. Customers acquiring the complete collection will receive a discount of
20% etc
● premium: each Rotunda publication carries with it an annual maintenance fee
(technical and content updates and installments. On future purchases the fee
will decrease on a per-product basis

15. ● subscription model: copyright is the reason for monetisation.
The estate holders require that a subscription system is applied in
order to retain copyright control over the original documents/
facsimiles
● 3rd PD: individual and institutional subscriptions
● lite version: demo

16. “editions for everyone are..a utopic concept” or “the problem of two audiences and two
natures”
“
digital editions for everyone are an utopia

17. Multiple modalities: heterogeneous outputs
for diverse purposes and audiences

20. Advertisement

23. Donation & Crowdfunding

24. Consultancy and service provision

25. *special thanks to projects and people who share their data (time, ideas, tea, etc) with us
British History Online
Beckett Digital Manuscript Project
HRI Digital - U Sheffield
Questions | ideas?
@amsichani
@aodhankelly