Marketing services provider Frontline Global Marketing Services Ltd, UK, and John Cox Associates have announced the opening of the first ALPSP Book and eBook Publishing Practice Survey. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishing (ALPSP) has previously conducted three surveys of scholarly journal publishing practice, in 2003, 2005 and 2008, which were published as industry reports under the title Scholarly Publishing Practice.
The Scholarly Publishing Practice surveys provided a great deal of information on the ways in which journal publishers have responded to the challenges of online publishing and to the expectations of authors, readers and libraries at a time when publishers are under scrutiny. Following a call for tenders issued by ALPSP earlier this year, Frontline and John Cox Associates have been commissioned to produce a similar survey of book and eBook publishers to ascertain the policies and practices of publishers in this emerging and complex market. It is expected that the new 'Scholarly Book Publishing Practice Survey 2009' will also be repeated in the future to build up a useful database of information about book publishing designed to track changes in policy and practice over time.
The data that is collected will be analysed and a report will be published by ALPSP later during the year. However, initial results of the survey will be made available at the ALPSP Annual Conference in September. Using hard data, it will enable ALPSP and, indeed, the whole publishing industry to represent accurately what policies publishers are adopting in the complex book and eBook arena.
The survey is currently available online at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=Tjz_2fFHybhDkotXBzH_2bd7Jw_3d_3d
