The team of directors spearheading University Press Ebook Consortium - a university press-branded consortium to sell collections of e-books to academic libraries - has announced a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for $47,000. The grant will be used to advance the venture toward its Fall 2011 launch. Fifty-five university presses have expressed interest in participating in this project. By working together to achieve efficiencies of scale, presses that join the consortium are expected to put the needs of the scholarly community as a whole at the top of the agenda.
With the benefit of the new Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, the press directors organising the venture will draft a prospectus clarifying a viable business model, including user features and pricing. They will begin to enlist the 55 presses and others in a formal consortium. In addition, the organisers will tender a request for proposal to a small list of prospective business partners able to host the platform and market the e-book offerings.
The press directors will also organise an advisory board of experts from the Association of Research Libraries to assist in determining the final size, number and coverage of discipline collections. The consortium expects to launch with over 2000 new titles and 23,000 older titles in subject-area collections, as well as a complete collection offer.
In this next phase of the University Press Ebook Consortium project, the original four press directors managing the project have been joined by Doug Armato, University of Minnesota Press, and Donna Shear, University of Nebraska Press.
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