Overview of Open Access Book Projects

Writing in the UM Journal of Electronic Publishing Peter Suber provides a complete run down of open access initiatives. This article mainly covers journals however he does pay significant attention to open access initiatives concerning books. (LINK)

Here is a sample:

2008 wasn’t the first year that academic book publishers published OA monographs or discovered the synergy of OA and POD (print on demand). But in 2008 the OA-POD model moved from the periphery to the mainstream and became a serious alternative more often than an experiment. We saw OA monographs or OA imprints from Amsterdam UP, Athabasca UP, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Caltech, Columbia UP, Hamburg UP, Potsdam UP, the Universidad Católica Argentina, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the Forum for Public Health in South Eastern Europe, the Institut français du Proche-Orient, and the Society of Biblical Literature.

He goes on to name many more programs. He also discusses the Google scanning project:

The settlement could mean that fair use will never be a workable rationale for large-scale book scanning projects, even if Google’s original fair-use claim was strong (as I believe it was). Future scanners may have to pay for permission, in part because Google paid and in part because the new commercial opportunities arising from the settlement itself will weigh against fair-use claims. At the same time, it means that users will have vastly improved online access to books under copyright but out of print (20% previews rather than short snippets), free full-text searching for a much larger number of books, free full-text access from selected terminals in libraries, free text-mining of full texts for some institutional users, and easier priced access to full-text digital editions.