Students gain free access to IU Press

IU Press, the school-affiliated publishing company, has teamed up with University Libraries to give all students, faculty and staff free access to its online collection of texts.

IU Press has joined a growing number of publishers making their hard-copy books into electronic books. But students should not expect their expensive textbooks to be available online free of charge.

“These are supplemental texts for courses,” Pat Hoefling, director of sales and marketing at IU Press, said. “A student can go through the online portal and access it at any University library.”

Associate Dean for Collection Development and Digital Publishing for IU Libraries Julie Bobay said the IU Press contacted IU Libraries in June 2009 to offer texts for free to students.

The online catalog is still growing in size, with more books being added over time.
“Since June, we went from having 200 books to 400 available online,” Hoefling said.

“Our next step is to add encyclopedias. Really, electronic books have become a big part of the publishing world, and we want lots of people to be able to access them.”

Hoefling said the texts can be read on web-enabled phones like iPhones and can be shared through several social networking sites like Delicious and Digg. She said they hope these features will appeal to students and help them take advantage of the resource.
The IU Press began publishing books in 1950 and focuses on specific subject areas, including African, Jewish, Middle Eastern and women’s studies.

Director of Electronic and Serials Publishing for IU Press Kathryn Caras said in the spring the company launched the online catalog, where electronic books and journals of the press’ standard print versions can be found. She also said the program with IU Libraries is in its earliest stages.

“We just started the promotion of it,” she said. “This is a long-term, growing project.” 

While IU Press employees work toward creating more electronic texts, the IU Libraries are working to put what is available in their database into the University’s library catalog so that both the print and electronic versions of the book can be found when a specific title is searched for.

“The links are up – the texts are just not in our catalog yet,” Bobay said. “The pieces are still being put into place.”

Even in the 21st century, Bobay said electronic books of any kind don’t threaten the use of hard copies.

“We have tens of thousands of books in our online catalog,” Bobay said. “We have a lot of early, pre-1923 books online, but I don’t think electronic books are anywhere near replacing books.”