Beyond the course pack: Putting copyrighted material online

Academe, Jan/Feb 2001 by Nelson, Cary

PUBLISHERS HAVE LITTLE MOTIVATION TO grant free reprint permission for online course packs. Most such compilations are almost of necessity highly idiosyncratic. Moreover, the students who use them are unlikely to go out and buy the book from which they've read an excerpt. But there is another, more ambitious way to proceed.

Over the past three years, I have worked with several dozen faculty members across the country to put together a Web site to serve an entire academic field-modern American poetryand thus draw faculty members, undergraduates, graduate students, and members of the public. We now have several thousand visits to the site each week, and many of those visiting are faculty members or doctoral candidates who will either encourage libraries to purchase the books excerpted or purchase them themselves.

The idea for the site grew out of my experience editing Anthology of Modern American Poetry, published by Oxford University Press in 2000. I realized that people reading a poem about the Scottsboro case, sharecroppers in the South, or even the Vietnam War could use more background information than I could hope to provide in notes at the bottom of the page. Meanwhile, scholarly books with interesting comments about the poems were often out of print and unavailable. Newer book! of value would benefit from excerpting that could draw readers' attention to them.

All the publishers or authors we have contacted consider our Web site a form of free publicity. Indeed, we like to think of ourselves as partners helping to promote the books we excerpt. In most cases, for example, we eliminate footnotes, preferring to refer readers to the original book to obtain documentation. When we put encyclopedia entries online, we leave in cross-references to other articles and make it clear that readers should consult the original book to read those entries. When we excerpt full chapters, we often put the book's color jacket online to help increase readers' interest. We have a special section of our site devoted to links to publishers to help readers obtain further information or place orders. Heavily illustrated articles are often placed online without the illustrations, and visitors to the site are urged to seek out the book to see the illustrated version.

We have in short thought carefully about how Web publication can help what is in reality a declining market for scholarly books. It is clear from the way publishers have dealt with us that they, too, are increasingly viewing Web publication as a means of increasing sales. Three years ago, every publisher wanted a formal letter and a signed contract giving us reprint permission. Now, many accept a simple exchange of e-mail messages. Several have informally granted us blanket permission to excerpt from their books as long as we keep them informed about what we are doing.

My own view, and some publishers would agree, is that putting an entire book online will increase sales of the book itself It's the equivalent of bookstore browsing, since few people want to read a whole book online, and hundreds of pages of computer printouts make for a clumsy, inconvenient, and sometimes expensive alternative.

Meanwhile, we are offering students, faculty, and general readers a remarkable intellectual resource-many thousands of pages of critical commentary and historical background on modern American poetry. No individual could assemble all this material, and no one person could disseminate it in hard copy. The Web makes it possible to put a painting or a photograph referred to in a poem online. It makes it possible to trace decades of scholarly interpretation in one convenient place. With luck, our practical focus on interpreting individual poems will also persuade educated readers that humanities scholars do something worthwhile.

We have not paid any reprint fees. Indeed, we have no budget for that purpose. In fact, even modest reprint fees of $50 per excerpt would have required a six-figure budget. My labor is gratis. The students who scan materials and place them online are paid hourly from a grant provided to me by my campus. In addition to reprinting already published material, we frequently place previously unpublished essays online.

The poems discussed and analyzed are not on the Web site. They are either in the Oxford anthology or in other books. Putting large numbers of copyrighted poems, which count as complete works, online without paying a fee would be impossible. So the Web site is designed to supplement poetry collections, not replace them. So, too, with our excerpts; people who want the full context of a scholar's commentary need to consult the original books.

In urging people to think "beyond the course pack," I am recommending that they ask what sort of Web sites will serve a broad audience. Many other academic subfields would benefit from similar projects. Historians especially have already recognized that fact, as any experienced Web surfer will confirm. Meanwhile, such projects often require help from many people. Our site is actually a collection of sites devoted to individual poets, most of them assembled by other scholars around the country.