Dakota Datebook Launch Party!

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is excited to announce the launch of Dakota Datebook: North Dakota Stories from Prairie Public edited by David Haeselin. Developed in collaboration with the University of North Dakota’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program and in cooperation with Prairie Public Broadcasting, Dakota Datebook brings to the printed page some of the most memorably, inspiring, and humorous stories from Prairie Public’s iconic Dakota Datebook radio program. Download a digital copy for free from the Digital Press webpage or pre-order your copy from Prairie Public today!

On Saturday at 8 pm, The Digital Press and Prairie Public are hosting a launch part on board the Lewis and Clark Riverboat on the Missouri River in Bismarck. Various media personalities will be there, as will David Haeselin and some Dakota Datebook contributors. It should be a great time. To get tickets for the boat ride and to come and hang out with us go here.

For more on the boat, the book, and the party, check out Aaron Barth’s interview on Prairie Public’s Main Street on Monday.

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A few more things from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota.

1. Busy Year! This will be one of the busiest years yet for The Digital Press with as many as five titles queued up to hit the website over the next 8 to 12 months. Late this fall, we’ll see the arrival of Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays. Stay tuned for a sneak preview of this. A book of essays from last fall’s Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean conference at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU and edited by Sebastian Heath should appear by year’s end as well.

In the spring, we’re looking forward to publishing Kyle Conway’s innovative edited volume, Sixty Years of Boom and Bust which juxtaposes the 1958 Williston Report with perspectives on the 21st century boom penned some 60 years later. It’s a fascinating read. There should also be volume 3 of our collaboration with the journal Epoiesen and maybe some previews from our 2020-2021 season.

2. Subscriptions? So far, The Digital Press hasn’t done much to connect personally with our readers. We’d like to change that some. I’ve been tempted to offer a subscription service of sorts through an email list that will distribute our newest publications and occasional news direct to your inbox (as the kids say). I’d run it through MailChimp or some other service that would make it easy enough to unsubscribe or to opt out. I wouldn’t share your emails with anyone (although I might be tempted to use it to plug for my other little publishing venture, North Dakota Quarterly).

3. Promoting Open Access. I’ve been thinking a good bit about the larger mission to promote open access publishing in academia. One thing that I would love to do this year is to pay more attention to open access publishing in general (whether from mainstream academic presses or from more specialized open access publishing houses). I’d love to do an “Open Access Book of the Week” that highlights some of the high quality open access work appearing these days.

I’d also like to start to build another project. It’s called Cite Open Access. It would promote citing open access scholarship across all forms of scholarly publishing. My fantasy idea involves getting various artists to design simply, legible posters that say Cite Open Access on them (and I’d urge folks to use open access fonts and it would go without saying that the posters would be free downloads). Ideally, I could get libraries, open access publishers, “fellow travelers,” and other supporters of open access scholarly work to co-sponsor various posters. I’d then distribute digital copies of these posters and encourage folks to display them prominently on their campuses. Who’s in?

4. Internet Archive. Finally, I’ve uploaded almost all the content from The Digital Press to the Internet Archive this weekend. One of the many great things about the Internet Archive is that it automatically converts our PDFs into multiple formats. The automated system isn’t perfect, but it works well enough to make our content available for text mining or ebook readers!

Sneak Peek: The Dakota Datebook Project

For the last six months, David Haeselin, his students, the folks at Prairie Public Broadcasting, and the folks at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota have been working on creating a book version of the popular Prairie Public radio program, Dakota Datebook.

The students in David Haeselin’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing class identified and copy edited the 365 of over 3000 potential essays available to include in the book-length version of Dakota Datebook. They copy-edited these texts, standardized the language, and made sure that the book version reflected the diversity of the radio program. The Digital Press did layout and design and worked with local artist Jessie Thorson for cover art. 

The book is finally done and we really want to share it with everyone. In fact, we’re so excited about the release of this book and the collaboration that produced it, we’re inviting everyone to a book release party aboard the Lewis and Clark Riverboat in Bismarck on August 24th at 8 pm. Register to attend the book launch or preorder the book from this website. For more on the book go here.

If you want a sneak peek of the book, click here, but don’t tell anyone because the book doesn’t drop officially until late August!

A Book by its Cover

Over the last week or so, I’ve been working to finish the layout and design of a partnership with Prairie Public, our local public media and broadcasting outfit here in North Dakota and The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. The book is based on their popular radio program, Dakota Datebook, which has had over 3000 episodes over the past decade. 

My collaborator, David Haeselin, produced the book in collaboration with his second year writing, editing, and publishing class. (Here’s a bit more on this project.) The cover is done.

I cover art is by local artist Jessie Thorson which we arranged in a calendar grid set into the outlines of the state of North Dakota. The blue is the color of Prairie Public and the yellow is from the state flag of North Dakota. 

The book will appear before August 24th when we will have an official launch party abroad the Lewis and Clark Riverboat on the Missouri River in Bismarck. More on the launch and the book in the coming weeks!

Selling Books

A colleague once described a book that I wrote as “selling well, but in very small numbers.” If I had a goal as a publisher, that would essentially sum it up. I’d rather my books circulate to people who genuinely appreciated them than to ascend a best seller list.

That being said, this last two weeks have been pretty special for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Not only do we have a series of amazing books in advanced stages of production (and ready for a fall release), but we also have two books that hit sales targets.

The Digital Press and our authors works hard to promote our books, but as a small press, our advertising budget is small. More than that, true to our laboratory roots we never think much about book sales when we pursue a book for publication. In part, this is because we give our books away for free as digital downloads and, in some cases, don’t even hold paper publishing rights to the works. As a result, we tend to get more excited about downloads than sales, but it remains intriguing and exciting to see a book sell paper copies.

This past week, both Eric Burin’s Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College (2017) and the book that Kyle Conway’s and I edited, The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota (2016) sold their 200th copy. This might not sound like much, but bear in mind that many academic monographs have print runs of fewer than 500 (and many have runs of only 300 copies). Moreover, The Bakken Goes Boom has had almost 1000 downloads and is starting to collect a scholarly citations. Picking the President has seen just a few clicks short of 500 downloads. 

Congratulations to everyone involved in these two books and their success. Download copies of these books or any of the books from the Digital Press here, and if the spirit moves you or you just prefer paper, order a copy as well! 

More Books by the Cover from The Digital Press

This summer, I’m doing a bit of design work for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota as we prepare for a very busy fall.

We’re eagerly anticipating the publication of the Dakota Datebook in book form. For those of you who aren’t from North Dakota, Dakota Datebook is a beloved Prairie Public Radio program that offers short interesting (and often fun) stories about North Dakota history on a daily basis. Over the past decade, Prairie Public Radio has produced and broadcast over 3000 of these 300-500 word stories. The students in David Haeselin’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing class selected 365 of the best for the book. 

For the cover, which is not final, of course, we partnered with North Dakota artist Jessie Thorson who provided the menagerie of character for the calendar set into the outline of North Dakota. The bold color bars combine the shade of blue used by Prairie Public and the yellow from the North Dakota state flag. The font is the ubiquitous “ChunkFive”. 

The second book cover that I’ve been working on is for a new book of essays by the Electric Archaeologist, Shawn Graham. It’s titled Failing Gloriously, and we wanted a cover that was both uncluttered, a bit playful, and makes reference to the digital aspect of his work. Here’s the first draft:

More on these two books (and their covers!) as we move forward this summer. The Digital Press is looking forward to an exciting fall!

Update from The Digital Press

The Digital Press has been quiet lately, but don’t read this as a sign of inactivity! My plan is to write some short posts updating folks on what we’ve been up to and what we’ve been thinking about over the last few months.

There’s been a ton going on behind the scenes with a record number of books in various states of production from the proposal stage to final review. That means, this late summer and fall will be busy with new book releases and announcements.

That also means that I’m learning a good bit about the managerial roles in the publishing business, the concept and practice of workflow, and thinking more seriously about how The Digital Press can contribute to the changing world of scholarly and academic publishing.

Peer review is fundamental to the academic publication process, but it also has seen some significant recent critique. Among the critiques that I found most intriguing comes from the Peer Review Transparency report sponsored by the Open Society Foundations. The report is here. 

One of the key aspects of The Digital Press’s workflow is close collaboration with the authors. This often involves a commitment on the part of the authors and the Press to see a project through to its publication. Unlike a typical academic press that might not commit to a project until it has received positive peer reviews, for many Digital Press projects, peer review does not have a “gate keeper” function that some imagine, but it part of the production and revision process. 

As a result, I became interested in the way in which the Peer Review Transparency report articulated the variations in peer review and I was charmed by their clever little icons that signaled the kind of review that a work underwent. They aren’t entirely straight forward, of course, but they do demonstrate the range of kinds of peer review present in academia today. Lever Press, a new and apparently very well funded, open access venture has already started to use these symbols to represent the level and kind of peer review present in their works. (This update from Lever is really interesting, by the way. I can assure my authors and readers that I won’t become a bishop any time soon!)

I’m thinking of experimenting with these little symbols in an effort to be more transparent about not just whether a particular volume is peer reviewed but the kind of peer review that the books we publish receive.  

Fragmentation and Publication in Digital Archaeology 2

It happens sometimes. I’m swamped by a painfully slow going paper, “Collaborative Digital Publishing in Archaeology” for the IEMA conference at the University of Buffalo next month.

I wrote this today; it’s not very good, but it is what it is. I’m blaming the bomb cyclone.

Historically archaeologists have modeled their work on industrial practices with authority typically following a clear hierarchy. In an overly simplified form, archaeological responsibilities and tasks define the roles of project directors, field directors, trench or team leaders, and diggers. This division of labor is designed, at least on one level, to facilitate efficient archaeological work and to produce specialized and precise data. This form of organization allowed for control over a project’s outcomes and the knowledge making process. The formal definition of the site and the recognition that archaeological work involved embodied knowledge reinforced the spatiality of archaeological knowledge making. The long-standing concern for provenience, for example, and the location of the physical archives of a site in a dig house or storeroom near the site’s location further reinforce the connection between space and archaeological work. The connection between the hierarchy of archaeological knowledge making and the spatiality of archaeological place evokes the factory floor (or the prison) and the processes of enclosure that defined regimes of control of the modern ara.

Of course, this conceptualization of archaeological work has seen compelling challenges over the past 30 years. Shanks and McGuire argued that archaeology should return to its roots in craft practices as a way to challenge the industrial modes of archaeological knowledge making. McGuire’s radical efforts to create more a egalitarian and democratized archaeological project demonstrated the potential of such an approach in practice. A few radical projects in the U.K. have likewise sought to introduce democratic processes to field work (the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (Faulkner 2000, 2009) cited by Morgan and Eddisford 2018). While these projects remain outliers, they demonstrate that the social organization of archaeological practice remains a topic of discussion and, to a lesser extent, experimentation for archaeologists. At the same time, Mary Leighton adopted an STS approach to understanding field work and argued that a certain amount of “black boxing” in archaeological practice masks a diversity of practices that are both more and less hierarchical than the formally reported results might suggest. Morgan and Eddisford (2018) have suggested that single context recording represents a far more decentralized and even anarchic method for producing archaeological knowledge.

The critical attention that field practices (including methods, but also more mundane procedures and unspoken conventions) has shaped how scholars have approached the growing use of digital tools in archaeological knowledge making and their practical, disciplinary, and ideological significance of these changes. My interest in workflow and the rise of logistics in archaeological knowlege making traces a scholarly trajectory that understands the movement, use, and reuse of data in a digital medium as a key element to transforming the institutional landscape of archaeology. The ability to disseminate data from the field, for example, and to repurpose that data for online publication through platforms like OpenContext demonstrates how the fluidity of the contemporary workflow is already challenging the barriers between fieldwork and publishing.

In 2014, a colleague and I founded the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. The goal of this project involved leverage digital tools enter into the world of academic publishing and to experiment with the potential for these digital tools to challenge the structure of the publishing process. Our current publishing model is extremely fluid, but follows certain relatively consistent conventions. First, we use digital tools to produce and distribute our books at a low cost using print-on-demand printing for paper books and PDF downloads on a low cost website running WordPress. Second, We publish mainly under various open access licenses. Finally, we collaborate closely with authors on all aspects of a publishing process.

Publishing Dakota Datebook

The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota has a pretty exciting collaboration to announce. We’re partnering once again with David Haeselin from UND’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing (WEP) program who worked with The Digital Press to publish Haunted by Waters: The Future of Memory and the Red River Flood of 1997 (2017) and, for the first time, Prairie Public Radio to produce a book version of their venerable Dakota Datebook radio program.

We chose to announce this today (although keen readers of the Prairie Public’s newsletter probably caught a little notice there), because February 28th marks the 60th anniversary of the death of UND English’s most famous alum, Maxwell Anderson (Sorry, Chuck Klosterman). What’s a bit newer, however, is UND English training editors in the WEP program. Students editors in David Haeselin’s WEP practicum are currently working to assemble an edited collection from the thousands of entries that have appeared on the Prairie Public radio’s Dakota Datebook radio show. 
 
The daily history segment is now its seventeenth year, so the first step was picking the best 365 entries. Luckily for us, there are sixteen students enrolled in the class, so, first, each student read through a randomly assigned year. The next step was deciding what exactly constituted the “best.” This is where the students’ more traditional analytical and interpretative training came in handy. After a series of freewheeling and impassioned discussions, the students agreed that our book should showcase the lesser-known, if not entirely forgotten, moments in North Dakota history. Lewis, Clark, and Teddy Roosevelt are the OG badasses, sure, but they passed through North Dakota. We wanted to showcase the stories of those who have made the state into what it is today by living here. And we think we accomplished just that. 

We recently finalized the table of contents and are confident that our selections highlight the state’s diversity, variety, and uniqueness. In it, you’ll find all kinds of stories: tough as permafrost homesteaders who lived through the worst winters on the continent without down feather coats or even walls made from something better than dirt blobs, proud women demanding their right to vote, the family who built the first mosque on American soil, and even how Grand Forks was founded because of a keg of beer. 

As the students have worked to select and organize content, we have also worked to produce an appealing page that captures a bit of a traditional “datebook” style with the bold day and month in Futura font. The text itself is set in the more traditional Janson-style font which we decided was appropriate buttoned-down for history. We tucked the page numbers on the outside margin to give us a bit more space on the page for text and to accommodate the varying length of Date Book entries. 

 

You can download the Maxwell Anderson page here.

Keep your eyes open for more updates. We plan for a  May release, with events across North Dakota. And, in the meantime, be sure to listen to Dakota Datebook on Prairie Public. 

Thinking about Publishing at NDQ and The Digital Press

As my post yesterday probably suggested, I’m thinking a good bit about the practice and theory of academic publishing these days. In particular, I’m interested in how digital media shapes workflow, logistics, and the character of both archaeological and more broadly academic knowledge making. My work with The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota Quarterly have increasingly become central to this research in ways that I had not anticipated.

So this little update today is both an effort to get my thoughts in order about how publishing and editing really works and to keep people interested in both NDQ and The Digital Press in the loop on what’s been going on with these projects.

1. Proposals. Recently I’ve received a couple of pretty exciting proposals to review and we’ve been able to give some pretty positive feedback to the proposers. There has been some pretty interesting recent conversation about book proposals in the field of ClassicsandClassical Archaeology (co-authored by a pair of Digital Press authors!). This got me thinking about the current way that publishers acquire manuscripts and the role of publishers, editors, and authors. I’ve resisted producing a standard questionnaire for prospective authors and, instead, have asked my individuals proposing to The Digital Press to produce “a 3-5 page document that outlines the book’s content, as well as its length, format, audience, relationship to existing publications. It’s also helpful to present the qualifications of the authors (or contributors) and a prospective timeline.” I’m not sure that this slightly more free-form proposal process necessarily produces better proposals, but I like to think that it introduces the relationship between press and the authors as more familiar and a bit less structured by a set of fixed expectations that dictate the value of a project.    

2. From Proposal to Manuscript. In particular, I’ve thought a good bit about the liminal zone between when a proposal is accepted and a manuscript is delivered. As an author currently navigating that zone with my own book, I can attest to the feeling of being unmoored and adrift, but still in the harbor. There’s an expectation that the book “will happen” but at the same time, the anxieties of producing something that the publisher, reviewers, and community finds valuable.

This is a pretty stressful place and judging by conversations with my colleagues, I recognize that any number of book projects find themselves smashed against the shoals long before the final manuscript can be delivered. I wonder whether the structural division between the publisher and the author have something to do with this ambivalent space. I’ve marveled at the generosity, for example, of my editors at North Dakota Quarterly who often work closely with authors during the revision process for articles and stories and feel extraordinary gratitude toward Paul Mullins and Chris Matthews at Historical Archaeology who shepherded my first effort to write an article on North American archaeology through the revision and publication process. My hope is that my press can be aware of the risks of the post-proposal, pre-manuscript experience and work – somehow – to make it easier to navigate. 

3. Peer Review. One of the most exciting things at present is that The Digital Press has three books currently circulating for peer review: two books and one edited volume. All three works represent significant investment on the parts of two authors and the editor as well as the press. As a result, peer review is less about whether the piece should be accepted or rejects, but rather how we can work to improve the manuscript to make into the strongest book possible for the author and the publisher. The reviews continue to be anonymous (or at least the reviewers are not known to the authors), but the review process becomes a chance to develop, improve, and nuance the manuscript.

4. Workflow. I’m completely invested in a publishing workflow these days, particularly for North Dakota Quarterly. The movement of an accepted manuscript through the pre-production process is neither completely automated or completely person. The accepted manuscript hits my desk, goes out to my copy editor (at least for non-fiction and poetry, our fiction editor handles his own copy editing as part of the revision process). While manuscripts are out at copy editing, I produce publication agreements – by hand – for each contribution. This can take a few hours. When I get the copy edited manuscripts back, I return them with a publication agreement to authors and  for a short (<50 word) bio and the mailing address for their author copy of the Quarterly. With any luck, I get both of those documents, but in about 30% of the cases, I don’t. I have to ask (again and again) for a bio, negotiate challenges associated with signing a digital document, and beg for mailing addresses to send author’s copies.

Because we won’t run a piece without a contract and a bio, I can’t finalize the order of the issue. The entire issue gets sent to our publisher, University of Nebraska Press, with all the finalized author agreements. They do layout and then return the proofs to me to circulate back to my authors for final approval. I compile any edits on the proofs and return it to the publisher. Then the volume goes to print.

The process of publishing involves constantly reinforcing the roles of publisher and author through our separate roles and the different timelines in which our work proceeds. The biggest challenge for me, for example, is managing the rapid progress from final manuscripts to final proofs. The different times of engagement and expectations complicate and humanize the workflow. Authors have delays associated with travel, internet and email access, challenging editing issues, and the need to arrange the content in the issue in a way that makes sense. It goes without saying that a small number of contributions take the most time.

5. Sales and Subscriptions. I’m incredibly fortunately to have a bit of cushion for both The Digital Press and NDQ. It’s not enough to allow me to ignore sales and subscriptions, but it means that they aren’t a daily worry. That being said, I’m excited whenever The Digital Press makes a sale (or two) or ticks over a particular benchmark for the number of downloads. Right now, for example, we’re chasing 500 downloads for Eric Burin’s Protesting on Bended Knee, and we’re doing all we can to maintain a steady stream of sales. The goal there is one book per day. 

With NDQ, we simply have to have subscribers. The subscribers will fund production, and with any luck, will eventually generate revenue that will help the Quarterly expand and innovate. We’re coordinating some email blasts, a subscription drive (particularly to ensure that folks who have historically subscribed to the journal renew their subscriptions, and also looking to some other ways to generate revenue. 

Yesterday, I thought a bit about how the commercialization of digital creative content can become exploitative, but how it is also a strategy toward sustainability in a world with fewer resources for the humanities and more and more competition. Considering new models for publishing that combine new ways to work with authors, contributors, and publishers might be the way toward a more sustainable future.    

 

 

Unlocking the Commons: Tim Carmody, NDQ, Amazon, and the Digital Press

There is a ton of tech writing on the internet these days and some of it is really good. None is better, I think than Tim Carmody who wrote really great pieces for The Verge and Wired back in the day, and now partners with one of the original bloggers, Jason Kottke, to produce a regular newsletter called Noticing that blends content from Kottke.org and the rest of the web. He also has a Ph.D. in Comparative literature from Penn.

What’s more interesting to me lately is his interest in the economics of good writing on the web. As a writer, editor, and a publisher, I have long relaxed in the relatively luxury of academia which has given me the security to do creative work — whether through my professional writing, my blog, my editorial role at North Dakota Quarterly, or my work as publisher at The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota — without having to get too far into the weeds of funding and finance. At the same time, I do realize that if these projects are going to have a life beyond my own energies and attention, some kind of sustainable model will have to exist to support them.

Carmody has proposed and developed a model that he calls “unlocking the commons.” It is predicated on the idea that a project – like his new newsletter on Amazon – needs a certain amount of support to exist. Carmody is a freelance writer and, from what I gather, he earns his income from his writing. At the same time, Carmody is aware that locking content behind a paywall or the like makes it difficult to demonstrate the value of the content and difficult for supporters and authors to share their work. In fact, it actually reduces the impact of any content produced by making it less visible and less likely to influence a larger community. In this way, Carmody is following arguments long held by the open access community who see the value of creative work not in its narrow and immediate monetary value realized through subscribers, but in its expansive potential to inspire and influence a wide range of audiences. By unlocking the commons, subscriber support allows Carmody to develop his ideas, write, and produce his work, and once it is supported, the work is available freely to anyone who wants to read it. He and Jason Kottke modeled this approach with Kottke.org’s membership program, which apparently worked.

For his new newsletter on Amazon, the threshold for unlocking the commons and making supporting Carmody to produce one newsletter per week was 200 subscribers at $5 per month. If he manages 400 subscribers at $5 per month, he’ll write two articles per week. You can subscribe and support the newsletter here.

This project is interesting to me for two reasons.

First, NDQ has a money problem. Right now, it’s not existential, but it is limiting. We have a great publishing partner in the University of Nebraska Press, and moving forward, they will handle subscriptions and most production for the Quarterly. The goal is that as we rebuild our subscriber base, we can break even for UNP and, then, with a little help from our community, generate some revenue. In the meantime, we rely on three sources of revenue: a small endowment that provides us with enough to copy edit the journal, a funding “backstop” provided by donors and income generated by The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, and surplus energy provided by our editors and editorial board. This is enough to keep our head above water and to survive the occasional emergency, but isn’t really enough to innovate in a sustainable way. 

Recently, several editorial board members suggested that we install a reading fee for submissions. Other members of the editorial board pushed back arguing that the submitters and contributors MAKE the journal and they shouldn’t be charged for that privilege. While I’m not entirely convinced by this argument, I share its broad sentiment that submissions should remain free as a way to encourage the widest possible range of potential contributors. Moreover, ideologically, there’s something democratic about allowing anyone to contribute and, practically, I think even a modest reading fee might discourage contributions from marginal writers especially in the global south.

What if instead of a reading fee, we included a link to a Patreon or Memberful account or created a formal NDQ newsletter using Substack subscription. To be clear, these wouldn’t be subscriptions in a formal sense — that is money provided in exchange for a product — but they’d unlock the commons and make more of the same creative content that typifies NDQ. More than that, the synergy between a funded newsletter and the regular publication of NDQ will be complementary. After all, the print version of NDQ is what makes us NDQ.

The second interest that I have in Carmody’s new project is that we built The Digital Press, in part, on Amazon’s print-on-demand infrastructure. Whether we like it or not, the world still loves paper books, and the ability to distribute our paper books from the nearly global Amazon marketplace is a massive advantage to a small press like ours.

At the same time, we realize that using Amazon is problematic. First, it limits our reach to small book sellers in the region who have not really warmed to Amazon’s direct sales to retailers. Second, Amazon’s labor practices and corporate culture are in many ways antithetical to the values that we have at The Digital Press. Thirdly, our relationship with Amazon’s production system, platform, and marketplace is completely outside of our control. Of course, as our catalogue expands, we will likely have other opportunities to partner with distributors, but at present, we’re stuck with Amazon whether we like it or not.

Carmody’s regular columns exploring Amazon as a company will offer us insights into both the present and future of the current distribution model for The Digital Press.