Vanderbilt University Press releases academic titles in the humanities and social sciences, including health care and education.

Libraries were traditionally the only digital market for the books, so they would sell them PDF versions. But all of the new e-readers need an e-pub instead of a PDF.

“Turning out a PDF is fairly easy. Turning out an e-pub is not unless you construct your files from the beginning in a certain way,” says Betsy Phillips, the marketing and new media associate at Vanderbilt University Press. “I know for a lot of smaller presses, not just University Press, it is kind of a crisis. It is one thing to say going forward we will have e-pubs, but how do you know what of your backlist you should convert, which ones might still have life in it, which ones might not be cost effective to convert?”

Vanderbilt is now working on an experiment in which it is picking five books from its back catalog – titles to which it still owns the rights -- and is bringing them out in paperback and e-books for the first time this fall. The titles are from the 1940s, 50s and 70s.

“One of them is a history of Nashville in the 1890s; another one is a collection of fake news articles that were intentionally funny,” she says. “Maybe not 100 people will want them, but 50 might.

“It is a trial run to see what kind of audience our books might have and whether or not it is worth our while to bring them back to life.”

Phillips says she is excited about the project because it could mean newfound life for old books and an extended stay for new titles.

“There is no need for books to go out of print anymore,” she says. “Any book we do, even if it only sells one copy a year, we can still afford to do that one copy to sell to you. In trade publishing, if your book sold 1,000 copies, that would be a failure and in the past your book would probably be out of print within six months. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be the fate of a book anymore.”