and education. Nevertheless the
book remains "a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we
grip it in our hands, we hold it against our bodies, we look at it with
admiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; its
fragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water and
fire, but it has the power to shelter man's thoughts from Time."

4. PUBLISHERS ON THE WEB

[In this chapter:]

[4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories / 4.2. Do Authors Still Need
Publishers? / 4.3. Electronic Publishing]

4.1. Publishers: Examples and Directories

A number of publishers chose to put the full text of some of their titles on the
Web. There was no drop in the sales of these publications - on the contrary,
sales increased.

The National Academy Press (NAP) was created by the National Academy of Sciences
to publish the reports issued by the Academy and by the National Academy of
Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. The
NAP publishes over 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science,
engineering, and health, presenting the most authoritative views on important
issues in science and health policy.

The NAP Reading Room offers more than a thousand entire books, free for reading,
from the first page to the last, and available in a variety of versions,
including scanned pages in image format, hypertext HTML books, and as Adobe
Acrobat PDF files.

The MIT Press (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is dedicated to
science and technology. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books a year and
over 40 journals, and is a major publishing presence in fields as diverse as
architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational
science, with a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new
technologies.

In the Project Gutenberg's Newsletter of October 1997, Michael Hart wrote:

"As university publishers struggle to find the right business model for offering
scholarly documents on-line, some early innovators are finding that making a
monograph available electronically can boost sales of hard copies. The National
Academy Press has already put 1,700 of its books on-line, and is finding that
the electronic versions of some books have boosted sales of the hard copy
monographs - often by two to three times the previous level. It's 'great
advertising', says the Press's director. The MIT