The e is italic and lower-case. It hovers over the shallow vee of an open book, as if floating up off the middle pages. Smaller than a thumbnail, this icon appears with 19 titles in the spring 2009 University of Wisconsin Press catalog. It represents the availability of a title in digital ebook format. It also signifies the opportunities the UW Press is pursuing amid the contractions and growing complexities confronting the book-publishing industry.
“We’ve been going through this really big transformation of our publishing model,” says Sheila Leary, who assumed directorship of the press last June after 2½ years as interim director. “It used to be that for some books we’d publish simultaneous cloth and paper editions.” After a few years of working with companies like Netlibrary and ebrary to meet research and university libraries’ growing appetite for ebooks, Leary says, future editions will be paper and ebook or cloth and ebook.