IOP launches e-book programme

IOP Publishing has re-entered the book market with a new e-book programme. The new IOP e-book programme, which was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, aims to provide an additional content channel for authors looking to publish with a society publisher.

The new portfolio will cover topics across the physical sciences and hopes to support the needs of physicists as well as researchers from other disciplines who are working in interdisciplinary areas of research.

‘I’m delighted about this news,’ Olaf Ernst, commercial director of IOP Publishing told Research Information at the Frankfurt Book Fair. ‘There’s a huge demand for e-books but what was missing in the past was a major physics society publisher focussing on publishing high quality books in physics.’

Several years ago IOP sold its book publishing business to Taylor & Francis. This new book publishing programme will have several differences from the previous business, as Ernst explained. A major difference will be that the books will be born digital; any print versions will follow through print on demand. According to Ernst this approach means that the publisher can focus more fully on the possibilities of digital such as embedding video.

‘We want to have the future in mind,’ he explained.

IOP's new books will be born-digital content. This, says the publisher, means that they will be free of legacy issues, such as digitising backlists of books that were not originally commissioned and written with electronic delivery in mind.IOP has also announced a strategic partnership with Morgan and Claypool Publishers (M&C) to build a dedicated collection as part of the overall e-book programme.

M&C’s publishing model – which already serves the engineering and computer science communities with its Synthesis Digital Library, and the life sciences community with its Colloquium Digital Library – will be adopted to create a new physics collection.

Ernst said: 'It is a natural fit for IOP, through its close relationship with the physics community, to launch a high-quality e-book programme that will complement its existing journals portfolio. We have a shared vision with M&C to serve the research community by delivering high-quality content through an innovative publishing approach. This will form the basis of a strong partnership and I very much look forward to working together on this.'