I ran across a great case study of a research institution adopting a progressive online distribution strategy within its publishing department on Lessig.com:

Eve Gray, of Eve Gray & Associates. Gray was asked to study the publishing strategy of the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) in South Africa. This research institution had a traditional strategy of publishing lots of research books, and selling them. Gray convinced them to change their strategy -- to give away all their research books for free online, and offer a high quality print-on-demand service for anyone who wants the paper version. The result: "the sales turnover of the publishing department has risen by 300%." As she concluded her presentation, "giving away books and lead to an increase in our book sales."

Read the full case study, an analysis of HSRC's decision making process for adopting this forward thinking approach.

It's a great story. A traditional research institution facing the same challenges we see again and again, opts for a progressive integrated online distribution strategy, and gets real results.

Here's some exerpts...

The challenges (these should sound familiar):

• Publications are seen as the necessary outcome of the research process; a visible manifestation of the project concerned.
  
  
• No coherent approach to funding publications from research grants; rather, the production of a report or book seemed to be ‘tacked on’ at the end of a project, with some confusion over funding mechanisms and cost recovery.
  
  
• Motivations from HSRC staff for publishing particular reports and books were often phrased less in marketing terms than in terms of the internal staff evaluation needs of the HSRC and the ambitions of individual researchers.
  
  
• There was a pervasive sense that publishing was a numbers game – researchers and units were judged by and promoted according to the number of publications that they produced and there was considerable store placed on the size of the print run for books published (even though most of the books appreared to land up in lcoked storerooms). This was coupled with an explicit or implicit assumption, which seemed deeply entrenched,
  that publishing projects should recover their costs from sales.
  

Reasons to aggressively utlitize online distribution as core to publishing strategy:

• The research and policy market is wired – even in Africa;
  
• Lower production costs;
  
• Greater flexibility – colour, multimedia;
  
• Appropriate for highly specialized, low volume products;
  
• Content can be updated;
  
• Links to abstract services and research indexes;
  
• Strong control over branding.