Exact Editions is an access platform, not a download platform, which enables users to access books through the web at any time. This means that the platform can be used to give time-limited but fully open access to complete books. When books are distributed as complete files for the end-user’s system, as is almost always the case with PDF files and eBook formats, there is no easy way of stopping their use at the end of a certain period. So Exact Editions can be used to give a book time-limited free access as part of a promotion, perhaps for no other reason that to promote the printed book. 

The case for putting books on the Exact Editions platform may be strongest and most compelling with books which can only be messed up or wrecked by being presented as ebooks. And ebooks  most obviously fail with highly illustrated or tightly designed books, which are beautifully presented on formatted pages but are hopeless when dissolved in a reflowable format such as used in the Amazon Kindle or the EPUB format of the International Digital Publishing Forum.

Although highly illustrated books are particularly suited to the Exact Editions platform, many other books have a finished quality which can be wrecked when converted to reflowable formats, and for such books Exact Editions provides a new kind of promotional platform. Carcanet Press are one of the most admired modern poetry publishers and are working with Exact Editions to provide promotional access to many of their new and forthcoming books.

These books will take advantage of Exact Editions unique ability to provide fully open, fully citeable, but time-limited access to books on the web. Currently two Carcanet books are available for completely open, but time-limited access (limited until 1 October).

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/beowulf

BeowolFC.jpg

or

https://institutions.exacteditions.com/complete-nonsense

peakenonsensefc

Clicking on those links will take the user straight through to the editions themselves. Press the “View” button and the book is there in your browser: no password, no user name, and every page in the books is citeable via its own URL.

Carcanet Press’s full use of the Exact Editions promotional platform will start on 1 October, with 10 titles live for a month, including:

Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound –John Cornford

The Homeric Hymns — Peter McDonald