Publish Your Dissertation as a Digital Book or Ebook on Amazon, B&N & Apple iBooks: Legal Ethics, Law, Legal History, Law & Society, Sociology, etc.

Posted by Alan Childress

As a follow-up to my post yesterday on republishing the Kadish & Kadish classic and others as a Kindle book or an ebook, I announce more generally that I seek submissions to publish digitally your still-relevant dissertation or monograph-length thesis.  This is to post on Amazon and other sites for use on iPad, Kindle, and Nook, and related apps on PC, Mac, iPhone, and BlackBerry.  The fields are legal ethics, law, law and society, legal history or biography, history, and the broader social sciences. This would not be an SSRN-type download but instead would be marketed as a regular Kindle book and the like and available to a broader international market, easily searched on Amazon, Google, and Barnes and Noble sites. 

This is unlike some digital-dissertation services that essentially make it a vanity press by having it as a download from their site; my goal is to turn it into a real book, for use with readers and researchers through real channels and read by every device, with working links and footnotes. (And also unlike those sites, my royalty rate is much higher, and your book will accompany not only other dissertations but classic works in law and society, brought back digitally.)  Eventually they will also be featured on this website, but mainly on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks. Editing services are available for outsourcing at good rates (with legal writing professors!), but I will do all production, formatting, and marketing.

This service is not exclusive, in the sense that you are free to submit your work elsewhere in the meantime and pull it from this program should it be accepted by Penn Press or OUP ("making it to the show"), or for whatever reason; I'd facilitate that. This is exclusively digital publishing and is not meant to interfere with your parsing parts of it for articles (even to SSRN) or your seeking traditional publication of the whole.  Contact me at this email address (or see left sidebar) with topic, description, and the history of your manuscript, and the goals you have for it, if interested. The imprint, as with the book above, would be with Quid Pro, these in a Dissertation Series or by subject matter, e.g., Legal Ethics, History. Although so far the accepted and anticipated books have been in law and society or legal sociology, subjects will include the broader social sciences of political science, sociology, history, and philosophy (or basically subjects that I feel competent to read and assess because of my doctoral work in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at Berkeley). If they are not particularly law-related, that is fine, as the project has expanded to become Quid Pro Books not just Quid Pro Law Books.

UPDATE: See this example, which has its digital origins in the comment by John Flood to this post.