National Endowment for the Humanities
Humanities Open Book Program
Page 3 of 17
I. Program Description
The Humanities Open Book Program is designed to make outstanding out-of-print humanities
books available to a wide audience. By taking advantage of low-cost “ebook” technology, the
program will allow teachers, students, scholars, and the public to read humanities books that
have long been out of print. The Humanities Open Book Program is jointly sponsored by the
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
(Mellon).
Traditionally, printed books have been the primary medium for expressing, communicating, and
debating humanistic ideas. However, the vast majority of humanities books sell a small number
of copies and then quickly go out of print. Most scholarly books printed since 1923 are not in the
public domain and are not easily available to the general public. As a result, there is a huge,
mostly untapped resource of remarkable scholarship going back decades that is largely unused
by today’s scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public, many of whom turn first to
the Internet when looking for information. Modern ebook technology can make these books far
more accessible than they are today.
NEH and Mellon are soliciting proposals from academic presses, scholarly societies, museums,
and other institutions that publish books in the humanities to participate in the Humanities
Open Book Program. Applicants will provide a list of previously published humanities books
along with brief descriptions of the books and their intellectual significance. Depending on the
length and topics of the books, the number to be digitized may vary. However, NEH and Mellon
anticipate that applicants may propose to digitize a total that ranges from less than fifty to more
than one hundred books. Awards will be given to secure the rights and digitize these books and
make them available as Creative Commons-licensed “ebooks” that can be read by the public at
no charge on computers, mobile devices, and ebook readers. The final ebook files must be in
EPUB version 3.1 (or later) format, to ensure that the text is fully searchable and reflowable and
that fonts are resizable on any e-reading device.
Proposed books can be on any topic relevant to any humanities discipline. However, in
recognition of two important upcoming anniversaries, NEH and Mellon encourage applicants to
consider proposing books related to the following:
� the 250
th
anniversary of the United States, coming in 2026. Applicants may wish to
include important books relevant to the founding of the United States.
� the hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, coming in 2020. Applicants
may wish to include important books relevant to the Nineteenth Amendment and
women’s suffrage.
Applicants are encouraged to form partnerships, if appropriate, when applying. For example,
two or more presses could collaborate to bring together books published by their respective
institutions on similar themes and topics.
Applicants are required to create an advisory board composed of scholars, librarians, publishers,
and other experts to help select the books to digitize. This advisory board should include at least
two members from outside the applicant institution.
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