NEH & Mellon Announce Pilot Grant Program to Digitize Out of Print Books in Humanities and Make Them Available With CC License

The pilot is named Humanities Open Book.
From a Joint NEH/Mellon Announcement:

A new joint grant program by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible e-books.
Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to “unlock” these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.
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The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.

A Few More Details

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 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 3.0.1 (or later) format, to ensure that the text is fully searchable and reflowable and that fonts are resizable on any e-reading device.

Read the Complete Announcement
See Also: FAQ
See Also: Application Guidelines

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Awards, Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding