For many of our future readers, the ACM Digital Library will be the primary channel from which to search, browse, and download complete copies or individual chapters of ACM Books. Libraries and library consortia around the world will make buying decisions on behalf of their faculty and students, as well as corporate libraries on behalf of their employees, and as a result end users will have “unrestricted” and “essentially” free access to all books published in the series. At present, there are approximately 1,500,000 members of the computing community with access to the ACM Digital Library from over 2,800 academic, government, and corporate libraries worldwide that subscribe to the ACM Digital Library (journals, conferences, magazines, etc.) and we expect that over time many of these institutions will purchase the ACM Books collections. Pricing for institutions will be made affordable by ACM, in keeping with our longstanding tradition and non-profit approach to selling the ACM Digital Library.For individual professional and student members of ACM, the series will be available at a low “add-on” price to their current ACM Membership ($29 annually for professionals and $10 annually for students) and for all other individuals interested in purchasing single print or digital copies, there will be an option to do so through the largest online booksellers, such as Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. At present, there are approximately 110,000 professional and student members of ACM eligible for this special membership pricing for access to the ACM Books series.In addition to our own goals for the Series itself, one positive side effect of ACM Books will be to address the soaring costs of textbooks produced by commercial publishers. If ACM Books can place pressure on the few large commercial publishers operating in the computer science market, then we will view this as a positive development.
