Garamond is a small publishing house that works in digital learning, and despite the tiny dimensions has been leading the way for years in digital publishing and experimentation in the school segment in Italy.

Today they announced the publication of an e-book on “Teaching and learning with e-books” (Insegnare e apprendere con gli e-book) with a unique pricing model: as Radiohead did for In Rainbows, “it’s up to you”.
Garamond provides a 16-page preview of the title, and any registered user can download the book and pay it the price he wants – with a base price of 1 euro.

It is true that Garamond’s experiment arises in particular conditions: their network reaches a very large number of teachers and scholars in Italy that have been made aware of the project through Garamond’s newsletter, the school book market is way different from the trade one, and the numbers of digital school publishing in Italy are far different from those of e.g. a mid-list book from Penguin or Random House (or from Radiohead’s ones, of course).

Nevertheless, it would be very interesting to know something about the results of this experiment in a few weeks’ time.
Its success would be, among many other things, a prime example of the importance of the creation of a community that is both large and strictly linked by common interests, and of the increasing relevance of verticalization.