Like a mythological creature, the ‘educated lay reader’ for monographs is often invoked but seldom described. Reviewers dangle ‘use beyond the academy’, editors add speculative ‘academic trade’ buyers into title budgets, designers wrangle alluring covers, and sales teams stalk recalcitrant booksellers. Researchers Diana Hicks (Georgia Tech) and Ameet Doshi (Princeton) have been working with the University of Michigan Press to study survey responses from 1,000s of university press ebook readers from outside universities and colleges, seeking to discover who they are and why they use academic books. A presentation at the University Press Redux conference in Liverpool, UK, on March 17, 2026, shared some initial results. The slides are shared here. The analysis makes use of data voluntarily shared by users of the 1,000+ open-access books that have been made available on the University of Michigan's Fulcrum platform by University of Michigan Press and partner publishers. It builds on an innovative taxonomy of readers developed by Hicks, Doshi, and colleagues based on analysis of use of National Academies consensus reports.