Textbook sales are headed downward at many university presses, and the negative trend has accelerated in the last couple of months. That's the word from press directors anxious about the decline but unsure what's causing it or what to do to stop it.
"I am hearing more and more complaints from people about their textbook sales, which for university presses means sales of specialized books that come in for upper-division courses," says Peter J. Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses. "I'm hearing it from big presses and small presses."
At the University of North Carolina Press, unit sales of course-adoption books—monographs ordered for classes—were down 14.5 percent for fiscal year 2008 from the previous year, according to Kate Douglas Torrey, the press's director. Unit sales over all have declined about 17 percent since 2004, she said in an interview. "So you can see that to have 14.5 percent of that in one year is really worrisome." And sales this July and August, the first two months of fiscal 2009, were down from last year. Course-adoption books account for 15 to 20 percent of the press's overall business.
At the University of Illinois Press, textbook sales make up about 14 percent of total sales, according to Willis G. Regier, the press's director. "There seems to have been a slow and steady decline for the last couple of years," he said. Unit sales for fiscal year 2008 were down 12 percent from the previous year, he said.
Mr. Regier cautioned against reading too much into the numbers. "Over the long haul, our textbook sales have been pretty steady," he said. He pointed out that many students now buy their books online, and those sales can be hard to track without closer analysis of the data. It can also be hard to determine which titles should be counted as textbooks.
And not everyone has been hit hard. Two of the biggest players, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, told The Chronicle that their sales remain strong.
But another major press, the University of Chicago Press, has not been spared. "July and August is when we usually get our biggest hit on textbooks, and we're down compared to the last three years," according to Garrett P. Kiely, the press's director. Orders from Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and the other big textbook retailers have slipped. "It's pretty widespread," he said. "It goes into our backlist as well."
Multiple Causes of Decline
There appears to be no single explanation for the slippage. A troubled economy doesn't help sales. Illinois's Mr. Regier also invoked "the perpetual anomalies caused by used-book sales, new editions, new competition, and the whims of the professors." Scholarship moves on, and scholars change their book orders.
Mr. Givler pointed to other, more worrisome suspects, including the proliferation of Web sites that offer pirated versions of textbooks (see related article).
University presses used to assume that their books were too specialized to attract swipe-and-scan pirates. Not any more. As scanning and download technology has gotten more sophisticated, electronic files of university-press books have been turning up more often on pirate Web sites—occasionally even before they're published, Mr. Givler said.
Many presses have relied on authors and readers to spot violations. A reader alerted the University of Chicago Press to a scanned version of its best-selling The Chicago Manual of Style that had been made freely available on the Internet.
"It can't help," Chicago's Mr. Kiely said of piracy's possible effect on sales. "I've certainly become more aware of it in the last quarter than I had ever been in my career."
He's not alone. At Princeton University Press, piracy exploded as an area of concern this summer, according to Daphne Ireland, the press's intellectual-property director. She came back from vacation at the end of July to find her e-mail in box full of reports of pirated online versions of Princeton books. She hired a part-time employee to trawl the Web to see how many violations were out there. He found more than 100 files available for download on a variety of sites.
Countering Piracy
Ms. Ireland expects that the press will have to spend a lot more time playing what she calls "digital defense" and that it intends to make piracy searches a regular part of its operations. "It's a new world for us, and we're having to be diligent about it," she said. "It's really discouraging to know that we're going to have to be doing this and that it's taking time away from putting out more and better books."
Many presses are also urgently worried about electronic reserves, the subject of a pending lawsuit brought by three scholarly publishers against Georgia State University (The Chronicle, June 27), and about the use of course-management software like Blackboard. If professors make chapters of a book available as e-reserves in the library, or get that material to their classes via Blackboard, students don't need to buy the book, and the professors may get out of having to pay a permission fee to the publisher.
To resolve the problem, presses "are going to have to start making it easy for people to ask for permission," said Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses. "It's something we really need to start thinking about."
Mr. Holzman said that his July and August textbook sales were down about 15 percent, in dollar terms, from a year ago. "My gut is telling me that electronic downloading is adding seriously to what would normally be just a straightforward economic downturn," he said. "There's something more going on here than in the past."
"The bottom line of all this on university presses is suddenly becoming quite significant and quite disturbing," said the press association's Mr. Givler. "It's coming at a time when we're heading into what looks like a very rocky year. So this is bad timing, very bad timing all the way around."
