Rafael Lima, a journalist, playwright, and screenwriter, has been in the writing business for 25 years. An assistant professor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami, Lima has done well enough in the writing business to have an agent at ICM.

When he decided to try a novel, however, he didn't ask that agent to shop it around. Having watched the shrinking of the publishing industry and the dwindling of old-school editors, Lima didn't like the odds of getting much creative help with the book if he went the traditional route. He uploaded a draft of the book to Amazon's Kindle store as a 99-cent download and invited readers to tell him what they liked and what they didn't.

Based loosely on Lima's experiences in the trade, "Screenwriter" tells the story of a Hollywood screenwriter married to an actress. Here's part of the Amazon blurb, written by the author: "As he tries to...

Many university presses are working hard to figure out how to be effective players in the e-book market. What do academic libraries want when it comes to e-books?

James R. Mouw is the assistant director for technical and electronic resources and the electronic resources officer at the University of Chicago Library. That means he handles "all things digital in terms of the licensing and the contracting side of things," he said in an interview.

These days, about 20 percent of the current monographs the library adds are digital, according to Mouw. The move toward e-books has been gradual but noticeable and parallels a similar shift in the journals world, he said.

Users have made their own shift toward digital materials. The library recently did a survey of Chicago's graduate and professional students. Many respondents said they wanted more e-books. "It came up over and over again," Mouw ...

Librarians and scholars hoping that University of California researchers would make good on a threat to boycott the Nature Publishing Group over high journal costs are likely to be disappointed.

The university and the publishing group issued a joint statement on Wednesday saying that they met on August 17 "to discuss our organizations' current licensing challenges and the larger issues of scholarly-communication sustainability." They agreed to work together "to address our mutual short- and long-term challenges, including an exploration of potential new approaches and evolving publishing models," they said.

They described the meeting as a friendly affair, with each side acknowledging the other's contributions and value. "We look forward to a successful planning and experimentation process that results in mutual agreement that serves all stakeholder groups—NPG, the UC libraries, and...

Rice University will close its press in September, the university confirmed today. The move ends a high-profile experiment in digital university-press publishing. Closed once before, in 1996, the press was reborn in 2006 as an all-digital operation. But it had proven too expensive to sustain even in its new form, according to a statement by Eugene Levy, a Rice professor of astrophysics who stepped down as the university's provost in June. As provost, Levy authorized the money for the press's rebirth four years ago.

"The hope was that, without the burden of having to maintain a print inventory, the press might sustain itself largely on revenues from print-on-demand book sales," Levy's statement said. "Unfortunately, book sales remained very slow, and projections discouraged the anticipation that revenues would, in the foreseeable future, grow to a level that could materially cover even...

The University of Scranton Press is closing, The Scranton Times-Tribune reported. According to the paper, the publishing operation is "a victim of financial pressures and shifting priorities" at the university.

"Basically, it was a budgetary decision. We are a tuition-driven institution, and these are tough economic times," Harold Baillie, the university's provost and vice president for academic affairs, told the paper. "Our main priority is the education of our students, and that takes precedence in the distribution of our resources."

Baillie indicated that the press had become too expensive. "It just reached the point where we could not sustain the losses in the face of our other priorities," he told the Times-Tribune. The press will finish production on the books it has in the works before it shuts down, he said.

Founded 22 years ago, the press has published some 200 books, the...

These are interesting times for university presses—"interesting" being a synonym in some minds for "difficult and scary." If it helps to be philosophical about publishing these days, Jane Bunker, the new director of Northwestern University Press, should be well qualified. She has a master's in philosophy from Fordham University and is active in the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

A Wisconsin native, Bunker came to Northwestern from SUNY Press, where she has been associate director and acquisitions editor, among other roles. The books she has acquired over her career give you some sense of her interests. They include Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader (SUNY Press, 1999), edited by Mariana Ortega and Linda Martin Alcoff; Kindness and the Good Society (SUNY Press, 2002) by William S. Hamrick; and translations of Martin Heidegger and F.W.J....

Even in the depths of summer, the scholarly-publishing world produces some news. Here are some developments from the last week or two that are worth noting.

—SUNY Press has two new directors. That's right: two. The State University of New York Press announced this week that James Peltz and Donna Dixon will become co-directors. Peltz already works there as an acquisitions editor and associate director under the previous director, Gary Dunham; Dixon has been the director of member services at NYLINK, an organization that serves New York State libraries. The co-director arrangement is unusual, perhaps unprecedented, in the university-press world.

—A multi-press e-book venture announced today that it has received a second round of grant money from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The four presses leading the project—New York University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, Rutgers...

If you're a fiction writer or a poet who planned to submit something to the Mississippi Review this summer, you might want to hold off for the moment. The journal's editor, fiction writer Frederick Barthelme, will not be returning to his job as director of the University of Southern Mississippi's creative-writing program, the Center for Writers.  That means he's also left the Review, which is published by the center.

For years the Review has been held in high regard, publishing Ray Carver, Rick Moody, Tao Lin, and other established and rising talents. According to Barthelme and to news reports, he's not the only casualty; the managing editor is now gone too.

The Hattiesburg American has been covering the center's drama in detail. The paper reported that the circumstances of Barthelme's departure have dismayed the university's creative-writing faculty members and students. (See more...

Salt Lake City — In a lively lunchtime talk only briefly interrupted by a fire drill, Richard Brown, the new president of the Association of American University Presses, made it clear from the outset that he had no time for talk of crisis in scholarly publishing.

"It's not crisis," said Brown, director of Georgetown University Press. "It's perpetual transition. That's what we're in, and we'll be in it for the rest of our lives."

After getting the audience laughing with references to "Cleveland, a misunderstood city," and tales of how he was once talked into going to the beach instead of to an AAUP meeting, Brown got serious. He called scholarly publishing a moral and ethical enterprise and urged his listeners to think hard about what sorts of organizations their presses should be. That, he said, involved looking hard at their economic, social, and cultural orientations.

First, he said...

Salt Lake City — The fiscal year for university presses is coming to an end. So how did they do in 2010? In a lunchtime address here at the Association of American University Presses' annual conference, Kathleen Keane, director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, pointed to a collective sense that things could have been worse.

"I think many of us feel a sense of relief that we survived 2010 as well as we did," Keane told the group. She laid out some of the things that did not go badly for university presses this year. Book contracts were not canceled en masse; online sales grew; and combined 2010 sales of print and e-journals look to be holding steady.

The talk marked the end of Keane's yearlong tenure as the association's president. She did not play down the grimmer realities that have faced the university-press world lately. Yes, there was a recession. True, there were library...