Jennifer Howard’s article in today’s Chronicle reports on this weekend’s meeting of the Association of American University Presses. Her account is upbeat, noting that the meeting “was more a study in resilience and adaptiveness than it was a death watch.” There are encouraging signs for university presses, she says, among them the inclination of academic presses to produce and distribute e-books. The Mellon Foundation has apparently just funded a project to survey librarians to determine what they are looking for in the way of e-books, and this will be quite useful. Howard also notes that the library community turned out for the university press bash, and the two groups made nice over one another.

But I think the underlying problem was identified by the Director of Scholarly Publishing at the University of Michigan Library, which is now the host of the University of Michigan Press, a newly all-digital operation. “Moving into the library will mean adapting to the library’s culture. . . . This is perhaps less dangerous but also less free” as a way for the press to operate. It really is not clear what this means, but the theme of the AAUP meeting seems to have been that presses and libraries have to “find common ground.” For Michael Jensen of the National Academies Press, that ground was obvious: “50 percent digital sales, 25 percent print-on-demand books, and 25 percent institutionally funded open-access publishing;” “Open access in exchange for institutional support is a business model for survival.” I doubt it, simply because these general formulations are content-free. There is not a single university press content problem, but rather a separate problem for each area of academic content. Open access is one thing for the sciences, another for the humanities. My concern, as always, is with the content in the humanities and social sciences.

I have no doubt that we are rapidly moving into an environment of tiny initial print runs (if there is any print run at all) followed by print-on-demand, combined with some form of electronic delivery. For most books in the humanities and social sciences, I think that will work well — at least until disciplinary departments come to their senses and ask whether the “book” ought to continue as the standard criterion for scholarly evaluation. We now have the technology to produce scholarship in these new formats, although there are still serious questions about how to deliver it to the user. I am going to teach one of my fall courses using the new Kindle DX, and I’ll report later on how that goes. But the real question at the moment is what business model there is to sustain university presses in this new environment? I don’t think the answer is clear.

I was impressed by Peter J. Dougherty’s “manifesto” on scholarly publishing that appeared in the June 12 Chronicle Review. Peter, the director of the Princeton University Press, doesn’t address the business problem, but he makes a forceful case for the importance of book publishing: “Books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms . . . thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations.” At best, this is surely true of books, but Peter then goes on to promote the publication of professional books, advanced textbooks, and books for “worldwide readerships.” He is careful to say that he is not advocating the abandonment of “our commitment to traditional humanities fields,” and I believe him — but I think the logic of his argument is to the contrary. My question remains: Can we (and should we) sustain academic book publishing in the humanities and social sciences?

Postscript: I want to draw attention to Ms. Bauerle’s helpful comment (#7) below, pointing out that I misunderstood the news report on the transfer of the U. of Michigan Press to the library. Michigan will continue letterpress publication, and will not become all-digital. I regret the error. But readers may want to look at the Web site of the revived Rice University Press (on whose board I serve) to see what an all-digital academic press looks like. SNK