Every May, the journal Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries has a special feature on university-press publishing. This year, Choice asked five directors “to focus on matters electronic—e-books, the Internet, in short, the so-called digital revolution as it pertains to university presses.”
Here’s a sample thought from each of the five participants, taken wildly out of context but still perhaps enough to convince you to read the feature in its entirety. It’s worth the time, although you will encounter some familiar challenges-and-opportunities rhetoric and what sometimes sounds more like PR than prognostication.
Carey C. Newman, Baylor U. Press, deploring the idea of a scholarly book as a chunk of “academic content”: “I am a book publisher, a publisher of books. I am a steward of sustained acts of wisdom, not a Gordon Gekko of information. There is a difference, a big difference.”
Kathleen Keane, Johns Hopkins U. Press, on her press’s digital accomplishments: “When we began in 1878, the very idea of a university press was an innovation. How wonderful, then, to know that through our e-book offerings we continue to deliver knowledge and reach new readers in ever more innovative, even startling ways.”
Ellen W. Faran, MIT Press, recapping lessons learned in the press’s digital experiments since the 1990s: “What we have learned is that there is absolutely nothing straightforward about moving ‘born print’ content to online editions.”
Peter Dougherty, Princeton U. Press, on the demands and rewards of selling “globally significant books”: Several recent titles on the global financial crisis “have reinforced the relevance of global markets for us and the residual importance of having production, distribution, marketing, publicity, rights, and sales capabilities geared to reaching these markets, and to reaching them quickly and steadily. But the real challenge is having the capacity to coordinate all these activities to create a sustained global publishing campaign in a fast-moving market.”
Alex Holzman, Temple U. Press, on the changing library market for university-press books: “Librarians currently presiding over shrinking budgets seem to have decided that the scholarly journal is akin to an untouchable government entitlement program while the academic monograph is subject to some serious sunset clauses. So it goes. E-books may offer the technological means for shifting outdated business models and allowing the retention of the monograph purchase.”—Jennifer Howard
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One Response to Five U. Press Directors Talk E-Books
mbelvadi - May 28, 2010 at 8:59 am
Mr. Holzman should try Googling “serials cancellation site:.edu” to see the myriad examples of academic libraries conducting comprehensive periodical subscription weeding projects – there’s certainly nothing untouchable about them. It is true that when faced with cutting a specific journal, that has specific stakeholders, compared with shifting “generic” money from a monograph budget to continue to pay for that journal, where the monograph budget represents some unknown titles to be purchase in the upcoming fiscal year, it’s hard to defend the value of the unknown books against the value of the known journal for which there may even be specific use data available.One of the tools librarians use to make these decisions is circulation data by LC class. In this, then, the rest of the university faculty are culpable. At the reference desk, I see far more undergrad assignments that require the use of scholarly journal articles than books. If faculty don’t require students to use books, they don’t, and then the circ stats show low use, which then justifies reducing the monograph budget. In library metrics, it’s called the “cost per use” calculation.Of course, these patterns vary in very predictable ways by discipline, and the rise of enrollment in the health/social science/professional programs which lean towards journals, and the decline of the arts and humanities which lean towards books, is furthering the trend. If proportionally more students are enrolling in disciplines which use journals, then there’s nothing necessarily wrong with library budgets likewise shifting proportionally.