From the issue dated June 28, 2002
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University Presses Aren't Endangered ...By NIKO PFUNDOne of the most frequently quoted aphorisms of the early Internet age was
Negroponte's term has proved prophetic in important ways. The music industry seems in a perpetual scramble to keep ahead of -- or, rather, only two steps behind -- the latest music-copying software. Napster declines, others rise. And there's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't quality to the position of the record companies. When they have organized their own online commercial presence, such as Pressplay, backed by Sony and Universal, and MusicNet, backed by EMI, BMG, and AOL Time Warner, the Justice Department has investigated them for collusion and antitrust violations. A multi-airline ticket Web site foundered on those same grounds, and such a fate would seem to await the kind of multipress, Web-based catalog that publishing visionary Jason Epstein anticipates as a way to cut out online booksellers. Many people in the publishing industry have fretted about the prospect of books going the way of music, freely pirated off the Web. The online world will no doubt offer many challenges, difficult to anticipate and even more vexing to navigate. The ultimate impact, for instance, of Amazon.com's decision to list used books on its site has yet to be determined. But whatever changes lie ahead, publishers, particularly university presses, are unlikely to find themselves endangered. Whether heavily endowed or self-sustaining, public or private, large or small, regional or international, university presses straddle two very different cultures. And it is precisely that dual identity, that Janus-headed quality, that ensures their existence, now and in the future. On the one hand, the presses reside squarely within the "gift economy" of the academic world, where thousands of hours of scholarly labor are often rewarded with little more than a modest print run, some reviews, and perhaps a shot at tenure. Even in this age of creeping privatization in higher education, the individual financial decisions and relationships that govern the three-way dynamic among authors, university presses, and universities often make little economic sense. Small wonder -- since university presses are often given deliberately blurred mandates (which is also why editors and publishers from the commercial world, where the clarity of purpose is less opaque, tend to have a more difficult time making the transition to the university-press world than do academic editors moving to trade). How can we best serve the university, and keep faculty members happy and feeling well-represented, all without skewing the editorial agenda of the press? (No Festschriften, please! Okay, maybe the occasional one.) How can we make ends meet while steering clear of anything too commercial or nonacademic? (Except, of course, for regional titles, in which case bring on those local cookbooks.) Perhaps most important, how can a university press shed reflective glory on its parent university -- which doesn't always or necessarily translate to making money, and sometimes requires engaging in publishing ventures that lose it? But even as we exist in this gift culture, university presses are also businesses, plain and simple. We create and sell valuable goods (although many of us try not to think of it that way), pay bills, and chase delinquent accounts. We fight for our place in the hardscrabble world of publishing and retail bookselling, calibrating advances, bargaining with our suppliers, and so forth. University presses aren't "pure" capitalist institutions. Many are subsidized or bolstered by endowments or grants, and even those few that aren't return any surplus to their parent institution and, thus, to the cause of higher education. Yet they must, in contrast to most divisions of a university, where the flow of money is decidedly one-way (in but not out), generate income and balance their books. The columnist Martin Arnold recently wrote in The New York Times, "Everyone knows book publishing is an easy thing to do, just as everyone knows he can run a baseball team or put out a newspaper." Good publishing, when done properly, can look easy from the outside. I often make a point of holding up a particularly specialized book and asking new members of my press how many copies they estimate we printed. Almost without fail, they guess a number with at least one more zero at the end than the actual print run. But even a book that sells only a few hundred copies -- a book only a university press could love -- benefits from a slew of publishing activities largely invisible to most authors. Consider just a few. First and foremost, university presses forge relationships with book reviewers and booksellers. I'll resist spouting old media clichés about the value of the brand and the centrality of trust, but there's no escaping the fact that reputation and personal relationships drive successful books. If the University of North Carolina Press were to claim that one of its new books were, say, "one of the most important works on Southern politics we've published in our history," that would mean something to book reviewers and booksellers. If an Oxford University Press sales representative with a quarter-century of experience and personal relationships in the business raves about a popular-science book on the emotional life of animals, or one of our publicists claims a title to be the definitive synthetic history of Vichy France, that resonates. If you see a university-press book in a national-parks bookstore, chances are a special sales expert has orchestrated that offering. If you notice a short history of Islamic architecture in the lobby of the Jerusalem Holiday Inn, an international sales specialist likely placed that book in Israel. Second, we are constantly negotiating the increasingly important world of online bookselling and promotion. Although online sales have plateaued since the go-go growth years of the late 1990s, online bookselling has still completely changed the topography of the academic-publishing industry. Everyone now knows that you can order virtually any book from an Amazon.com or a barnesandnoble.com. Behind the one-click technology and the user-friendly Web sites, however, lies an immensely complicated web of data feeds, never-ending information updates, and time-consuming communication between publisher and online bookseller. At Oxford, we recently sought to diagram the way information travels back and forth among publishers, the Library of Congress, wholesalers, and retail accounts. The resulting chart ended up looking like Tom Ridge's graph of the American national-security bureaucracy. Understanding that information dialectic, and being able to make it work effectively, is one of the most critical aspects of ensuring that scholarly books reach their audience. Simply printing a book and announcing its presence online does decidedly not mean that they will come. When NYU's public-journalism program decided to work with BookSurge.com -- an online store catering to print-on-demand and e-books -- to compile and publish 09/11, 8:48 am: Documenting America's Greatest Tragedy (a book in which some Chronicle essays appeared) within a month of the September 11 attacks, they were able to manufacture the physical book with lightning speed. But they were confounded by the difficulty of getting it into the consciousness of the book industry. Publishers tend to announce their books six to nine months before publication, and the entire promotional grid is set up accordingly. If and when presses do publish "instant books," they must, all the more, draw on their foothold and personal contacts in the industry to push those books out. While reasonable people can disagree about whether such systems constitute an unfortunate barrier to entry for nonpublishers or simply a pragmatic system by which the book world tries to process the 50,000-plus books published every year in this country, the inescapable lesson to be drawn here -- one learned by countless self-published authors -- is that newcomers or one-timers unable to rely on an extant infrastructure struggle mightily to be heard. Another service in which university presses specialize -- and that many commercial presses and self-publishing scholars are hard-pressed to match -- pertains to their work with libraries. Libraries, which constitute the largest prospective market for much serious non-fiction, cannot evaluate every book or every catalog to decide which titles to purchase, an impossibly onerous task. Rather, they rely on a number of library "jobbers" (such as YBP Library Services), to whom they present a general outline of what kinds of titles they would like to purchase. Those outlines, known as "approval plans," are extremely detailed, consisting of dozens of criteria. Not only do the plans rely squarely on the implicit guarantees that lie behind a university-press imprimatur, but they must be "fed" with a constant stream of information about new publications, without which the flow of books from publishers to institutions of higher learning would stop. Next, consider the mechanics of publishing. The fulfillment side of the business is a decidedly industrial enterprise, far removed from the abstract chitchat of a New York publishing lunch. Imagine a warehouse three to four times the size of your average Costco or Sam's Club and you have the Oxford warehouse, a veritable cathedral of specialized scholarship, with thousands of books (new titles and, alas, returns) arriving daily to be logged in and credited, and even greater numbers of books leaving the facility every hour. An efficient fulfillment system constitutes a particular challenge for university presses, charged as they are with selling a small number of each of a great many different titles, making it an inherently less-efficient undertaking than the fulfillment operation of a commercial house with virtually no titles boasting initial print runs of under 1,000. On the other hand, once the books are sold, how many self-publishers are willing -- or able -- to carry out the less-than-pleasant business operations of a press? Every business has an accounts-receivable department that chases down overdue payments. Since publishing is an undercapitalized industry, publishers incessantly pressure late accounts, negotiate for payment, withhold new deliveries until old ones are paid for, question charge-backs, and on and on. It's a never-ending process that requires a delicate mix of hard-nosed pressure and subtle diplomacy, and, perhaps most important, of stamina and good cheer. To be sure, we also engage in all those activities of which publishing is rumored to consist. We review proposals. We read manuscripts, overhauling some from top to bottom, merely tweaking others. We solicit outside readers. We copy-edit. We transform rough manuscripts into clean, elegant type. We send out review copies and hundreds of thousands of targeted catalogs to a range of people as varied as ornithologists and medieval historians. Even the frequent grousing over the decline in editing these days is, arguably, a tacit acknowledgment of what publishers are best known for. Even with the occasional author-publisher friction -- with its inevitable concern that presses aren't doing enough to promote a book, that the book is never in stores, that it would sell in droves if only priced $3 below its current price -- the reality is that most authors, with the occasional exception, tend to be favorably disposed toward their presses, and, if not to the publishing houses per se, then certainly to their editors, marketers, and publicists. That is particularly true for scholars and university presses. To my knowledge, no professor has written "slave" in magic marker on his cheek to protest his book contract, as Prince did to describe his relationship with his record label. To invoke a different musical analogy entirely, consider the case of Todd Rundgren, an influential and innovative but commercially marginal songwriter for the past 30 years. (If you've never heard of him, his two most popular tunes are "Hello, It's Me" and "Bang on the Drum All Day," a crowd-pleasing repetitive little number that's in heavy rotation at every sports arena in the country.) Faced, I imagine, with steadily declining record sales and increasingly disinterested record labels (again, I speculate), in 1998 Rundgren launched an interactive Web site (www.tr-i.com) that permits his hard-core fans immediate, unfiltered access to his latest work for a subscription fee. That model makes perfect sense: Why go through a middleman for whom you are small potatoes and who might interfere with your artistic decisions when you can go straight to your most loyal enthusiasts? If you have 5,000 devout supporters out there willing to pony up $40 a year for that kind of access, and you can afford to keep your site fresh and responsive for $30,000 a year, you're taking home $170,000 in income. The most closely analogous development in publishing is Stephen King's serial e-novella, Riding the Bullet. That seems not to have worked beyond an initial, media-induced frenzy, although I would maintain it still might just. However, in the case of both Rundgren and King, their reputations have already very much been made, which is a far cry from an unknown author throwing work up on the Web. Vanity publishing makes sense, whether in print or online, but only if one is truly humble about one's ambitions -- and willing to pay to be published. During the Olympics, a friend in publishing commented to me: "I have been listening to my teeth grind nightly, while watching the Xerox commercial that comes on every 20 minutes about how 'now, everyone can get published!' with on-demand technology. 'Where's the demand for your work going to come from, you slovenly weenie?' is what keeps running through my head." So we should be able to agree that much of what we university presses do is invisible, that a good bit of it would be laborious and dull to an author wishing to self-publish, and that it is presses' transparent efforts that often add the greatest value. We should further be able to agree that university presses bring to light important work that a commercial publisher would never consider. I suspect we can also agree on one more point -- namely, that publishers have not done a particularly good job of revealing to authors all the factors and activities that underlie the publication of a successful book. Publishers, particularly university presses, must make a concerted effort to communicate more consistently and effectively to both their reading and writing constituencies, to perpetually and deliberately renew the sense of alliance, of genuine partnership, that lies at the heart of our industry. That information transfer is especially critical at a time when presses themselves struggle to keep up with galloping technology and to devise long-term strategies in response to an ever-shifting marketplace. The age of the deliberately cryptic publisher, of an industry that obfuscates to remain mysterious, is over. Granted, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. All the more reason to disclose it all. Niko Pfund is academic publisher of Oxford University Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education