From the issue dated June 13, 2003
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5 Problems and 9 Solutions for University PressesBy WILLIS G. REGIERFor a symptom of the current state of university presses, consider the recent
I suppose that is because publishing has become so much of a business. And what's wrong with the business? In a word, returns. Returns is a word that will return like a thief throughout these pages. The book business has an anomaly: If a retailer can't sell a book, the book can be returned to the publisher for full credit. Books will be returned today that we thought we had sold last year. Imagine this: Borders buys $10,000 worth of books and has 90 days to pay. If its stores sell half the books in 30 days, they can bank the money and enjoy interest on the income for two months. After 90 days, they can return the unsold books to the publisher for full credit, then reorder the same books for another 90 days. The bankers of Venice could have learned much from the American book trade. Because of returns, success can fail. If a book looks promising, stores will order most or all of a first printing; and the publisher will reprint. But there are always more promises made than kept, and not all books fulfill their promise. Then come the returns, and the publisher has all the copies from the new printing and piles from the first one. Last year, an Ivy League press had one month with more than a million dollars in returns. In some months, some presses had more returns than sales. Why are we so involved with returns? How did university presses move so far into the trade marketplace, ever further from their universities? Because of five significant changes:
By the way, there is a weak national economy. Now, in more detail. First problem: Library budgets shifted. There remains today a stubborn, widespread fantasy that libraries will buy enough copies of a book to pay for the cost of producing it. True, once upon a time, a university press could expect to sell about 1,500 copies of a typical monograph, with 800 to 1,000 of those sales to academic libraries. But by 1990, the number for library sales had dropped to 500 or 600. Currently, it is common to hear 200, and not unusual to hear still lower numbers. Why? Oh, you know, business. In 1991, Elsevier Publishing, in the Netherlands, acquired Pergamon Press, and in 1993, Elsevier merged with Reed International. In 2001, Reed Elsevier received permission to acquire Harcourt General, making it a worldwide giant in publishing science and medical journals. For some reason, during this period, journal prices soared, library budgets were gouged, and monograph budgets were gored. The sale, last month, of the academic publishing group BertelsmannSpringer to two private European equity firms will create a second behemoth in the ever-smaller ring of commercial publishers of scientific journals. The painstaking investigation of a subject presented at book length, with credible evidence and a solid grasp of the knowledge and protocols of at least one discipline, will continue its slump. Alas, poor monograph. According to reports from the Association of Research Libraries, since 1986 journal expenditures by its members have increased 215 percent and monograph expenditures 68 percent. In material terms, since 1986, library purchases of the actual number of monographs has decreased by 9 percent. In a Faustian equation, one journal about lipids is worth 50 or 60 books about literature. The library at my own University of Illinois subscribes to nine journals about lipids. When I'm asked about the university cutting out fat, such journals come to mind. The second problem: Across the continent, university administrations came to assume that their presses could make money, so they cut press subsidies, or removed them altogether. As library purchases dwindled and subsidies disappeared, most university presses had nowhere else to go but to the trade, to the bookstores that sell John Grisham and Mary Higgins Clark. In order to publish for universities, university presses had to spend more time and more money publishing books for readers outside universities. The strategy seems simple enough: Publish one book in order to pay for another. But the effects upon university publishing were savage. In the first place, presses now had to publish a second book to sell the first, increasing workloads and manufacturing costs, which in turn demanded streamlining in production, less attention to detail, and more uniformity in size, shape, and subject matter. In the second place, there was no guarantee that the second book would sell enough copies to pay for itself and another. In the third, most authors began to think that their books were the ones that would make money. Nevertheless, acting in hope and good faith, university presses set their sights on bookstores and increased their production levels. Did they ever. In the past 20 years, the number of new books published by California, Columbia, MIT, and Princeton doubled, by Indiana and Yale tripled, by Stanford sextupled, and other university presses huffed and puffed to keep pace. More books, more books! At the same time, a tight academic job market raised the bar for hiring, tenure, and promotion, and scholars and presses felt the pressure to publish more books. After a few years, a defect in the strategy became obvious. Wealthier university presses could afford to diversify more effectively. In 1980, Cambridge published 543 new titles and Oxford 802. In 2000, Cambridge published 2,376 new books, and Oxford 2,250. In 20 years, the productivity of the two presses tripled. By comparison, in the same period, the number of faculty members at North American colleges and universities increased by 65 percent. The business of university publishing had entered into dangerous arithmetic. Production grew almost four times faster than the market. The total output of all university presses in 2000 was 31 million books. After deducting the five million books bought by libraries, each and every one of the million faculty members in academe in the United States would need to buy 26 university-press books a year to reach market equilibrium. Administrators who demand that their presses stay in the black ask much when they ask them to compete against Oxford and Cambridge, each eight times larger than the largest American university presses. In like manner, it takes a lot to compete against commercial presses like Routledge, W.W. Norton, AOL Time Warner, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and Bertelsmann (which owns Alfred A. Knopf and Random House). Behind that sober picture lie other systemic troubles. The number of reviews of academic books has pretty much stayed constant, so more books get less review attention. The number of faculty members competent to referee manuscripts has lagged far behind, so fewer manuscripts are well refereed. On the supply side, if presses continued to expand, where would they find the additional books? From barely revised dissertations, from books written faster, less carefully refereed, and less revised. On the demand side, could university presses publish twice as much and sensibly expect that readership would also double? Not when you consider that scholars had to spend more time writing, rather than reading. But author expectations changed: Twenty years ago, the primary concerns of a scholar were the clear and accurate presentation of scholarship in an attractive and durable format; now marketing, paperback publication, and sales in superstores are front and center. (It is surprising how many authors assume that publishers decide what books a bookstore will carry. Instead, publishers cajole bookstores with large discounts and huge credits, usually rewarded by account disputes and massive returns.) Nor did success in the market necessarily improve the health of a university press. Chicago is the largest American university press, with a spectacular list of books that have sold very well -- too well, perhaps. When the press was prospering in the 1980s, the university began to drain off its income, taking away millions of dollars every year. That practice is no longer an exception. At several universities, money made by the sale of trade books is not allowed to support publication of scholarly books. For a while, it seemed possible to labor in the trade market. In 1991, the first of the Barnes & Noble superstores opened in Minneapolis. Borders surged out of Ann Arbor. Those chains bought university-press books in vast quantities. As they kept building, they kept buying, imitators appeared, and university presses went into the market willingly, cheerfully. Then in 1996, the boom stopped. Obituaries appeared for chain bookstores like Brentano's, Chapters, and Crown Books. Independent bookstores, now handling less than 20 percent of bookstore sales, went bankrupt or sold out. And then -- returns. (The annual reports of Borders and Barnes & Noble give no comfort. Borders is putting a happy face on major losses; Barnes & Noble is aggressively expanding via debt. Sooner or later one will clobber the other, one or both will fall, and the returns will become tsunamis.) For a while, however, we had hope. Suddenly in Seattle, a nobody on the Internet claimed to have the "world's largest bookstore." Amazon.com arrived like a saving angel, promising a speedy means for reaching a reader. Amazon ordered three copies of every book published by just about every university press. As returns came in from the chains, books turned around and went to Amazon. By 2003, we can look back and see a steady increase in sales to Amazon; but by no means have those compensated for the loss of other sales. In another important trend, the Los Alamos National Laboratory launched several Web-based preprint servers that caught on faster than cable TV. Web-based scholarship, with its immediacy and unlimited circulation, mesmerized the academy. Enter problem four: electronic publishing. The advantages of electronic publishing are real, wonderfully so, but they are not cheap, requiring highly trained personnel, constant upgrading, and a very expensive infrastructure. Electronic publishing adds costs; it does not shift them. For the best of reasons, scholars still expect print. Even though research on astrophysics goes on the Web at the speed of light, Chicago must still publish print versions of its astrophysics journals, a very expensive undertaking. True, electronic publishing has one viable market: libraries. But library funds for electronic publications flow mostly to commercial publishers for journals ... . Yes, with print-on-demand, books converted to electronic form can be converted into books again; no book needs to go out of print. That is good news, indeed, for the giant publishers that formerly licensed rights to university presses, and good news for authors who want their books available at any price. It is not good news for authors who cannot take their books to other presses to be published in quantity because old editions are still being published one copy at a time. On December 9, 1999, Random House announced that it intended to digitize its entire list -- 20,000 books -- and to consider reviving the 50,000 out-of-print books for which it still had rights; shortly afterward, Simon & Schuster made a similar announcement. The giants recaptured their book rights. University presses saw a significant source of income -- books licensed from trade publishers -- become harder to get. What had been the fifth change in publishing, licensing, became the fifth problem. In 2001, 41 university presses -- including Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale -- published fewer new books than they had the year before. I doubt that is a one-time correction. But neither is it the crack of doom. Against the gloom, there are still Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and other catalogs full of important new books. Business has contracted, but so have we. We may shrink, but we will not disappear. We've been through five substantial changes, yet here we are. We're still in the bookstores, because they need our books. If they depend on us less, we depend less on them. But they do not need all our books, or many copies of them, and that cold fact returns us to a warm one: Universities need university presses because commercial presses are too expensive, too market driven, to meet publishing needs of works whose importance is gauged by other measures than copies sold. For a great university, publication is necessary; and if the university participates in publication, it is all the greater. That would seem an obvious principle, vindicated by the universities that promptly responded to the departure of press directors by hiring new ones. But it is by no means a sacred truth, disputed as it is by administrations whose whole concept of a university is distorted by corporate analogies. University presses are under severe financial stress, and they are struggling for footing in a swirl of returns and budget cuts. It will be more difficult to publish. No one should assume that trouble at university presses is small and isolated. When presses shrink, they must make decisions based on a wide range of criteria, including the vulgar one: Who cares? A university administration will care more if its faculty cares more. What can be done to create care where it matters? Nine things at least. First, scholars can buy more books in fields they cherish -- 26 a year would solve everything. Second, presses can put trade sales in second place, restoring priority to publishing important books. Third, authors can take more care in writing clearly and concisely, so that books are less expensive and more valuable. Fourth, authors and publishers alike can care more about design and editing than market splash, about books as books rather than books as occasions for advertisement. Fifth, university administrations can care enough to invest in university presses up front, paying for the costs of electronic publishing or ceasing to expect it. Sixth, tenure-and-promotion committees can reduce paperwork by caring more for energy than mass. Seventh, presses should care enough to befriend librarians. Eighth, they should befriend scientists. And ninth, if a nearby university press is in trouble, faculty members, especially in the humanities and social sciences, should rise to the courage of their curriculums and fight for it. Who else will? If university presses cannot publish in those fields, who else will? The same publishers who made science so expensive will gladly take over. Willis G. Regier is director of the University of Illinois Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 40, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education