Textbook Sales Drop, and University Presses Search for Reasons

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

Textbook sales are falling at many university presses, a trend that has accelerated in the past couple of months. That's the word from press directors anxious about the decline but unsure what's causing it or how to stop it.

"I am hearing more and more complaints from people about their textbook sales, which for university presses means sales of specialized books that come in for upper-division courses," says Peter J. Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses. "I'm hearing it from big presses and small presses."

At the University of North Carolina Press, unit sales of course-adoption books — monographs ordered for classes — were down 14.5 percent for the 2008 fiscal year from the previous year, said Kate Douglas Torrey, the director. Unit sales over all have declined about 17 percent since 2004, "so you can see that to have 14.5 percent of that in one year is really worrisome," she said in an interview. Sales in July and August, the first two months of the 2009 fiscal year, were down as well. Course-adoption books account for 15 to 20 percent of the press's business.

At the University of Illinois Press, textbook sales make up about 14 percent of total sales, said the director, Willis G. Regier, noting "a slow and steady decline for the last couple of years." Unit sales for 2008 were down 12 percent from the previous year, he said.

Mr. Regier cautioned against reading too much into the numbers. "Over the long haul, our textbook sales have been pretty steady," he said. Many students now buy their books online, he pointed out, and those sales can be hard to track without closer analysis of the data. It can also be hard to determine which titles should be counted as textbooks.

Not every press has been affected. Two of the biggest players, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, told The Chronicle that their sales remain strong.

But another major academic publisher, the University of Chicago Press, has not been spared. "July and August is when we usually get our biggest hit on textbooks, and we're down compared to the last three years," said Garrett P. Kiely, the director. Orders from Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and other big retailers have slipped. "It's pretty widespread," he said. "It goes into our backlist as well."

Multiple Explanations

There appears to be no single explanation for the slippage. A troubled economy doesn't help sales. Illinois's Mr. Regier also invoked "the perpetual anomalies caused by used-book sales, new editions, new competition, and the whims of the professors." Scholarship moves on, and scholars change their book orders.

Mr. Givler, the press-association director, pointed to other, more-worrisome suspects, including the proliferation of Web sites that offer pirated versions of textbooks (see related article).

University presses used to assume that their books were too specialized to attract swipe-and-scan pirates. Not any more. As scanning and download technology have gotten more sophisticated, electronic files of university-press books have been turning up more often on pirate Web sites, sometimes even before they're published, Mr. Givler said.

Many presses have relied on authors and readers to spot violations. A reader alerted Chicago to a scanned version of its best-selling The Chicago Manual of Style that had been made freely available on the Internet.

"It can't help," Mr. Kiely said of piracy's possible effect on sales. "I've certainly become more aware of it in the last quarter than I had ever been in my career."

He's not alone. At Princeton University Press, piracy exploded as an area of concern this summer, said Daphne Ireland, the press's intellectual-property director. She came back from vacation at the end of July to find her e-mail inbox full of reports of pirated online versions of Princeton books. A part-timer, hired to trawl the Web, found more than 100 pirated files available for download, on a variety of sites.

Countering Piracy

Ms. Ireland expects the press to have to spend a lot more time playing what she calls "digital defense." Princeton intends to make piracy searches a regular part of its operations, she said. "It's a new world for us, and we're having to be diligent about it. It's really discouraging to know that we're going to have to be doing this, and that it's taking time away from putting out more and better books."

Many presses are also worried about the abuse of electronic reserves, which is touched on in a lawsuit brought by three scholarly publishers against Georgia State University (The Chronicle, June 27), and about the use of course-management software like Blackboard.

If professors make chapters of a book available as electronic reserves in the library, or get that material to their classes via Blackboard, students don't need to buy the book, and the professors may get out of having to pay a permission fee to the publisher.

To resolve that problem, presses "are going to have to start making it easy for people to ask for permission," said Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press and president of the Association of American University Presses. "It's something we really need to start thinking about."

Mr. Holzman said that he believes there is real reason for concern. His July and August textbook sales were down about 15 percent, in dollar terms, from a year ago. "My gut is telling me that electronic downloading is adding seriously to what would normally be just a straightforward economic downturn," he said. "There's something more going on here than in the past."

"The bottom line of all this on university presses," said Mr. Givler, "is suddenly becoming quite significant and quite disturbing. It's coming at a time when we're heading into what looks like a very rocky year. So this is bad timing, very bad timing all the way around."