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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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For Millennials, College and Learning Are Not the Same | Comment [20]
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Prospects for University Presses
Each year Book Industry Study Group publishes a report on sales and revenue trends in the publishing industry, and one chapter covers university presses. The 2006 report shows anemic revenue growth from 2004-5 of 1.3 percent — $460 million to $465.8 million. Worse, unit sales actually went down—24.7 million units to 24.5 million units. And the prediction is that through 2010 unit sales will remain flat.
The authors of Trends 2006 note the trajectory and observe that “a number of problems with no immediate solutions persist.” They include: “the diminishing buying power of libraries, the precarious financial state of the presses’ allied universities, and general economic uncertainties” (such as energy prices).
Some libraries are economizing by buying the paperback version of a scholarly book (if it exists) and slapping a cloth cover on it themselves. Some presses see an advantage in trade publishing, especially if the books have a regional attraction. Indeed, the presses surveyed by BISG have 20-30 percent of their offerings as trade titles, which helps their budgets even though trade books have lowered prices. Many presses have typesetting done overseas, while others are experimenting with print-on-demand. Oxford University Press has started blogs oriented around certain books.
Overall, the forecast is gloomy, with one publisher sounding the final note: “But if you want a staid, predictable business model, university press publishing is not the business to be in.”
The 2007 report came out months ago, but hasn’t arrived at my library. Here’s the press release.
Posted at 09:39:22 AM on January 29, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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I’ve been in university press publishing for over 40 years, and one thing I’ve learned is that trade publishing is not the path to salvation for most presses, if any. Because of the high discounts, low prices, large marketing costs, substantial print runs and corresponding inventory problems, and royalty advances to authors that are inherently involved in trade publishing, it can as often be a press’s financial undoing as it can a road to success. It is true that regional trade publishing is a safer bet, owing to university presses’ comparative advantage in being located where the main market is, thus reducing some costs, but even regional publishing is a crap shoot, with as many failures as successes likely.
As for the overall state of university press publishing, no one said it better than Yale’s director, Chester Kerr, way back in 1949, and this remains true today: “We publish the smallest editions at the greatest cost, and on these we place the highest prices and then we try to market them to people who can least afford them. This is madness.”
— Sandy Thatcher · Jan 30, 04:58 AM · #
I’d love to see the whole report, but since it costs $875 very few libraries own it, and often have only scattered years, not a standing order.
Speaking as a librarian, one of the best things the Association of American University Presses has done is compile Books for Understanding. If you select books for your library, it’s a great tool. Even if you don’t, it’s proof of the unique value of university presses. There are a lot of topics trade publishers aren’t interested in, because they don’t believe people would care about it – until something happens and everyone needs to know more about it right now.
http://aaupnet.org/booksforunderstanding.html
— barbara fister · Jan 30, 07:20 AM · #
The peer review process of most proud university presses imposes, has imposed for 50+ years, certain norms that diminish students as a market for their books. Anything not “academic-y” is banished “we are university presses”. Anything “grounding” an idea in practice is dirty, practical and banished—“we are for the mind not the dirty old inferior body”. The culture of university presses, infested with Descartes and Plato, undoes their ability to sell great ideas to academic customers—so they sell few ideas to libraries instead of to professors and students. They deserve all the financial trouble they get.
I like very much the “idea” of a university press but its current and traditional realization in the form of Platonic silly unpractical norms about what ideas are and what “academic books” on them are, undoes the whole thing, unfortunately. They deserve every single financial woe they suffer from. They have well earned it by cultural stubbornness and bigotry of the worst academic kind repeated over decades.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Jan 30, 09:38 AM · #
Why do the U Presses work so hard at killing their markets? The prices discourage individual students and scholars from building personal libraries. Flipping through a new Cambridge Classics catalog this week, I noted cheap cloth titles running $80-100, with some running in the $200-300 range, without even the option of an egregiously overpriced paperback. Not that trade houses are much better. Routledge seems to specialize in books that cost a dollar or two per page. I used to buy twice as many scholarly books as I do now (including as a grad student when I had much less income).
— hippokleides · Jan 30, 09:56 AM · #
One possible eventual solution is to make universities into self-publishers: university presses as they are now, of course, are not the organs of the institution. The “institutional repository” movement is a move in that direction — see http://www.sparceurope.org/Repositories/ for more information. Although the word “repository” suggests a passive cache of a university’s intellectual content, in practice there’s nothing from stopping such a repository, if digital, from being a mode of distribution, as well. Peer review could still be performed by scholars from other institutions.
— Amanda French · Jan 30, 10:30 AM · #
The same report indicates that juvenile books only increased 1.9% —but where is the outcry about those backward juvenile book publishers? Overall sales units only increased by 1% for the industry, according to the report.
Please note: all publishers are having trouble finding readers these days.
I spent 22 years in commerical publishing before being furtunate enough to become a university press publisher and I am baffled that at the lack of understanding and appreciation for what presses actually DO accomplish.
Despite the discouraging trends that apply to all publishers, some presses are actually improving —publishing better in print and electronically, and garnering more appreciative support from their local financially beleagured institutions, despite what the redoubtable Chester Kerr said in 1950.
— james jordan · Jan 30, 12:54 PM · #
Mr. Greene seems to have gotten out of the wrong side of bed this morning, so grumpy is he about university presses. But his comments belie little understanding of the current diversity of publishing at presses, which ranges from publishing monographs—yes, still the core of our publishing, because that is what our parent universities have mandated that we do—to real texts for undergraduates and graduate students to regional titles for the broad public and trade titles for the entire world. His jaundiced view may had had some basis in reality forty or fifty years ago, but it ill reflects the state of university publishing today, which is hardly stuck in the Platonic clouds of pure theoretical discourse. Has he heard the term “irrational exuberance,” for instance? It is the title of a book by Robert Schiller published by Princeton that made popular the phrase coined by Fed Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. Or the book by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker titled “The Great Risk Shift” issued by Oxford that analyzes in plain words (and sells for $15.95 in paperback) our modern dilemma of economic insecurity that is the focus now of all the presidential campaigns? Many such examples can be cited to show that Mr. Greene is way off base in his characterization of what presses do today.
— Sandy Thatcher · Jan 30, 03:48 PM · #