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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Mark Bauerlein Marc Bousquet Laurie Fendrich Dan Greenberg Stan Katz Stephen Joel Trachtenberg Bob Zemsky Recent PostsCan You Use Orphan Works? | Comment [9] SNAAP Judgments | Comment [6] Thanks, Karen | Comment [5] Symphony Orchestra as a Team Sport | Comment [2] Is the E-Book in Trouble? | Comment [2] Featured Articles By the Author
Is the E-Book in Trouble?The Chronicle reported a couple of weeks ago (4/12/08) that there were rumors that the Columbia University might eliminate its electronic publishing program, and that the admirable Kate Wittenberg, who has been the editor most prominently associated with Columbia’s electronic-publication program, would leave the University in June. Jim Neal, Columbia’s able librarian and chief information officer (Columbia was one of the first universities to combine the two positions) refused the Chronicle’s request for comment on the matter. I gather from friends in publishing that no one knows exactly what is happening, but if Columbia is abandoning the field of electronic publishing, those of us who have promoted digital publications should be concerned. One of Columbia’s first forays into the field was via a Mellon-funded partnership with the American Historical Association, to publish Gutenberg-e. This was an initiative spearheaded by then AHA president Bob Darnton (my former Princeton history colleague and currently the Harvard Librarian) to award prize fellowships for the best history dissertations in fields that seemed to have limited publishing opportunities. I was the vice president for research at the AHA at the time, and worked with Bob to launch the project. Simultaneously, the Mellon Foundation was funding an ACLS digital history project, intended to provide retrospective digital conversions of important history monographs, as well as to publish born-digital monographs in the field. The initial idea was to distribute e-publication across several academic publishers, but Columbia pretty quickly emerged as the leading publisher, in part because of the skill and commitment of Kate Wittenberg, and in part because of Columbia’s commitment to e-publishing. These events took place about a decade ago, and today almost all academic presses are doing some electronic publishing, though it is my impression that little of their digital activity is of born-digital scholarship. Google has of course made large-scale digital retrospective conversion of older academic monographs and source materials a startling reality, and most academic journals currently publish either simultaneously in analog and digital forms or exclusively electronically. But the economics of born-digital publishing (whether commercial or non-profit) are still very difficult, and therefore the news from Columbia may be discouraging. We do not yet (or I do not yet) know enough about the actual situation to be sure, but this is one more sign that our entry into digital publishing is still a work in progress. Can academic presses continue their important work without philanthropic support? If not, what is the near-term future of the digital academic book? Posted at 03:10:25 PM on April 25, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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The key sentence of this posting is: “[T]oday almost all academic presses are doing some electronic publishing, though it is my impression that little of their digital activity is of born-digital scholarship.”
It appears that the problem for Columbia (and other scholarly e-venues) is that academics, by and large, do not engage in what I call “integrated writing” — where they themselves compose electronic “multimedia” texts. To be fair, in general, most doctoral candidates are still expected to produce a traditional “book” frozen in time and form, for “evaluation” and “publishing” equally frozen in time and form.
The costs of assuming the responsibility for such “translations” from book writing to digital multimedia “integrated writing” have been noted as a major stumbling block for such “upload for download” enterprises as Columbia’s.
Only when the next generation of scholars, those who are, as high school students, composing their own Webpages, etc. — only when they arrive on the academic scene will scholarly e-publishing reach its true potential.
Not only will this new generation of “authors” be “literate” in “integrated writing” but their concept of publishing itself will be more fluid, more collective, communitarian.
They will expect to be able to update and change their “integrated writing” themselves on-demand, to receive often near-instantaneous comment and reaction from the scholarly community at large (and not just from the three-person dissertation review committee).
The nature of the production and transmission of knowledge is changing, indeed, has changed, but our academic institutions and publishing e-venues in general have not. Not having yet regularly educated scholars in “integrated writing” (and not having yet figured out how to do profit-making and credit-sharing activities in such an open environment) they are still “frozen in time and in space” in the midst of ever-evolving forms of scholarly communication.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 25, 05:06 PM · #
Stan:
Your posting of April 25 with respect to e-publishing can be read to suggest that Columbia’s Gutenberg-e project has terminated, since you speculate that Columbia might be “abandoning the field” of e-publishing. We are happy to confirm that ACLS Humanities E-Book, working closely with Columbia and building upon the foundation laid by the people there, is now distributing Gutenberg-e, and that the project is motoring along smoothly.
— Eileen Gardiner & Ron Musto, ACLS · May 2, 08:16 AM · #