From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 30 May 2014 19:50:14 -0500

Rick will recall a debate we had about the effect of PDA on presses,
which ended up being an interview later published in Against the
Grain. I worried about how PDA might affect negatively presses' cash
flow and inventory, while Rick emphasized the positive aspects for
libraries and declared that it wasn't libraries' responsibility to
save presses.  Of course, he was right in one sense, but I think Joe's
comment gets at what I was trying to say, which was to underline how
the whole system of scholarly communication might be harmed if presses
were to become extinct.

There is much at stake for universities in letting this system die
out.  We all need to be reminded that university presses were first
launched back in the late 19th century because of perceived "market
failure" -- that there were not enough potential buyers/readers to
support publishing of scholarly work (both journals and monographs) in
the existing commercial publishing marketplace of the day.
Ironically, of course, entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell figured out a
way to make a viable commercial market out of publishing scholarly
journals, and a number of commercial firms even have tried to make a
business out of publishing monographs.  The days of both appear to be
numbered, at least using the business models on which they were
originally built.

My guess is that, for monographs, university administrators will
eventually step forward and fashion some kind of modified OA approach
to ensure that scholars in the humanities and social sciences, where
books still remain important (at least in some disciplines and
subfields), for tenure and promotion.  It might take the form of more
widespread support for an already existing model like Knowledge
Unlatched, or more experiments with endowment-based operations like
the new one just launching at Amherst, or else just reallocating
monies (perhaps from library budgets) to award as grants to junior
faculty to cover the first-copy costs of their first books (which
would still have a market component to the extent that some revenues
would be generated through sales of POD editions, as we experimented
with at Penn State in romance Studies).  As Michigan's former provost
and current head librarian Paul Courant has argued, adding $20,000 or
so to a junior faculty member's stipend is a rather modest investment
when viewed in the light of the entire investment a university makes
in a tenured faculty member over the course of an entire academic
career. And approaching the matter in this way would not require
setting up any new bureaucracy or set of procedures, but would simply
build upon the already existing competition among universities to
attract the best faculty (just as they bid against each other to
attract the best football coaches).

I agree with Rick that we are probably coming to the end of the road
as far as totally market-based scholarly book publishing is concerned.
 But, in my view, that would be liberating as it would free presses
from having to rely so much on market criteria in making decisions
about what to publish, allowing assessments of merit to play the major
role instead.

Sandy Thatcher


From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 29 May 2014 01:44:08 +0000

>Those prices will continue to go up until nobody buys the books any
>more.  Then they won't be published.  That's where we are heading.

The thing that concerns me for UPs is that this may be where we©–re heading
regardless of what happens with prices. What we©–re seeing here, I think,
is not just the relatively elastic nature of demand for scholarly books
(©¯Raise your prices? Whatever, we©–ll just buy less©—), but also a formerly
irrational system Ð one where books were sold in numbers that had nothing
to do with the amount of demand for them Ð gradually becoming more and
more rational as sales start to come more and more into line with demand.

That©–s what PDA/DDA does Ð it starts to expose what has, up until
recently, been largely hidden by the library©–s traditional just-in-case
collection-building practices: the actual amount of reader/researcher
demand for scholarly books. And the results would be pretty terrifying to
me if I were a publisher.

The simple reality, I think, is that an awful lot of these books probably
shouldn©–t be published Ð at least, not in the sense that we©–ve
traditionally understood that word.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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