From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 22:52:01 -0500

And let's not forget that the introduction of the photocopied
coursepack, followed later by the e-reserve systems run by libraries,
had a very significant impact on the sales of paperbacks for course
adoptions, which had historically been one of the primary revenue
streams for university presses in the 1960s ands 1970s.  The licensing
of sales of book chapters through the CCC only partially compensated
for the losses, and then of course we have the challenges coming from
universities like GSU that didn't want to pay for use of book chapters
at all in e-reserve systems. If people are wondering why university
presses have been struggling financially, part of the explanation lies
here.

There may be good pedagogical reasons for assigning just chapters
instead of whole books, but the consequences of using that approach
include weakening the system of scholarly publishing that makes the
publication of books possible in the first place.

Perhaps, as Jim appears to be hinting, we should abandon publishing
monographs at all and just have scholars publish articles, as they do
predominantly in the sciences?

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:24:06 -0400
>
> This is a fascinating topic to the practicing academic.  I can think
> of a lot of good reasons why the interest in chapters would increase.
> (1) We've always done it, but when it required taking the book
> physically out of circulation for a semester and putting it on the
> Reserve Desk, we probably did less of it.  (2) It used to be a lot
> harder to assign articles for the same reason until the coursepack was
> invented; so the coursepack got us used to the idea that we could do a
> mix and match of half a dozen shorter readings a week easily.  (3)
> Lots more "books" now are collections of articles.  We talk a lot in
> my neck of the humanities of the growth and flourishing of the
> companion, the handbook, and the volume of conference papers, to which
> many of us contribute far more than we do to peer-reviewed journals.
> That produced objects that pass as "books" in the world of publishing
> and libraries but contain a disparate and uneven collection of
> articles and make sense when assigned as such.  (4) And e-availability
> makes the book chapter, at least in principle, exactly equal to the
> article as a knowable, assignable, downloadable, useable intellectual
> object.
>
> So people like me assign more chapters and publishers and librarians
> work to figure out how to improve the ways and means.  Well and good.
> But .  .  .
>
> The result of this thread is to make me make a note to ask my freshmen
> this fall to look at their syllabi and tell me how many books they are
> going to read in their first semester at University. Then I'll ask
> them to break down between book-books and textbooks -- that is, omit
> introductory language and biology and econ books written and published
> to be used as the backbone of a course and list just books assigned
> for reading and discussion.  My guess is that more than a few of them
> will list the three books I'm telling them to read for *my* course and
> none other.  That begins to be a worry for me.  How many of them are
> going to the bookstore and buying a serious book and sitting in their
> room or the library or under a tree and reading it from cover to
> cover? Do I really want to know the answer to that question?
>
> Now, many readers will ask, why does he care?  Why does this make him
> nervous?  Two answers:  (1) We have a long history built up in the
> production and consumption of what we now call "long-form
> scholarship".  The notion of the "book" as something coherent and
> important that is really qualitatively different from a series of
> articles is deeply embedded in our culture.  I don't just use books, I
> believe in them.  At a minimum, we should reflect on whether it's an
> historical accident that there have been people like me around for a
> couple of thousand years and whether it's essential to go on having
> and reading such things; and even if we decide we can move on to an
> intellectual galaxy defined by the bite-sized chunk, we should think
> about how our students should be introduced to that older world even
> if they are not going to be part of it.   (2) But we also still
> require our rising scholars to produce these objects as a condition of
> their prospective exaltation in rank and status.  If we're not
> actually *reading* these things, then do we have another reason to
> worry about why we require the writing of them?  Do we have a
> collective cognitive dissonance we should be addressing?  Is the
> crisis of the scholarly monograph perhaps *not* a function of rising
> serials prices squeezing us out and falling library sales but
> something entirely different:  a decline verging on collapse in
> readership?
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.