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.