From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jun 2014 10:01:32 -0400

Another perspective on Sandy's remark is simply to say that even if U.
presses should be subsidized (for their monograph output anyway),
librarians can legitimately ask why the subsidy should come from them.

I do want to introduce a small nuance to these discussions.  The
phrase "no one wants these books" or the comment that "books don't
circulate in libraries" is probably never true.  If libraries purchase
300 copies of a title and the title circulates in 100 of those
libraries, it circulates.  There is a difference between small demand
and no demand.

One way of viewing the problem of one segment of U. press publishing
(not all U. press publishing is unprofitable, and some presses have
both profitable and unprofitable programs) is that the cost basis for
publishing these books is too high for the forecast market.  So, for
example, if you could produce a book for $5,000 and sell 100 copies,
then you could make a go of it.  But the cost of publishing a book
over its lifetime to the publisher is closer to $50,000 (at some point
I will write up a blog post to explain this number, but it's not the
exercise of a Sunday morning)--that is, if you publish books the way
we do now, which happens to be the way the marketplace expects them to
be published.

So it makes perfect sense for some people to look for ways to publish
scholarly books more inexpensively.  That's not the only strategy, and
I am not personally endorsing it.  It is simply a natural outgrowth of
the market-based economy that presses operate in.

Joe Esposito


On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 5:17 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> 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
> [log in to unmask]