From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2012 10:42:57 -0500

What makes OUP and CUP different from U.S. presses--besides their
being several hundred years older--is that they make a great deal of
their money from types of publishing that U.S. presses do not
undertake, such as bibles and ESL.

It would be interesting to know what "experience" Mr. Gupta has had
that allows him to pass judgment on the "business practices" of U.S.
presses. Has he ever worked at one? Has he ever had access to the AAUP
operating statistics reports that are produced annually?

And one wonders what he means by "faculty influence." OUP and CUP also
are governed by faculty editorial boards. Isn't that "influence"?

Sandy Thatcher



At 2:50 AM -0400 7/4/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Nawin <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 11:52:42 -0500
>
> Sally's comments are right on the mark.  It is interesting to note that some
> of the university presses - Oxford University Press and Cambridge University
> Press, to name two - are prevailing and compete successfully in the
> marketplace, leveraging their pedigree and values combined with sound
> business practices.  In my experience, many of the university presses in the
> US are encumbered by faculty influence, poor management, and lack of sound
> business practices.
>
> Nawin Gupta
> Informed Publishing Solutions, Inc.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2012 12:18:47 +0100
>
> It is interesting to note that most (possibly all) of the university presses
> that have survived and flourished have moved on from only publishing the
> output of their own faculty.  That tended to lead to broad subject coverage
> (and, arguably, variable quality levels).  What I believe happened next was
> that the Presses realised that they needed to specialise (often in areas
> where their own faculty had particular strength) - you can't effectively
> market a list which covers a little bit of everything.  And in order to
> offer the most outstanding list possible in those specialist areas, they
> began to seek out the best authors wherever they were.
>
> They became in effect scholarly publishers like other scholarly publishers -
> with a couple of big differences, however.  One is that the university is
> (on one way or another - structures differ) the sole owner/shareholder, and
> any surpluses made go back to the parent institution.  The other is that it
> is (in my experience, at least) the policy of the Press to publish
> particularly valuable scholarly works that almost certainly will lose money,
> provided enough surplus is made from other publications to keep the
> enterprise afloat overall (some, particularly in the US, have diversified
> into non-scholarly publications - e.g. books of local interest - to achieve
> this).  Commercial publishers do not, in my experience, knowingly publish
> loss-makers (which is different from taking risks on books whose success is,
> by definition, unknown)
>
> Sally
>
> Sally Morris
> Email:  [log in to unmask]