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]