RE: Digital publishing and university presses

["Nawin Gupta" <nawin.gupta@comcast.net>]

It will require many of the university presses to change the way 
they operate - including their end-to-end publishing processes - 
to make the leap and grow stronger.  Otherwise they will require 
increased subsidy, as Joe contends, even more so if they do not 
make the shift.

Nawin Gupta

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Joseph Esposito
Sent: Thursday, April 09, 2009 4:05 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Digital publishing and university presses

If we indeed see the leap envisioned in Scott McLemee's article,
it will significantly increase the cost to the university press
system.  The American university presses (that is, leaving OUP
and Cambridge out as special cases) have combined book sales of
just over $300 million, which requires a subsidy from their
parents of around $35 million/year.  Most of the digital plans
that I have seen will likely increase the need for subsidies by a
factor of about 3--that is, to around $100 million/year. Where
this money will come from in these economically depressed times,
I do not know.  The most likely outcome is that the presses'
activity will be reduced, thereby further limiting the number of
publishing options available to scholars, especially in the
humanities.

As for why the costs will rise, the reasons are various, but the
principal one is that most (75%) university press books are
purchased by individuals, not libraries.  For individuals the
preferred format remains print.  People who argue that POD
(really SRP) solves this problem overlook the fact that all the
presses have SRP systems in place and have had them for some
time, usually with vendors such as Ingram, BiblioVault, IBT, and
CodeMantra.  An enlarged digital program thus adds little to the
core market of individual scholars, though it may add some heft
to library sales, assuming the libraries will purchase electronic
aggregations of books just as they are cancelling electronic
subscriptions to journals.

It is simply wrong to make an evaluation of any publishing
process based on the medium of publication alone.  Electronics do
great things, print does great things, but they don't do the same
things, and one is not a substitute for the other.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 6:08 PM, B.G. Sloan <bgsloan2@yahoo.com> wrote:

>>From insidehighered.com, discussing a Sandy Thatcher article in
> "Against the Grain."
>
> "It's clear that the recession is accelerating the shift to
> digital publishing. 'With the economy shaping up as it seems to
> be,' one astute observer of trends in the university press world
> told me last summer, 'we're going to see a 15 year leap in
> publishing in the next two years.' And that was well before
> trillions of dollars started vanishing into the ether."
>
> Full text:
> http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee237