RE: Digital publishing and university presses

["Courant, Paul" <pnc@umich.edu>]

My guess is that you are both partly right.  Making scholarship 
public, like the rest of the production of scholarship, will 
require continuing subsidy.  That's in the nature of the work. 
It is also the case that digital production and distribution is 
(or ought to be) intrinsically less expensive than older models, 
so costs should come down.  This is good news, because it frees 
up more resources to be used in the production of scholarship 
itself, which is the point in the first place.

Paul Courant

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 9:32 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Digital publishing and university presses

What makes you think the "leap" will result in lower costs? All
the experience we have so far is that we are just exchanging one
type of costs (printing, binding, warehousing, etc.) for another
type (server maintenance, IT investment, licensing transactions,
etc.). Basically, monographs are unlikely to sell more no matter
what format is used; their audience is necessarily limited by the
very nature of these works as highly specialized. I predict that
presses will continue to need subsidies indefinitely into the
future.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>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