Re: publishers' #1 short-term problem

[Alex Holzman <aholzman@temple.edu>]

Sandy's good post is food for thought.  But while I am not able
to speak to general trade publishing, I'd argue that university
presses can and will make the switch to electronic first, backed
by print on demand by mostly following the Nike bromide: just do
it.

How do we just do it?  For now, most presses can't afford to
implement an XML workflow for technical reasons, but almost all
are producing web-ready PDFs as part of the production flow.
Digitizing backlists is a bit more difficult, but many presses
have taken advantage of various opportunities, sometimes working
on their own, sometimes with grant support, sometimes with their
library or other instutions to make a serious start on this.
Sandy's right that this involves balancing future and immediate
needs.  But almost all presses I know of are making progress at
their own pace.

Meanwhile, libraries, as soon-to-be-released research conducted
as part of a Mellon-funded university press ebooks consortium
project has shown, say they are anxious to start buying
monographs in electronic form and willing to accept PDFs, at
least for now.  This will allow better monitoring of usage,
better use of space and perhaps access to a broader range of
materials.  So that's where we start--by selling ebooks in PDF
format to libraries, and with pricing models that can perhaps
open up more of the library market than we've been selling to in
recent years.  For a generation, libraries have been a shrinking
market for university press monographs; done right, ebooks may
actually open up opportunities to reverse that shrinkage.

Fromselling ebooks to libraries, I'd hope university presses
would then use them to change the distribution system for
textbooks and ancillary coursebooks.  The print distribution
system has frankly been a mess for a generation, creating vicious
revision cycles, mounds of pulped books that are returned, and
economic inefficiencies borne mostly by students.  Especially as
we do crack the XML issue and can move to epub--and many talented
software engineers are working on the problem--the opportunities
to redistribute costs will allow all sorts of interesting models
and experiments to flourish.  It's a climate of great
uncertainty, but one I feel is equally of great opportunity. And
will save a lot of trees.

So I guess my glass is half-full, maybe even more than half full.
But this is one university press publisher who would prefer that
you save your prayers for folks who need them more than we do.

Instead, what I would ask of the library community is an open
mind and a willingness to accept that sometimes low cost can
actually be better than the open access ideal of no cost.
And/or that if end users pay nothing, then the costs of
disseminating scholarship, which are real and will never go away,
will then have to be borne by some combination of universities
and their libraries, the government, and authors. Together,
university presses and the university community can do great
things.  If we fight each other, we will all fail.  My
twenty-first century version of Lincoln's house divided speech.

Alex Holzman
Director
Temple University Press
Phone: 215-926-2145
Email: aholzman@temple.edu
http://www.temple.edu/tempress



On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 10:13 PM, Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:

> As I have been reflecting about what challenges face university
> presses in the near term, and reading more about what is
> happening in other parts of the publishing industry, I feel
> confident in declaring that the #1 problem that book (not
> journal) publishers in almost all sectors face for the
> foreseeable future (5-10 years) is how to accomplish the
> transition from print-based to electronic publishing
> successfully. The truth is that, while in percentage growth
> e-book sales are made great strides in recent years (one hears
> of growth exceeding 300% year to year), they still total as an
> overall percentage of book sales a very small amount, not
> exceeding in most sectors even 5% yet.
>
> Economically, publishers have to figure out how to continue
> making enough money from declining print sales in order to make
> the investment in technology and trained staff necessary to
> prepare for the future when e-book sales will begin to bring in
> the majority of revenues. This transition happened relatively
> quickly in journal publishing, in less than a decade. The
> complications, however, for books are far greater and more
> complex, meaning that the risks of not being able to survive
> long enough to see the transition through are very real and
> immediate.
>
> Michigan Press director Phil Pochoda touches on this in his
> recent article "UP 2.0: Some Theses on the Future of Academic
> Publishing " in the Journal of Electronic Publishing. But he is
> not alone. In the latest issue of Book Business, I read similar
> concerns from publishers in other sectors of our industry. The
> head of Minneapolis-based Lerner Publishing Group, which
> identifies its main customers as "school libraries and
> institutional markets," says: "While it's understood that the
> majority of every book publisher's revenue now is still derived
> from print revenue, without digital elements, print will suffer
> because the relevancy of the house will diminish....There's a
> myriad of challenges here....It's a challenge because creating
> a digital infrastructure is not an inexpensive thing....So it's
> a real fine line to be able to fund the change in workflow [to
> XML] without necessarily counting on revenue--digital revenue.
>
> Another article titled "Hitting a Moving Target" also
> articulates the challenges for publishers in "balancing
> short-and long-term investment," in light of the fact that "so
> much of the business is still wrapped up in print sales" but
> planning now for a future of predominantly e-book sales is
> imperative for survival. The publisher of Harlequin romance
> novels is among those who face this dilemma, as revealed in the
> article.
>
> As industry guru Mike Shatzkin is quoted in the article as
> saying: "When you make an acquisition decision for a book
> that's going to be published in two years, that book will be
> published into a print market that is not as robust as the
> print market is now. So you need to lead the target on those
> kinds of decisions" and be thinking already of making
> adjustments in workflow to re-purpose the content for use on as
> many different available electronic platforms as possible,
> without succumbing to the temptation to get into the business
> of producing those platforms themselves, which he thinks it is
> a bad idea for publishers to do since they have no real
> experience with that side of the business.
>
> Many university presses right now are struggling with how to
> get from here to there, and the early results, as Penn State's
> Patrick Alexander reported at the ALA meeting in January on our
> experiment with "open access" e-book cum print publishing is
> not terribly encouraging. So, pray for us all out there and
> hope we can find a way to cut through this Gordian knot.
>
> Sanford G. Thatcher
> Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities
> Penn State University Press
> e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
> Phone: (214) 705-9010
> http://www.psupress.org