RE: open access to dissertations

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

I assume the book priced at $107 you cite was not published by a 
university press (at least a real one, not the University Press 
of America). Typical prices for monographs published by Penn 
State Press during the twenty years (1989-2009) I was director 
there ranged between $35 and $75, with $55 being about the norm 
for a book of 250 to 300 pages.

European-based scholarly publishers have taken a different 
approach to pricing monographs from American publishers, pricing 
them to break even on institutional sales of a few hundred copies 
and not caring at all whether the books ever sell to individuals. 
U.S. presses have generally resisted this approach, trying 
instead to break even at lower hardback prices and publishing 
more titles in paperback to maximize distribution of copies.

The digital era has changed only one thing, really: it has 
provided a way for publishers to keep books in print forever, and 
to take advantage of the "long tail" of sales. Digital printing 
is actually more expensive on a per unit basis, unless you are 
printing 200 copies or fewer (at which point offset printing 
becomes uneconomical to use at all). Some 75% of the costs of 
publishing a book are independent of physical format, so even if 
publishing electronically had a zero cost (which it most 
certainly does not), prices could at most be reduced 25%.

Prices of monographs have actually escalated at a rate far lower 
than STM journal prices, even though STM journal subscriptions 
have resulted in reduction of sales of monographs from several 
thousand in the 1960s to several hundred today. Given that sharp 
drop in sales, it is surprising that prices have not risen a 
great deal higher.

Sandy Thatcher


At 5:48 PM -0400 4/14/11, Corbett, Hillary wrote:
>I agree with Kevin and Elizabeth. I would venture a guess that
>the titles that Sandy mentions (both published in 1979,
>incidentally), were likely quite a bit more costly as revised
>dissertations in their first printing than they are today as
>heavily purchased classics (adjusting for inflation, etc., of
>course).  A quick search of revised dissertations sent to us as
>"slips" from Yankee since 1/1/2011 turned up 465 titles, of which
>the average list price was $80. (Prices range from $15 to a
>whopping $272.) Some of them do sound of general enough interest
>to be worth purchasing, and may indeed become classics over time,
>but others... how about "Pizza and Pizza Chefs in Japan: A Case
>of Culinary Globalization" for $107.00?
>
>Given that newly published revised dissertations are very likely
>to be at the tail end of the long tail, it makes poor sense, in
>my eyes, to hinder their purchase by the few who are likely to
>select them by using the traditional production/distribution
>processes that drive up cost. Why aren't more revised
>dissertations published as print-on-demand or as short-run
>digital publications, if they must be produced in print at all?
>
>Hillary
>
>......................
>Hillary Corbett
>Scholarly Communication Librarian
>Snell Library
>Northeastern University
>h.corbett@neu.edu