The past year has been rife with dismal news for those of us in scholarly publishing. Eastern Washington University Press is in the process of folding; the University of Missouri Press has cut nearly half its staff; Louisiana State University Press is in deep and well-publicized trouble; and the layoffs at the University of New Mexico Press riled survivors into open rebellion. It’s hard not to wonder who will be next.
As is now well known, suspects both usual and unusual have contributed to the problem: the global economic malaise; the subsequent retrenching and refocusing of state governments and thus state universities; the supposedly democratizing digital revolution that has led many authors to think of publishers as disposable middlemen; and on and on. It’s been said more than once that we press folk are responsible for our own travails, and to a certain extent we are, mostly out of a stubborn belief that our world wasn’t changing permanently.
Still, one significant contributing factor has not received much attention, and that is the failure of scholars to buy one another’s books.
Why is this? Yes, the economy has gobsmacked one and all, and university professors usually don’t make as much money as flamboyant trial lawyers do (unless they are flamboyant trial lawyers). But it’s pretty hard to understand why so many card-carrying members of the knowledge industry can’t, or don’t, or won’t purchase the instruments necessary for the plying of their trade. It’s as if test pilots thought it unnecessary to invest in crash helmets. Paper hats for all—and make them dunce caps, too.
Naturally I am not referring to impoverished graduate students, nor to all scholars in all disciplines. At the press where I work, for example, we’ve learned that historians of many stripes—Civil War-era, Colonial, architectural, and others—generally support the work of other historians, with those sales bolstered in turn by sales to a respectable contingent of educated lay readers. And many of those laboring in the smaller and more specialized disciplines, in which relatively few presses have a publishing presence, make a point of buying everything that comes out in their fields. Good on you!
But what about those in some of the other domains? (Are you listening, literary critics?) Do they really have so much less discretionary income than their colleagues that they must borrow all of their books from the university library (and, by the way, libraries are buying fewer books all the time) rather than purchase a reasonable number for their own shelves? Or is it that disciplinary pies have been sliced up into such razor-thin slivers that no one cares to stick a fork in someone else’s piece?
People complain that scholarly books are expensive, and of course they are, relatively. It costs plenty to have manuscripts evaluated by outside experts, copy-edited meticulously, produced to professional standards, and sold by people who know the market. Universities can no longer afford to keep their presses as pets, so scholarly publishing houses are increasingly dependent on sales for survival. The smaller the actual (versus optimistically projected) market for a book, the smaller the print run, and, accordingly, the higher the price. Mass-market publishers may be able to crank out cheap (and cheaply made) copies of 14-day diet books in a flash, but most scholarly books don’t sell 500,000 “units,” and why? Because they are (or are supposed to be) packages that contain ideas, not the literary equivalent of junk food.
I find it interesting that so often the very people who don’t buy books will be the first to ask for complimentary copies—and sometimes not even ask, but simply assume that relevant titles will be sent their way. (I’ve been told as much, and rather grandly, too, on several occasions.) Nevertheless, furious is the nonpurchaser’s indignation when the press that publishes his or her own book doesn’t sell a passel of copies. Then the complaints and accusations fly: The press “didn’t get the book reviewed,” did nothing to promote it, didn’t appreciate its brilliance, failed to place ads in The New York Times Book Review (no matter that the subject was the evolution of the toothpick during the Northern Renaissance), and so on.
The woes afflicting university presses may not seem very important to those who think we’re simply makers of flint arrowheads and stone tablets anyway, and good riddance to the lot of us. Then self-publishing can really flourish, content will be out there for the grabbing, and if it hasn’t been properly reviewed for errors, or copy-edited, or illustrated, so what?
But if you’re among those who don’t believe that the Book is Dead—as we are so often and irritatingly told—please take notice: If you don’t buy ‘em, we can’t afford to publish ‘em, and sooner or later, you’ll awake to find that the scholarship your field relies on for its intellectual rigor and vitality has become as sparse as grass in a desert, and as insubstantial as the air itself.