David Schwen for The Chronicle
A historian or anthropologist spends years working on a monograph, bulking up an argument. A scholarly publisher takes more years to shepherd that argument into print. Meanwhile, academic libraries have ever-smaller amounts of money and space to lavish on such books, which often have more pages than they have readers.
What if scholars, publishers, and tenure-and-promotion committees embraced short-form e-books as a respectable way to deliver serious scholarship? A Kindle Singles model could help academics and publishers pick up the pace of production. It could be priced low enough to appeal to library budgets. It wouldn’t devour precious shelf space. It would suit libraries’ current desire to build up their e-book collections. And it might pull in new readers for serious scholarship.
The approach would also free up scholars to write shorter, if that’s what their project called for. Not every idea needs 300-plus pages to fully explore. Daniel Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and an advocate of revamping the academic-publishing system, calls this “right-sizing scholarship.”
Some scholarly presses are already experimenting with shorter-form publishing. Princeton University Press has a series, Princeton Shorts, that serves up highlights from previously published books. It’s trying what the director, Peter Dougherty, describes as “short-form serialization,” releasing peer-reviewed chapters of a book on the 2012 presidential election by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, two political scientists. Mr. Dougherty hopes that will help build interest in the final book while giving the press a greater voice in the coverage of contemporary events.
Publishers and authors will have to lead the way, and demonstrate to departments that shorter-form, digital work can be serious work.
Stanford University Press has taken the idea further, recently introducing a series of original short e-books called Stanford Briefs. They take less time and money to publish but “carry just as much academic significance” as traditional long-form monographs, says Alan Harvey, the press’s director. “Our feedback to authors is there’s no reason they shouldn’t count toward tenure and promotion just as much.”
If shorter e-books are going to catch on with academic authors, they’ll have to be taken seriously by disciplinary gatekeepers. Several years ago, the Modern Language Association called on departments of language and literature “to give serious consideration to forms of scholarship other than the monograph in promotion-and-tenure reviews,” says Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the association’s director of scholarly communication, via e-mail. Short e-books are “in keeping with that call.”
Publishers and authors, though, will have to lead the way, and demonstrate to departments that shorter-form, digital work can be serious work. More authors will have to take the leap that Margret Grebowicz, an associate professor of philosophy at Goucher College, is taking.
She’ll publish her next book, Why Internet Porn Matters, as a Stanford Brief next year. (The book is a feminist critique of the social and political consequences of online pornography.) Stanford put the 35,000-word manuscript through rigorous peer review and editing, she says. The press will price the book at around $10—far less than a monograph—and offer her a greater share of the royalties than she usually gets. (That might be a moot point given the market for academic books, she acknowledges.)
Ms. Grebowicz is in a good position to try something different. She has tenure, and she’s published traditional monographs. Still, she expects that many of her colleagues “will react with horror” to the shorter book. “Longer books have greater credibility,” she says, even though few of them find an audience.
If enough scholars and presses are willing to give it a go, serious, short-form digital publishing could help change that.
Correction (10/17/2012, 12:43 p.m.): This article originally stated incorrectly that Princeton University Press plans next year to start releasing peer-reviewed chapters of a book, in an experiment called “short-form serialization.” The press has already begun releasing the book chapters. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
