Last year the University of Missouri Press was killed and then revived after an outcry from its supporters. The press’s plight will be featured in a plenary session at this year’s annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, which begins on Thursday in Boston.
But Missouri’s experience won’t be held up as an example of how grim the outlook is for scholarly publishers. Instead, it will be one highlight of a program that looks short on crisis talk and long on practical tips and advice about building strong ties on and off the campus, working e-books into publishing strategies, and other hands-on, how-to approaches.
“I didn’t want to make it focused on ‘How are we going to survive?’” said Brian Halley, Boston editor of the University of Massachusetts Press and chairman of the committee that created this year’s program. “Let’s talk about how things are working or not working.”
Last year the association’s president, Peter J. Dougherty of Princeton University Press, played up the idea of the global university press that could find readers and markets anywhere and everywhere. That idea informed this year’s theme, “Bridging Worlds,” according to Mr. Halley. But the worlds being bridged are as likely to be hyperlocal as international.
Library-press relations figure prominently on the program, for instance. So do technology and nuts-and-bolts production issues. The program also emphasizes “the university-press identity—how to establish and promote the work university presses do,” Mr. Halley said. “How are we all adapting to and using this new communication landscape?” MOOCs and open-access textbooks are also on the program, although many university presses have not yet really grappled with what open access might mean for them.
As of Tuesday, about 760 people had registered for the conference, according to the association. That’s not far off the record set last year, when 787 people signed up.
New Leadership
This year’s meeting marks a significant leadership change for the association, as its longtime executive director, Peter J. Givler, steps down. His successor, Peter M. Berkery Jr., most recently worked at Oxford University Press, where he served as vice president and publisher of the company’s U.S. law division.
While Mr. Givler brought in-depth experience with university presses to the job, Mr. Berkery comes to it with strong legal and association expertise. He worked at the information-services and publishing company Wolters Kluwer for 11 years, specializing in securities and tax law, and has done legal and government-relations work for several groups, including the National Paint and Coatings Association and the National Society of Accountants, among others.
Mr. Berkery’s familiarity with Washington may come in handy in the months ahead as the association confronts the implications of recent legal, legislative, and policy developments. Those include the decision in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, a copyright case in which the Supreme Court handed publishers a setback by ruling that books produced for foreign markets could be legally resold in the United States; a growing debate over copyright reform and the Obama administration’s recent directive requiring expanded public access to federally financed research.
E-Book and Print Sales
Issues closer to home, like how sales have been this spring, will be on attendees’ minds. Like other publishers, university presses consider sales data proprietary, but Mr. Berkery did share a couple of broad trends from the association’s most recent survey of its members.
“Looking at our third-quarter report, with responses from about half our membership, overall sales have dropped by just a few percentage points compared to last year,” he told The Chronicle by e-mail. “The smaller presses seem to be faring slightly better this year.” And over the past four years, university presses’ collective sales “have actually increased by an average of slightly over 5 percent,” Mr. Berkery said.
That upward trend has been evident at Texas A&M University Press. “Two years ago we had a really dismal fiscal year,” Charles Backus, the press’s director, said in an interview. “But last year it turned around very nicely, and this year that trend, thus far, has continued.”
Mr. Backus credits the turnaround in part to having some books make best-of-year lists. For instance, Continental Divide: Wildlife, People, and the Border Wall, by the photojournalist and environmentalist Krista Schlyer, has been a hit.
Such successes “obviously buoy us a bit,” Mr. Backus said, but digital sales have also been strong. The press now works with at least a dozen e-book vendors, according to the director, and very recently signed a contract with Apple as well. “We just need to get our materials out there as much as possible in as many channels as possible,” Mr. Backus said.
“I’m glad to say that our e-book investments and efforts seem to be paying off,” he said. “The most striking thing to me is that e-book sales—which are just over 10 percent now of our net sales—do not seem to have hurt print sales thus far. That has been the happy combination that has led to good results on sales.”
Mr. Backus does not take the relatively good times for granted. “We feel we’re in a fairly stable situation right now,” he said. “We know that that can change rapidly.”
Untapped Potential
Not all presses have upbeat stories to bring to the annual meeting. “It’s been a tough year for us and I think for many other presses that are medium size,” said Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press. E-book sales there have plateaued after doubling over the past four years or so, she said. As at Texas A&M’s press, e-books constitute about 10 percent of net sales now, but “it’s still not enough to make up for the dip in print sales,” she said.
“The other thing that’s on all of our minds now is enhanced e-books,” she added. A lot of e-books are still just digital versions of print texts, “so we’re not really taking advantage of the medium,” Ms. Wasserman said.
Many university presses are wondering how to explore the untapped potential of digital books. “There’s a lot of talk about this but not a lot of action,” she said, laying out the challenges that face a press that wants to experiment with enhanced e-books. First it must find an author who wants to do such a project, then it has to figure out how to add images or video or other content without breaking the bank on permissions costs and staff time.
Doing a film book with clips from Disney movies would be impossible for Rutgers, for instance, “because we wouldn’t be able to afford the permissions fees,” Ms. Wasserman said.
Finding the right project for an enhanced e-book is one challenge. Finding a market for such work is another. “I’m not convinced of anything,” she said. “But I feel that we need to experiment.”
Chunking and Micropayments
Another hot topic right now—one that’s percolated for the last year or two—is shorter-form publishing. Princeton University Press and Stanford University Press, among others, have been publishing books-in-brief that use either original content or cull chapters from longer works.
“Everyone is watching these too,” Ms. Wasserman said, to find out whether there’s a hunger for what she calls “this new genre—longer than an article, shorter than a book.” To find out, the Rutgers press is commissioning new works that run about 30,000 words each; the first three books in that series should be out in about seven months, she said.
She also expects “chunking"—selling individual chapters of a book—to come up at the annual meeting. If publishers are able to sell small servings of content, she said, “that’s going to be hugely beneficial to everyone.”
Open access, however, makes her much more cautious. “I have seen no proof that open access stimulates book sales,” Ms. Wasserman said. “I would be delighted to get micropayments for individual chapters. I’m just not delighted to give them away.”
