Once again, Choice is pleased to provide a special feature on university press publishing in its May issue.  As in years past, this feature comprises two parts: a “forum” and a press-by-press listing of significant current titles of interest to undergraduates.  The latter lists a broad range of titles–many not destined for review in Choice (for example, text-books and reissued titles)–selected by publishers as particularly valuable.  By contrast, the forum is a tiny bit narrower–but even more informative–enterprise this year.  Read on.

Every year we seek out a handful of university press directors and ask them to comment on matters of interest to university presses, their press in particular, or university press publishing as a whole.  Heretofore the forum has been entirely open, which is to say, we made no effort to guide the contributors toward a particular issue.  This year we took a slightly different tack: we asked our directors to focus on matters electronic–e-books, the Internet, in short, the so-called digital revolution as it pertains to university presses.

As the feature that follows demonstrates, each director tackled the subject from a different angle.  Taken together, however, the five mini-essays create a cohesive and instructive whole, one that recognizes the inevitability–the desirability–of the e-book and at the same time acknowledges the complications surrounding e-books and the beauty of that nifty technological marvel, the printed book.  Including a celebration of the printed book in the face of the “e/i” apocalypse by Baylor’s Carey Newman, Kathleen Keane’s and Ellen Faran’s commentaries on existing e-book programs at (respectively) the Johns Hopkins and MIT presses, musings by Peter Dougherty (Princeton University Press) on globalization, and an elaboration–by Temple’s Alex Holzman–on a projected university press consortium that would market and sell e-books, this forum reveals that university presses large and small are looking toward a future in which e-books will become as viable as the printed book.  Though, one hopes, not to the exclusion of the printed book.–Rebecca Ann Bartlett, Humanities Editor

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Baylor University Press
http://www.baylorpress.com/
Carey C. Newman, Director

If I were truly clever (not to mention funny), I would say, à la Stephen Colbert, that the WORD for today is “academic content.”  While neither clever nor funny, I am concerned, mightily concerned, that the idea of the book, and its accompanying rhetoric, is being co-opted (at best) or replaced (at worst).  All the talk of “academic content” to refer to a book seems a bit misguided to me.  It gnawed at me each time I heard my professional life summed up as a “provider of academic content.”  It finally dawned on me, though, that I was not–and neither are other academic publishers–just or simply a provider of academic content. 

I am a book publisher, a publisher of books.  I am a steward of sustained acts of wisdom, not a Gordon Gekko of information.  There is a difference, a big difference.  Some will say that I am old-fashioned or regressive, a publishing Luddite.  However, I do not doubt the coming apocalypse, to book publishing, in the form of the two godlike vowels of the digital age–the “e” (as in e-book) and the “i” (as in iPhone).  Nor do I stick my head in the sand of denial to say that parts of books will not be Frankensteined to form new bodies of work.

Our small press eagerly and aggressively participates in many creative ways to make our books, and parts of our books, reach the widest possible readership.  And I continue to think that all the various ways of enhancing reading of the traditionally printed book are here to stay and should be celebrated.  Still, I am bullish on the book, the traditionally printed book.  Why?  Why so confident?  The book is a wonderful invention, a marvelous technology.  You can’t spill suntan oil on your Kindle or subject it to a drenching wave.  Well, you can.  It just means you will need to buy another one.  The traditionally printed book is durable, strong, with broad shoulders.  If it suffers a bit of oil, sun, or surf, it is made all the better.  Reading it is a tactile experience.  There is a weight and gravity to a traditionally printed book.  Reading it capitalizes on a unique aesthetic peculiar to the printed book.  It will take a bigger fly swatter than the iPhone to kill the book.  A book is an act of wisdom enshrined in a wonderful 2,000-year-old technology all its own.  So while our press is busy riding the euphoric wave of the next delivery platform, it is also robustly confident that a scholar’s sustained act of wisdom and a traditionally printed book make for a wonderful marriage.

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The Johns Hopkins University Press
http://www.press.jhu.edu/
Kathleen Keane, Director

New digital technologies present both challenges and opportunities to academic publishers like The Johns Hopkins University Press.  So far, our press’s electronic publishing initiatives reflect a strong commitment to innovation, as well as a necessarily pragmatic approach to a trend that has managed to present exciting possibilities and raise difficult questions in roughly equal number. 

The JHU Press has been offering e-books through licensing arrangements for nearly ten years, and each year our program becomes wider, more effective, and more efficient.  We have three goals for our electronic books.  First, we want to make our book content more easily discoverable than is possible in print format, and searchable e-book files are the way to improve discoverability.  Second, we want to offer our books in ways that scholars and students can use most easily and fully, and e-book functionality is what these readers need.  Finally, we want to offer libraries and individuals options for purchasing e-books in a variety of ways and at reasonable cost.  As the industry has matured in recent years, we have benefited from the interest and expertise of a growing list of partners wanting to work with our press to develop these offerings.

Thanks to Google Book Search and Amazon’s Search Inside the Book, for example, much of JHU Press’s 3,000-title, in-print backlist can be discovered and browsed electronically.  Many of our books address specialized subjects, and the limited inventories carried by most bookstores mean they are not often available for actual browsing by customers in stores.  Similarly, constraints on library budgets in recent years have led to fewer printed copies even in academic libraries.  The contract-based Google Inc. and Amazon programs have offered great opportunities for us to make the contents of these books discoverable for a much wider range of readers who may not have access to physical books.  Helpful links take these readers to a range of options, from ordering the print edition to finding it in a library.

A growing list of JHU Press books is available electronically in libraries, with about 500 of our titles made accessible through licensing agreements with NetLibrary, ebrary, and the ACLS Humanities E-Book project.  These inventive partners are each finding new customers in the academic library market and discovering new ways of serving those libraries.  Their services make it possible for a global audience of library patrons to access our books online.  Users can now browse, search, take notes, and export citations with the tools that have long been available in journal databases. 

About 200 JHU Press titles are now available for Amazon’s Kindle device.  Amazon’s familiar online bookstore, coupled with this reading device, offers readers convenient shopping and reading options.  One of our cornerstone lists at Hopkins is consumer health, comprising books that sell very well and deliver information that can improve and even save lives.  It is especially gratifying to know our customers have the quick and convenient option of reading titles such as Nancy Mace’s The 36-Hour Day (2006) and Michael Levy’s Take Control of Your Drinking–and You May Not Need to Quit (2007) on Kindle.  We are finalizing negotiations with a number of partners that will enable us to offer our books on a variety of other devices.

For JHU Press, moving into e-book publishing entailed a lot of learning on our part, some moments of frustration, and, fortunately, consistent forward progress.  It was quite a chore, for example, to organize, catalog, and convert our digital files (our “assets”) to enable electronic publication.  Fortunately, we were able to call on a number of in-house experts, since the digital publishing of journals has long been one of our strengths.  The nearly 70 periodicals published by the press’s Journals Division appear in Project MUSE, the online collection that now includes more than 400 journals from more than 100 publishers.  Project MUSE was founded at Hopkins as a joint effort between the press and the university libraries back in 1995.  Its presence has positioned us well as the digital revolution finally comes in earnest to book publishing.

With all of these innovations and projects, our aim is to support scholars, students, and general readers who want convenient ways to gather information yet still rely on the expertise and imprint of an academic publisher.  Johns Hopkins has been publishing books for a very long time; in fact, we enjoy the distinction of being America’s oldest university press.  When we began in 1878, the very idea of a university press was an innovation.  How wonderful, then, to know that through our e-book offerings we continue to deliver knowledge and reach new readers in ever more innovative, even startling ways. 

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The MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu
Ellen W. Faran, Director

The MIT Press is committed to meeting its readers where they live and work: online.  The imperative to make our books and journals available electronically is one the press has recognized since the 1990s, when we began digitizing our backlist titles and archiving PDF files of new books as they were published.  Today we continue to invest in the digitization of our titles in useful formats, including XML.  Most of our new books are now produced in XML, which, along with PDF, makes them eligible for a wide variety of digital programs and editions.

The MIT Press believes that e-book distribution to libraries is one of the most effective ways to disseminate scholarship to the scholars, students, and researchers who need it.  We also recognize that, in some markets, aggregators provide the services and title selection that deliver the most value for the least cost and effort.  The library aggregators with whom we elect to partner are those providing excellent services and a variety of access models to the academic and public library communities.  We were one of the first publishers to work with NetLibrary to make our books available electronically in libraries; we now work with an expanded list of library aggregators, including ebrary, MyiLibrary, and Books24x7. 

Publishing journals has clearly helped us think electronically.  MIT Press journals have been available electronically since 2005, and we were an early participant in journal aggregations such as HighWire and Project MUSE. 

We have long been interested in digital subject-area collections as well.  CogNet, the pioneering cognitive science library that we developed in the 1990s, gathers the major books, journals, and reference works in the field into an accessible subscription product for libraries and individual readers.  A new collection, CISnet, offers computer and information sciences books on a similar platform.

For the rapidly growing consumer market for e-books, the MIT Press works with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other partners to make our books available for popular reading devices.  We have supplied most of our catalog to Google Inc. and Amazon so that our titles can be readily discovered in online searches.  We recently signed up with Bookshare to produce accessible versions of our books for the print-disabled.  Finally, our own consumer-focused e-book site <http://mitpress-ebooks.mit.edu/> has been online and open for business since early 2009.  We hope to make this collection available to institutions in the near future.

What we have learned is that there is absolutely nothing straightforward about moving “born print” content to online editions.  For this reason and others, it is increasingly our strategy to publish in digital and print editions simultaneously.  We are not there yet but are making good progress toward this goal.

The MIT Press believes that readers deserve choices.  We will continue to work with partners and in multiple formats to deliver affordable, attractive, and accessible editions of our books in digital media as well as in print.

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Princeton University Press
http://press.princeton.edu/
Peter Dougherty, Director

While we have been busy preparing for the next stages of the digital transition, the force that has really animated our activities at Princeton University Press this past year has been globalization–driven largely by the current financial crisis.  We published two books in particular that have figured prominently in the debates and discussions about the crisis, not only in the United States but also in countries all over the world.  The first, published in March 2009, was George Akerlof and Robert Shiller’s Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism; then last September, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff’s This Time Is Different: Eight Centures of Financial Folly.  These two books, along with several other globally significant titles, have reinforced the relevance of global markets for us and the residual importance of having production, distribution, marketing, publicity, rights, and sales capabilities geared to reaching these markets, and to reaching them quickly and steadily.  But the real challenge is having the capacity to coordinate all these activities to create a sustained global publishing campaign in a fast-moving market.
 
It all begins with online publicity.  Blog posts, news columns, editorials, and online reviews can be read as easily in Shanghai as in Chicago–and everywhere in between.  In the case of both Animal Spirits and This Time Is Different, the online publicity came fast and wide and tested our abilities to respond.  In communications emanating from Princeton and from our British office in Oxfordshire, we alerted our sales reps and agents all over the world and kept them informed of the publicity, while they kept us informed of the demand for these titles.  Having established the global demand for these books, we quickly decided to split subsequent printings between the United States and the United Kingdom in order to meet demand in Europe more nimbly.  In addition, we made both books, along with most other new PUP titles, available in popular e-book formats, thereby enabling readers instant access to them.  On the rights front, the online publicity drove powerful interest on the part of foreign publishers for translations; many foreign-language editions are now proceeding apace.
 
Our marketing colleagues supported our global sales and publicity efforts in a particularly novel way.  In December we took out ads in The New York Review of Books featuring both Animal Spirits and This Time Is Different and also listed the names of the most outstanding bookstores in the financial districts of leading cities around the world.
 
The global publishing campaigns for these two important books have made for impressive successes in each case, but the unanticipated publishing dividend for PUP is just as important: they have improved and sharpened our ability to execute well-coordinated publishing efforts near and far.  Of course, the ability to conduct such global publishing campaigns would be impossible without the instantaneous and borderless connections provided by the Web.  Exploiting new digital innovations will be crucial to the next wave of progressive publishing.

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Temple University Press
http://www.temple.edu/tempress/
Alex Holzman, Director

University presses face two challenges/opportunities as they move into the second decade of the not-as-new-as-it-used-to-be century.  First, the business models that depended on printed book sales to relatively predictably sized audiences no longer work and, second, the university press’s relationship to the university as a whole is evolving.  The latter involves recognizing that a university press is, first (as the name implies), a unit of the university that must recognize and embrace its larger mission and, second, a publisher that must pay close attention to markets.  Presses must find ways to fit their horizontal nature–we publish books from faculty located in universities all over the world–into the universities’ generally more vertical orientation, which emphasizes local interests to a greater degree.  Clearly, the press-university relationship is interesting and important.  But I want to focus here on the changing business models.

It is old news that university presses used to depend primarily on the academic-library market, secondarily on occasional course adoptions and individual faculty purchases, and finally on regional and/or national trade markets.  In the old days probably 40 or 50 percent of sales were to libraries; these days, though it varies widely from press to press and can be difficult to compute because of multiple outlets, it is more like 20 percent.  Librarians currently presiding over shrinking budgets seem to have decided that the scholarly journal is akin to an untouchable government entitlement program while the academic monograph is subject to some serious sunset clauses.  So it goes.  E-books may offer the technological means for shifting outdated business models and allowing the retention of the monograph purchase.  They can reduce if not eliminate both returns and the overprinting of physical books.  And they can help libraries by both eliminating required storage space and making holdings more visible via online search and retrieval.

The presses at NYU, University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers, and Temple have been working together since early summer 2009 to investigate the possibility of putting together a university-press e-books consortium that would initially create a group of presses that could sell their books as e-books individually and in packages to academic libraries.  With Mellon funding, the four presses hired first-rate consultants to work with us in researching what librarians would want in such a service, how it might best be delivered, and what would constitute a sustainable business plan.  The final results of our research are promising; it is particularly heartening to report a broad consensus among librarians that they would like to acquire e-books and would sometimes prefer them to print books.  They are also quite willing to accept the good rather than await the perfect in terms of the bells and whistles that can be attached to platforms and delivery systems for e-books. 

It is also heartening to report that some 60 university presses have responded favorably to the idea of joining a consortium.  Such numbers would make offering a wide range of books–in a variety of ways, from a large number of presses–easy for librarians to manage and adaptable to the patron-driven acquisitions models many libraries are beginning to employ.

A shift in library sales from print to electronic books could dramatically reduce waste–from overprinting to shipping costs to air pollution and resource depletion–in the current system, a savings that could be shared by both libraries and presses.  This is no panacea–electronic sales would likely replace print on something close to a one-to-one basis, and the vast majority of university presses would continue to require subsidies from their parent universities.  But it could help relieve some financial pressure on both of these university units.  Win, win, as they say.

Going forward, a publisher can have only sweet dreams about extending the e-book system to students.  Our group sees this as an eventual goal, but one with many more obstacles between the current course-adoption model and the electronic world.  Limited studies to date have shown students are not over-impressed by electronic texts and often actually prefer print for its portability and easy annotating.  So any shift will have to involve addressing their concerns and resolving questions of e-reserves, modes of payment, purchase versus rental, even purchase of chapters versus entire books.  The benefits to publishers–and, I would argue, to students and libraries and faculty as well–are potentially so large that it’s hard to see how this won’t happen eventually.  But for now the focus must be on beginning the process by shifting the library monograph market from print to electronic.  The stakes are high–for university presses, for libraries, for faculty and the quality of the scholarship they produce–but high stakes offer encouragement that this will be achieved, and soon.