The Future of University Presses and Journals
 

Looking at the VQR article less than a week after seeing this piece in the New Yorker, I can't help seeing a head-butting contest between people who believe that "products made of ideas"--such as university press publications--should be bought and sold like other things, and people who believe they should not.

I'll bet the presses could all be saved if they went to a publish-on-demand model. But universities are all about prestige, and that's just not prestigious enough.

Maryann, I'm not following your line of thought here. Wouldn't "publish-on-demand" only work for books that are, well, under a lot of demand? I earn most of my living editing books for university presses, and it's hard to imagine much demand for most of them. Even the interesting ones--rare! oh rare!--are on subjects (e.g., philosophy of science and, you know, poetry) that aren't exactly competing with Starbucks or Madonna.

I'm curious what you meant. Am I missing something?

Andrew

P.S. Kevin, thanks for posting that interesting and well-written article.

Andrew, my husband buys a lot of very specialized statistics books, so I know how frighteningly expensive they are, and I know it's because the audience is so small.

The model I'm thinking of is the Lulu model. In that model there's a cost to the author, and we call it vanity publishing, and we think ill of it. The book exists in electronic form and only becomes a physical book--an inexpensively produced one--when a copy is ordered. The book can be ordered without covers even more cheaply. If the costs of composition are kept low and the costs of printing and binding are covered by the purchase price, that reduces the costs to press staff salaries.

No, the purchase prices won't cover the salaries, but they probably don't now. Reduced production costs might keep the presses going a while longer while universities figure out how to subsidize them.

To me the more interesting question is whether scholarship produced and disseminated the way most poetry is--purely for love, and mostly online--would still be held valuable.

You're closer to the process than I am, so I'm sure you can point out things I'm not seeing. And yes, Kevin, thanks for posting the article.

Maryann,
You should be right about that, but alas, I'm ignorant on the matter. I do know there have been cutbacks, reduced budgets for production etc. But beyond that, I pay as little attention to the business side of things as possible.
Thanks for explaining your point. I'm going to try running some of this by some editors I work with, to see what they have to say about it all.
And yes, who can afford the damn things anyway, at the current prices.
Andrew

I love my home state as anyone would love a home that holds more good memories than bad. There are a handful of Louisiana exports with a national reputation that I can point to and say, to some stranger who only sees statistics showing Louisiana's many faults, this represents a part of the greatness of the people there. Two are LSU press, and the Southern Review. The history of the Review, by itself, is astounding (it is briefly outlined in the article I shared). It is heartbreaking to think that soon it may be just that, an astounding history. Of course, they have had a longer run than most quarterlies, and their present state doesn't always live up to the glories of the past. But as Genoways has pointed out, it was something that put LSU on the literary map.

I just checked their website, and they are still having their annual summer sale. Their poetry list is well worth checking out. And you can't beat the prices.

Maryann, your proposition makes a lot of sense. Print-on-demand, it seems to me, has made long strides in quality over the years. I've only used Lulu once, and what I loved most was being able to download a sample issue of a journal at reduced price, instantly. No waiting by the mailbox for that one.

People love to talk about the demise of print. I hope it's not as bad as all that, because there is nothing better than enjoying quality writing with a quality presentation. The elegance of such journals as The Dark Horse, Hudson Review, Sewanee Review, etc. matches that of the writing found in their pages.

My husband recently ended nearly a decade as a newpaper editor, and folks often point to the internet model as the "solution" for the problems facing print journalism. But physical production isn't the highest cost they face. The real overhead is in people (editors, journalists, free lancer, copyeditors, etc.) and offices. University presses surely have these same issues. I believe you still need editors and copyeditors. Someone still has to pay them. .

Alicia, I'm always intensely sorry to hear when jobs in publishing cease to be. It's been several years since I had to do hard pruning on our office's use of the freelance indexers I coordinate, but the loss of their help--and the mess it made of the working relationships--still hurt.

I don't know if internet publishing is what I'd call "a solution." What I wonder is whether people can be persuaded that they have lost something by the absence of the editing and checking that should behind a published piece. We've become accustomed to free content, most of us don't have the expertise to recognise subtle errors, and there's no central authority to complain to about error, because a blogger can't be fired.

How do we convince people that the salaries of editors and other publishing professionals are worth paying, and that content that costs is to be preferred to content that's free? That's the question I wish I could answer.

They'd have to appreciate craft, and insist that what they publish is well crafted. But that's a matter of artistic integrity, perhaps not considered very important in modern commerce.

Maryann wrote: "How do we convince people that the salaries of editors and other publishing professionals are worth paying, and that content that costs is to be preferred to content that's free?"

Maybe it will be cyclical. When enough people get sick of inaccurate wiki articles and typo-laden, hate-filled blog comments, perhaps edited publishing will make a comeback?