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Yes, and it's a death spiral since the university presses could, in theory, provide some competition. Can't/Won't invest in alternatives => lower competition fo
by ahi 3y ago
Yes, and it's a death spiral since the university presses could, in theory, provide some competition. Can't/Won't invest in alternatives => lower competition for the parasites => higher subscription costs => less resources to invest in alternatives.
Academic libraries and publishing are effectively being privatized and will be dominated by ever more rent-seeking. I don't see this getting turned around unless universities dictate to their faculty where they can publish, i.e. stop subsidizing their competition.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI don't think the major universities - the ones that could have publishing houses that matter - are too broke to be able to keep the publishing house running.
- beepbooptheory 3y agoSo wait, if that's true, is the article at hand here mistaken, or in bad faith? Also, isn't the case that it is mostly the "major" universities that have their own presses in the first place?
- jhbadger 3y agoDepends on what you call major. But it certainly isn't just Oxford, Harvard, and the like. Pretty much all US "University of X" (where X is a state) have their own presses.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoYeah, and see, I'm not claiming that the University of, say, Wyoming, has the money to keep their own press running. But the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and the like... they definitely do.
- hiddencost 3y agoThey usually cap the number of books they publish a year. Artificial scarcity makes their imprimatur more desirable.
- Finnucane 3y agoLol, we have the opposite problem—we need to have more books.
- cardboardbach 3y ago[dead]
- anileated 3y agoIf we want to have more books, we need to protect the rights of the publishers—if publishers are not protected, then the market is just doing its job: publishing books is not going to be profitable if book contents are stolen without consequences. As a result, universities wouldn’t want to waste money publishing books, and for-profit journals would have to charge exorbitant subscription fees to compensate for the fact that no one except a few institutions will sub in the first place (everyone else will get the same stuff washed through an LLM).
- ghaff 3y agoThe barrier to publishing a book is more or less non-existent. The barrier to getting a publisher’s name that is sufficient for someone to think (rightly or wrongly) that this book has a legit stamp of approval is somewhat higher if not all that high. And obviously implies that those publishers have to gatekeep to some degree.
- Finnucane 3y agoSure, we turn away crap, but so what? We don’t have a cap on how many books we can publish other than the time, labor, and money resources we have. Which are finite. We could publish more than we do now, and we have in the past.
- Finnucane 3y agoThis is the current membership roster of the AUP: https://aupresses.org/membership/membership-list/ https://aupresses.org/membership/membership-list/
- ahi 3y agoYou would be surprised. University of Michigan Publishing, one of the largest and wealthiest of the publics only has a staff of ~30, some of whom are shared with other departments. The university's annual contribution is well under $2 million. The entire University Library, the second largest research library in the U.S. after Harvard, has an annual budget of $64m (0.58% of the entire budget). I think historically the larger presses were expected to be close to revenue neutral. They do well enough to limp along, but don't get the resources really needed to build new infra. As a cost center without significant tuition or grant funding, the library has little pull when provosts form their priorities.
- idontpost 3y agoMaybe if the university presidents and deans weren't looting the coffers for themselves, the publishing unit would have funding?
- avar 3y agoTalking about "the budget" is meaningless in this context, you could similarly argue that Bill Gates can't afford to buy his kids bubblegum on any given day. After all his self-imposed budget for them is $10/day. Look at the size and growth of the university's endowment.
- begemotz 3y agoUnfortunately talking about the "size and growth of the endowment" is similarly meaningless in this context for a number of reasons. Even if the funds were not restricted in a way that excluded funding the University Press, it's probably a poor measure of whether a University could "afford" to support a press.
- posterboy 3y agoThis trend is generally true for print. If smaller presses don't go out of business, due to the advantage of newer facilities, they are subsidized or bought out by bigger players.