Hace unos días comentábamos sobre las editoriales universitarias entre dos fuegos: ¿cambiar o morir?.
A continuación una serie de tres recientes artículos aparecidos en publicaciones especializadas que dan cuenta de las dificultades de diverso orden que deben sortear (o ante las cuales terminarán sucumbiendo) las casas editoras académicas:
— Books Aren’t Everything , Thomas Bacher, director of the University of Akron Press,
Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2009
— A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing, By PETER J. DOUGHERTY, Director Princeton University Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2009
— The Future of Scholarly Publishing, The Chronicle of Higher Educayion, June 12, 2009, con la participación de un grupo seleccionado de directivos de algunas de las principales editoriales universuitarias de los EE.UU:
Douglas Armato, director, University of Minnesota Press; Joan Catapano, associate director and editor in chief, University of Illinois Press; Patricia Fidler, publisher (art and architectural history), Yale University Press; Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor (religion, philosophy, and animal studies), Columbia University Press; Charles T. Myers, executive editor and group publisher (social sciences), Princeton University Press; Niko Pfund, trade and academic publisher, Oxford University Press; Leila Salisbury, director, University Press of Mississippi; Doug Sery, editor (new media, game studies, and design), MIT Press; Alan G. Thomas, editorial director (humanities and sciences), University of Chicago Press; Lindsay Waters, executive editor (humanities), Harvard University Press; Eric Zinner, editor in chief, New York University Press

Books Aren’t Everything
By Thomas Bacher, director of the University of Akron Press
Inside Higher Ed, June 30, 2009
Publishing — especially university press publishing — is a tough business. Recently, many presses have come under greater financial pressure or the threat of being closed completely. Much of this is due to the downturn in the economy, which strains state budgets and makes so-called ancillary operations like scholarly publishing expendable.
Some in university presses view this as a time to rally around the book as the focal point of scholarship and academic publishing. Part of the argument revolves around university presses as purveyors of hard ideas — ideas that push culture forward. Intellectual rigor, the hallmark of any good university or college, is also the driving force in university press publishing. This rigor is best reflected in full-length discussion of particular subjects.
Whatever the merits of books, this argument neglects to address fully the current financial and technological challenges. Disruptive technologies — the Internet and digital information networks — have made the printed book less important. Information gatherers have found an abundance of material on their desktops. More important, the psychology of getting information is driven by quick searching and the generation of instantaneous results. Trying to change users’ actions under continual technology improvements is futile.
Expanding university press publishing into the areas that are driving the current educational and research enterprises — science, engineering, technology, etc. — is definitely an option that must be explored. In fact, these disciplines were on the forefront of ushering in new forms of communication highlighted by arXiv, an e-print service in the fields of physics, mathematics, non-linear science, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. University presses, except for the few Überpresses whose reputation transcends their parent universities, must also be concerned with aligning their interests with the strengths of their home institutions. By doing so, they become a vital tool in branding and marketing. Forays into tertiary fields are not strategic or sensible.
While moving into STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine) publishing and producing cutting-edge textbooks – another idea of those who favor a continued emphasis on books — would improve presses’ financial performances and provide them greater credibility, ready capital is not available to presses. Parent institutions or foundations would have to pump millions into the scholarly publishing business to jump start these programs. Commercial publishers have much deeper pockets and can offer richer services to their authors.
I had a recent conversation with a prominent engineering dean. He wanted to know why I was visiting, since his faculty was intent on getting published in Elsevier journals. I wasn’t the least bit surprised, but did mention perhaps some of his faculty might write “little books” on very narrow subjects. Basically, these books would be an extension of an existing journal article or an adaptation of class notes with the purpose of covering a topic, but keeping in line with the way faculty communicate in those fields. He thought the idea might work, but reminded me that his faculty was immersed in teaching and research, so that finding spare time for an endeavor that had negligible tenure impact would be hard.
University presses must move away from focusing on books or any one method of distribution. While I was at Purdue University Press we published a book entitled 100 Years of Change in the Distribution of Common Indiana Weeds (the title came with a free CD for easy searching). Weeds found their way across the state along highways and railroads — distribution networks. Likewise current scholarly information is a product of the channels available, including libraries, digital repositories, wikis, blogs, and social networks. The absolute growth in digital resources impacts the creation of information as well as the completed work. A scholarly monograph might be the end product, but we must realize that the pathway itself has hard information that scholars want to access, too.
University presses must become part of the new information infrastructure of the university. Presses must partner with departments, centers, and scholars to publish groundbreaking materials. University presses need to be good listeners. The university press editorial board, if made up of a diverse cross-section of faculty members, is a way to initiate this process. At board meetings, interactions have led to the discovery of programs that are being run independently at various schools that could be made much more vital through cooperative efforts.
I do not doubt that the book will continue to exist as a part of the scholarly enterprise. When television disrupted radio, radio survived. When the Internet disrupted television, television survived. When digital networks disrupted libraries, libraries have survived. All of the survivors have had to adjust to the new reality. Digital device are disrupting the traditional book. University presses have to show how vital they can be to their parent universities’ strategic direction. Traditional books cannot drive the answer any longer.
Thomas Bacher is director of the University of Akron Press.
——————————————————————-
A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing
By PETER J. DOUGHERTY, Director Princeton University Press.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2009
In 1948, the University of Illinois Press published Claude Shannon’s brief and profoundly influential book The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon’s work, which explained how words, sounds, and images could be converted into blips and sent electronically, presaged the digital revolution in communications.
Anyone not living under a rock knows that Shannon’s idea has engulfed all forms of written thought, including every genre of scholarship. Ironically, the very institution that brought Shannon’s technological tract to a broad audience, the university press, is now contending with the possible demise of the print book itself. Just as the researchers at Bell Labs helped to develop the very technologies that undermined the old phone company, so the editors and publishers who brought Shannon and his fellow theorists to print have effectively disrupted the traditional technology of books. Joseph Schumpeter had a phrase for it: “creative destruction.”
And while university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books?
I believe quite the opposite. Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar:
First, books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms — narrative, thematic, philosophical, and polemical — thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations.
Second, university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don’t traffic in hard ideas. They’re too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly. More free-form modes of communication (blogs, wikis, etc.) cannot do justice to hard ideas in their fullness. But we university presses luxuriate in hard ideas. We work the Hegel-Heidegger-Heisenberg circuit. As the Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters notes, even when university presses succeed in publishing so-called trade books (as in Charles Taylor’s recent hit, A Secular Age), we do so because of the intellectual rigor contained in such books, not in spite of it.
Hard ideas define a culture — that of serious reading, an institution vital to democracy itself. In a recent article, Stephen L. Carter, Yale law professor and novelist, underscores “the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share.” The challenge for university presses is to better turn our penchant for hard ideas to greater purpose.
University presses need to foment a content revival astride the delivery revolution, one that stimulates our connection to new intellectual trends, encompasses a broader conception of scholarship, and renews our commitment to the scholarly mission of the university. Such a revival in content would return us to our roots; roots revealed in Albert Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity, Paul Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis, Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the Melting Pot, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory, and other classic works. Since our earliest days, our content has been our glory, and it will remain so in the future. But this requires a new and purposive round of brainstorming. We need to match the power of our book-making imaginations with emerging currents of scholarship, some emanating from corners of the university distant from our traditional turf in the humanities and social sciences — new genres, and new readerships.
This content revolution would proceed apace on parallel tracks, which I will touch on briefly, then in greater detail:
First, include on our lists more titles from the burgeoning professional disciplines: engineering, law, medicine, architecture, business, the graphic arts, and the information sciences. Those fields are driving the growth of our host universities while redefining the limits of culture in new and exciting ways.
Second, become much more purposeful and assertive in publishing books that define whole fields, including important advanced textbooks. University-press editors would add depth and ballast to their lists by looking for that next great advanced text in our traditional fields, such as social theory, comparative literature, or art history, as well as in emerging fields. That kind of publishing is often dismissed as cookie cutter, but it’s not.
Third, publish more books for worldwide readerships. As the globalization of knowledge continues apace, American university presses are positioned to engage readers in ways unimagined a generation ago. By infusing our lists with titles of international interest, we can better exploit the technologies that bring the world closer to us.
Fourth, work more closely with departments and centers within our host universities to adapt their work — sponsored lecture series, etc. — into books, monograph series, and other such initiatives. We should be planning our future lists strategically within our host universities in order to maximize the relative strengths of press and campus alike.
Let’s look more closely at these goals.
As noted above, the first key to a stronger and more vital university press is in the embrace of a broader array of fields, notably the professions, including medicine; engineering; computer, environmental, information, and management sciences; graphic design; and finance. The professions, for all the prestige of graduate institutions like the Wharton School or Harvard Medical School, are often seen as peripheral to the humanities-centered core mission of universities, and to the heavily humanities-oriented program of university presses. That disparity presents an identity problem for the modern university. The diversified research university’s great growth areas exist largely outside the dialogue internal to the humanities and social sciences.
But that paradox offers an opportunity for university presses, because books function at least in part to humanize hard ideas, such as those that define professional knowledge. Not only do the professional fields yield important technical books, they provide university presses with the chance to publish broader books that convey important profession-specific knowledge to diverse, cross-disciplinary audiences. In other words, university presses, because of our position within the academic community, are uniquely positioned to help introduce professional knowledge into the larger intellectual discourse by publishing books that engage the historical, literary, and social dimensions of these fields. That effort has, in fact, already begun. For example, think of the influence of works such as Donald Mackenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006), John Seeley Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000), Henry Petroski’s Success Through Failure: The Paradox of Design (Princeton University Press, 2006), or James R. Beniger’s The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, 1986). Each of those books introduced into the broader intellectual conversation powerfully important technical subjects to an impressive cross section of readers, removing the technical barbs and burnishing the transcendent human implications.
There are also ethical elements of professional subjects that need to be integrated into broader intellectual conversations. As Harold T. Shapiro, a former president of Princeton, notes in his book A Larger Sense of Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2005), “the most valuable part of education for any learned profession is that aspect that teaches future professionals to think, read, compare, discriminate, analyze, form judgments, and generally enhance their capacity to confront the ambiguities and enigmas of the human condition.”
While naysayers may argue that publishing more books on the professions subverts the university press’s historical commitment to the humanities and culture, one could counter that those professional fields are themselves coming to define culture. Think of the growing influence on society of fields such as telecommunications, financial engineering, and cognitive science, as well as the increasingly ubiquitous influence of statistics and applied mathematics in everyday communications. In fact, the electronic transition in scholarship itself is the product of applied science. These fields are foreign to most university presses, but the direction of scholarship suggests that they shouldn’t be. In fact, they provide a great new opportunity for us to publish works that reflect the reality around us.
I am not suggesting that university presses should abandon or even reduce our commitment to traditional humanities fields. History, literature, art, politics, and philosophy form the core of university-press publishing, and always will. However, by integrating more technical subject matter into our publishing, we can add color and depth to our lists. The mere introduction of new ideas into the culture of university-press publishing would add vigor to our operations while inspiring in editors in the humanities and social sciences new exciting cross-disciplinary books. Books, better than any other literary form, can speak to the ever-widening chasms that define the modern, intellectually diverse research university. We should embrace the challenge.
Second, even as university-press publishers should diversify our disciplinary portfolios, so too should we strive more ambitiously to define entire fields by commissioning important new high-level textbooks and treatises. That kind of publishing used to be the proud purview of textbook publishers, but as a result of the nearly 30-year wave of consolidation that has marked college publishing, only a few such houses remain. Those publishers tend to concentrate their energies on producing mainstream undergraduate textbooks in repetitive shootouts for market share, leaving smaller yet intellectually vibrant fields open to new and innovative texts, treatises, and reference books.
University presses should seize the opportunity. Important advanced texts often turn out to be intellectual game changers, reviving and redirecting knowledge in older fields, synthesizing ideas in newer fields, and unifying scholarship across fields. Thus they serve eminently the mission of the university press. But as the author of a leading book on academic publishing observed in conversation with me, university-press editors tend to dismiss that kind of publishing as cookie cutter. A little history suggests it is anything but.
When I began my career at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in the summer of 1972, I carried in my briefcase sales briefs for titles that would be regarded as excellent by any standard. Harcourt’s college department published great works such as Noam Chomsky’s Language and Mind, Walter Jackson Bate’s Criticism: The Major Texts (1952), Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Modern Rhetoric (1949), Lewis A. Coser’s Masters of Sociological Thought (1971), and Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity (1971). So did other college houses, as did the celebrated “crossover” houses of that day, Basic Books and the Free Press. If that’s cookie cutter, please sign me up for some shares of Pepperidge Farm. There are superb and growing opportunities for university presses to engage in that kind of stylish textbook publishing and to do so both proudly and well.
Third, enlarging the globally relevant dimension of our lists not only provides a greater fulcrum for sales, but better connects us to the scholars, writers, and foreign publishers forming the next generation of research networks around the world. At Princeton, the percentage of business that comes from internationally attractive lists such as economics is as high as 40 percent of total sales, or about twice the average of most of our lists. Robust international lists also generate more translations. On a visit to Asia in 2007, I discovered that many of the booksellers there were aware of an important new book from our catalog, Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, even before its official publication dates. That is how immediate and tangible the global market has become. Without global content, university presses risk isolation from a growing community of readers and authors. After all, the numbers suggest the next John Hope Franklin or Joan Robinson is as likely to be sitting in a classroom in Delhi or Beijing as in Cambridge or Los Angeles.
Fourth, university presses should reinforce their strategic positions within their host universities by partnering with departments and committees on developing new books consonant with the scholarly initiatives afoot on campus. A simple example is the lecture series as book.
When I became an economics editor, I learned about the wonderful volumes drawn by Oxford University Press from the Clarendon Lectures delivered annually in Oxford by invited scholars. Those lectures served then — and continue to serve — as vital events drawing scholars and students alike together for several days of lecturing and discussion. They also serve as the basis for a manuscript that eventually gets published by Oxford and, in the case of the Clarendon volumes, read worldwide by economists and scholars in related fields. Those books include now-classic works such as Robert Shiller’s Macro Markets: Creating Institutions for Managing Society’s Largest Economic Risks (1993). That is the kind of win-win arrangement that facilitates partnership between the university press and its host university.
Another is the university-sponsored book series. For example, think of the Princeton Annals of Mathematics series, supplying the world of math with cutting-edge monographic works for generations, or the Harvard East Asian Monographs series. University administrators should be aware of the enduring recognition that comes from the successful continuing publication of such series, and of the capacity of books to command attention in publications as wide-ranging as blogs, Web journals, newspaper columns, and magazines. If mathematics can emanate throughout the world from Princeton and its press, economics from Oxford and its press, and East Asian studies from Harvard and its press, why not engineering, environmental science, management, or public health from other presses? Such books are reviewed worldwide, providing a continuing stream of recognition for universities and presses alike.
Although we live in an era of disaggregated knowledge, I believe scholarly books will thrive. William Germano notes in his book Getting It Published that “the book is the form in which we scholars tell our stories to one another. … Even when a publisher offers the choice of a physical or electronic edition of a work, or supplements a physical book with electronic ancillaries, or produces a physical book only on demand, it is the form of the book, that precious thought-skeleton, that holds a project together.”
In effect, books remain valuable precisely because they are distinct from the other, more transitory, forms of scholarly communication. But university presses have to grasp the stinging nettle, jump-start a serious discussion about content, get strategic, invent projects. If university presses attempt to be more creative by introducing new subjects into our existing lists, the resultant hybrid vigor, to borrow a phrase from the biologists, will put us on a stronger course and renew the place of books in the world of ideas. For in the future, as in the past, we will be judged by the character of our content.
Peter J. Dougherty directs Princeton University Press.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 39, Page B10
——————————————————————————–
The Future of Scholarly Publishing
The Chronicle of Higher Educayion, June 12, 2009
In these times of financial crisis, much of the discussion about scholarly publishing has focused on budgets, the switch to electronic formats, and the future of the monograph. Throughout, however, university presses have continued to bring out important scholarship that is the mainstay of academe. The Chronicle Review asked a group of editors and press directors (via e-mail) about intellectual trends in what they are publishing. Following is a selection of their answers.
FORUM PARTICIPANTS
Douglas Armato, director, University of Minnesota Press
Joan Catapano, associate director and editor in chief, University of Illinois Press
Patricia Fidler, publisher (art and architectural history), Yale University Press
Wendy Lochner, senior executive editor (religion, philosophy, and animal studies), Columbia University Press
Charles T. Myers, executive editor and group publisher (social sciences), Princeton University Press
Niko Pfund, trade and academic publisher, Oxford University Press
Leila Salisbury, director, University Press of Mississippi
Doug Sery, editor (new media, game studies, and design), MIT Press
Alan G. Thomas, editorial director (humanities and sciences), University of Chicago Press
Lindsay Waters, executive editor (humanities), Harvard University Press
Eric Zinner, editor in chief, New York University Press

What new areas of growth in topics and approaches do you see?
Leila Salisbury: I’m seeing more proposals and manuscripts in media studies and popular culture that relate to African-American studies, and we’re seeing and encouraging more work in this area on post-civil-rights topics. Our folklore list has always been strong, and as we partner with the University of Illinois Press and the University of Wisconsin Press on a new Mellon initiative, “Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World,” I expect this list to continue to grow. We want to see new books developed in music, foodways, folk tales, folk art, and contemporary folklore.
Wendy Lochner: One of the largest areas of growth that I have seen is animal studies. From its beginnings as primarily an animal-rights topic within law and philosophy, it is now an area of major concern in most of the humanities and social sciences (as well as, of course, the biological sciences). The approach that seems to be the most fruitful and most conducive to interdisciplinarity is one that considers whether species can be added to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability as a category for critical analysis.
Niko Pfund: In no particular order, I’d include the following: sociolinguistics, computational linguistics (and its close relative, natural-language processing), neuroscience, and neuropsychology — all of which are related to the study of the brain; transnational history, whereby historical inquiry is no longer structured largely around national borders; oral history; film studies and media studies, as we move to being a more visual culture; modernist studies and reception studies; the sociology of religion, new religious movements, and world religion; criminology; international law, human-rights law, constitutional law, copyright/intellectual property; ancient history; and digital music.
Lindsay Waters: I see philosophy and literary studies as areas with a lot of new growth, and they relate to one another in a way that combines to make for the emergence of what I call the “New Humanities.” Now big issues are going to be addressed again. The most obvious example is the opening up of questions of religion and spirituality with a new way of talking about the subject. In history, literature, and cultural studies, the prohibition against asking what makes America a separate place with its own peculiar ways (“exceptionalism”) is being dropped. That question was off the table in the era of political correctness for fear that writing about what made the United States what it is would somehow help Bush and Cheney turn the country into a straight-up empire. Now that the mixedness of America is evident on high, I predict African-American studies will flourish as never before, freed at last from liberal guilt to explore America’s destiny as a mixed-race country.
Alan G. Thomas: Where I see a lot of intellectual energy, even urgency, is in work that addresses the shifting terrain between the sciences and the humanities, whether historically or prospectively. There’s a growing need for scientist-authors who can speak to nonscientists, and for humanists who can clarify the stakes of what is happening across the sciences.
Doug Sery: I think the rather broadly defined area of digital humanities is going to be a major topic now and into the future. In my own list, I’ve signed what I feel are going to be two strong subsets of this area, the Software Studies series and the Platform Studies series, and I fully expect to add more subsets as the humanities bring digital technology into their research.
Patricia Fidler: Growth topics include contemporary art, Latin American art, design, graphic arts, modernism, fashion history, and decorative arts. In architecture we have seen growth in areas relating to sustainability, landscape, preservation, and environmentalism.
Joan Catapano: It seems a number of new areas of growth involve technology. Some examples include projects in digital humanities; digital arts; projects linked to Web-based databases; and videos. Topics include a broader range of ethnic studies and migration studies (movement back and forth between countries and even within a country) rather than immigration studies. Religious studies broadly defined continues to grow to include cultural as well as sociological approaches.
Eric Zinner: Forensics via criminology but extending through psychology; transnationalism within American history; children’s studies, starting in the humanities and now including the social sciences; media studies from a variety of disciplines; within legal studies, an increased focus on empirical methods; new religious movements.
Douglas Armato: Though there is nothing new about the concept of interdisciplinarity, we see books that cross scholarly boundaries continuing to gain momentum with the generational shift to younger scholars who came into the academy when those boundaries were breaking down. With the increasing turn toward a posthumanist perspective, we also see a return to the “big questions” about the status and condition of human society and, with it, a revival of social theory and philosophy.
Charles T. Myers: The social sciences are characterized now by a growing diversity of approaches and by increasing technical complexity including the use of math. There is more work being done that ties explanations of social behavior to biology and cognitive science. In this work, scientists are looking at the biological and neurological roots of behavior. The influence of economics and rational-choice-based models continues. Now there is more work being done using experiments and drawing on psychology and cognitive science to better understand the important deviations from the predictions of those models. More work is being published that is grounded in chaos and complexity studies. Finally, the Internet is resulting in work that is designed to understand the impact it is having on politics and other social behavior. Whatever the approach taken, the best books are those that give us new facts or a new way of understanding an important problem. I like to think of great books as in part “myth busters.”
What areas do you think are overpublished?
Salisbury: From our perspective, Southern history and the Civil War are perhaps overpublished in relationship to the market demand for those titles. While there are likely still some excellent topics out there, we have to look much harder, and the competition is immense.
Lochner: Within my acquisitions areas (religion, philosophy, animal studies), I would have to say low-level books on Islam and philosophical and other responses to September 11 — we have moved on and have a new generation of problems.
Pfund: Trade science as a genre seems to me to have suffered for some time now from a disproportion between the sheer numbers of books and their readers. For every successful book such as E.O. Wilson’s Consilience or Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Impossible or Melanie Mitchell’s Complexity: A Guided Tour, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of books that aspire to the same goal but slip under the surface without leaving a ripple. If this question were asked of me a year from now, I’m pretty sure I know how I’d answer, judging just from the number of books that have been signed in recent months on every conceivable aspect of the financial crisis — from forensic recountings of How We Got Here to prescriptive works on how we can best extract ourselves by learning from past history.
Waters: The time is up for social constructionism and New Historicism. The “construct” part of that phrase looks too mechanical and reductionist now. Those many thought were the coming gods in the 1990s are going to sink into well-deserved obscurity. Just wait: The time is up foriek and Badiou and Rancière. But the difference is not in them, but in us. Until recently those attending the Modern Language Association meeting were looking for new gurus on the model of Derrida and Foucault. A new seriousness has taken root, and people seem to be able to tell false prophets from real thinkers. The soberness of Adorno and Benjamin is one of the things that has made interest in their work grow, and they have not peaked yet.
Sery: I moved from acquiring books in computer science to books in new media and game studies, and design. There were a couple of reasons for this, but essentially I found that computer science was becoming increasingly specialized and, therefore, fragmented.
Fidler: Some aspects of 19th-century European art have been overpublished, in large part because these books often appealed to a more general audience (e.g., those interested in Impressionism) and sold quite well. Many scholars now shy away from working in this area, not only because of the challenges associated with publishing their work but also because academic departments are not hiring vigorously in this area. Certain artists have been overpublished, including Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Gauguin, Chagall, Picasso, Warhol, O’Keeffe, but a really solid, smart book on one of those figures can still find a place in the marketplace. In architecture and photography, there have been too many “overproduced” monographs with insufficient critical apparatus.
Zinner: Relative to the size of the field, cinema studies. A victim of its own success, Civil War history.
Armato: We think it is more a matter of where the scholarly energy within an area is moving than overpublishing per se. This would be a difficult time to start, say, a traditional American-history list, but there are certainly areas in American history that still sell. The major fields are continuing to break down into smaller areas and topics of interest, and what an acquiring editor needs to do is see where that energy is flowing. So while you could say the boom in cultural studies is over, there are areas within cultural studies that remain very strong.
What fields were hot 10 to 15 years ago that you don’t publish in as much anymore?
Salisbury: Besides publishing fewer titles in Southern history, we no longer publish fiction or in the field of performance studies. Literary studies has long been in a period of decline for most publishers, and though we’re still active in that area, we do very few monographs on single authors or single works anymore. Memoir is also a delicate area; with the right author and subject matter for a particular press, those books can still succeed, but it’s getting harder to make a particular book stand out in such a crowded field.
Pfund: Cultural theory’s not dead, as is often claimed, nor will it likely ever be, but for sensible reasons it is not stacked up in chain bookstores anymore the way it once was. Over the past 10 to 15 years, some subjects, including gay and lesbian studies, complexity studies, and nanotechnology, have at times become overheated — not necessarily intellectually but certainly with regard to publisher enthusiasm relative to the demographic realities of the readership base — before then settling back into their steady groove.
Catapano: Over the past 10 years, the press has reduced the number of projects in poetry and literary studies. The press has also cut back on reprints acquired from other publishers and creative nonfiction.
Fidler: Yale University Press has long had a tradition of publishing the best books on Renaissance art and architecture. While we still publish selectively in this area, we no longer have as many titles on our list as we did a decade ago.
Zinner: The Balkans. Psychoanalysis.
Armato: We tend to reorient within fields rather than drop them entirely. What was once a strong cinema list with a new-media component is now a strong media list with a smaller film component. Our Latin American-studies list is now more focused on economics, migration, and race than on cultural issues.
Are new series productive? If so, in what areas?
Salisbury: A series can be a good tool to help launch a press into a new area or to codify a list that’s already very successful. That said, there are probably too many series out there and new ones appearing all the time, and that dilutes the impact of series more generally. From a purely marketing perspective, I don’t think they have a significant effect on sales. We’ve recently established a series in Caribbean studies to help tie together books we were already publishing in history, cultural studies, music, and folklore.
Pfund: Series can be very helpful in drawing attention to new directions and subfields, such as with our Oxford Studies in International History, and in creating a formal space where new types of research methodology can be recognized. New series can also indicate a press’s intentions in a certain field. For instance, we are launching new series in politics and classics, both areas where we have plans to expand our publishing aggressively.
Catapano: Some series are successful in terms of sales, others in terms of academic credibility, some both. The key to a successful series is to carefully define parameters, focus on a subject or area not overpublished, identify a target audience, and find active, thoughtful, reliable series editors. The press has recently launched successful series in film, music, and food studies.
Do you see a decline or increase in edited collections? If so, why?
Lochner: I am afraid that edited collections as a rule sell so poorly that I almost never consider them. It is always surprising to me how many scholars still propose them. They often take more work than a single-authored book. The only exception that I would make is for collections that have been specifically developed for niche courses where good materials are lacking.
Pfund: In history, we’ve noticed an increase in the number of people wanting to collaborate in group projects out of small conferences. There appears to be money available at many universities for projects that bring scholars together in groups of 15 or so, to focus on a particular theme, often crossing disciplinary boundaries. From a publishing perspective, it raises a real challenge in marketing: Are people going to assign these books? How should the conference work be expanded and honed into a book format? Are scholars going to read these collections? Is the printed book the best format to distribute the often very cutting-edge discussions that occur in small conference settings?
Waters: I am doing edited collections again, having stayed out of that business since I was at the University of Minnesota Press, but we did one edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur on the limits of naturalism; we’ll do one on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age; we’re going to do one on G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention, based on a conference held at the University of Chicago a month ago that attracted a huge crowd, mostly philosophers in their 30s.
Fidler: We are seeing an increase in the submission of edited collections, as they are an efficient way to generate content and spread some of the originating costs out among individuals and institutions. However, these books do not tend to sell well, so we do not acquire more based on the increased submissions. There will be a new digital model for publishing edited collections emerging soon; it may be a more viable platform for publishing this type of book.
Armato: Edited collections are important for getting at issues that are emerging (where the book-length scholarship hasn’t emerged) or where a topic is complex in a way that it is better served by multiple authors coming at a topic from diverse perspectives. Some of our best-selling recent books are collections (as are some of our worst). Thus, collections do important scholarly work and aren’t likely to go away. But they are difficult and costly to publish, and I think everyone is selective in taking them on.
Myers: The number of proposals for edited volumes, particularly those coming out of conferences, is increasing, while sales of these volumes are decreasing. We are publishing fewer of them than in the past.
Do you see new trends in scholarly writing?
Salisbury: There’s much more of an emphasis on interdisciplinary work, which is a positive development. Also, I see potential authors being more thoughtful about the markets for their books. That is of particular interest to me because I come to acquiring from the marketing side of things, which is my background. I’m more likely today to receive a market summary and list of competing titles as a part of a book proposal, and that benefits both the press and the author. It helps the press know more immediately what need a book will fill, and it gives the author guidance and direction in developing his or her work to address a topic in ways that have not been done before.
Waters: The new seriousness has been growing for at least 10 years and is reflected in the new interest in philosophy, a field that may have seemed to some high-tech hustlers like some carryover from pre-tech days.
Thomas: There has been a welcome trend, still continuing, for scholars to use the security of tenure to frame book projects for wider audiences within the academy, and sometimes outside it. But for first books, things haven’t changed much: The habit of writing to satisfy a dissertation committee carries over into writing to satisfy later professional gatekeepers, without enough regard for the book’s potential audience. The peer-review process is sometimes to blame for that (well-meaning readers’ reports sometimes have the effect of re-dissertationizing a first book), and we as editors need to help authors sort the good suggestions from the bad. One trend I don’t see, but would like to, is greater attention to writing skills in graduate school. When I speak to groups of grad students, I always urge them to cultivate an ability to write in several registers (through book reviews, blogs, journalism, and so on), even as they write their dissertations.
Sery: There seems to be a movement afoot to change the evaluation criteria used by universities for promotion and tenure. Specifically, there is a desire among some academics to allow participation in blogs, online journals, and other new media to count toward their promotion and tenure cases.
Fidler: As it has become more of a priority within many academic institutions, we see more cross-disciplinary studies, history overlapping with cultural studies, etc. Younger scholars also seem to have become a bit more savvy in their approach to writing dissertations. By that, I mean that first-time authors are more aware of how drastically different a monograph needs to be from a formal dissertation as well as of the viability of a particular subject in today’s publishing climate.
Catapano: There appears to be a slight turning away from jargon-laden books. My colleagues report that almost every “pitch letter” they receive touts the clearly written jargon-free quality of the project being proposed.
Armato: I see the blog form moving into scholarship through more diarylike texts. There is also a more European-influenced urge to write speculative scholarly essays or meditations with minimal footnotes and apparatus.
Myers: In my area of publishing [the social sciences], the technical complexity is increasing, limiting in many cases the potential market for the books to scholars in the subfield.
http://chronicle.com
Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 55, Issue 39, Page B12