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It can be a frightening time to be in the publishing business. The economic mechanisms that support the reproduction and distribution of information in print have been disrupted by the economics of digital media. The newspaper industry provides just one example. As Eric Alterman pointed out in a recent New Yorker article, "In the Internet Age,… no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad." Print circulation is at its lowest level since records have been kept and online revenue from advertising and subscriptions are nowhere close to making up for those declines. It is well known that journals and scholarly presses are also struggling to adapt their business models.
At the same time that established publishing organizations are struggling, more and more academics and academic organizations are attempting to enter digital publishing. They are digitizing new content daily, developing new software tools, and collecting new data. Naturally, the creators of these online academic resources (OARs) wish to make them broadly available and to ensure their continued availability and currency.
These new digital resources have generally been created from one-time grant funding or short-term commitments of resources. However, unlike a printed book, digital resources require continued investment. The software systems and platforms on which they depend must be upgraded and kept current. It is the nature of digital resources to be continually growing and changing, attracting new content, and rapidly cycling through revisions and additions.
Increasingly, therefore, foundations, government agencies and universities are asking where they will find the recurring funding to sustain these online resources over time. They are requiring the leaders of such projects to develop sustainability plans that include ongoing sources of revenue; in short, they are looking for academics to act as publishing entrepreneurs. Success in such endeavors requires entrepreneurial expertise and discipline, but in our experience at Ithaka, few OAR projects employ fundamental principles of project planning and management. Why don't they?
What we have observed is that deep cultural differences separate the scholarly mindset from the mindset of the e-entrepreneur. Most people overseeing online academic resources are scholars, raised in the academy, accustomed to its collegial culture and deliberative pace, shielded from traditional market forces. However, the rapid changes and ruthless competitive landscape of the Internet require a different mindset. The challenge for a successful OAR project leader is to marry the scholarly values essential to the project's intellectual integrity with the entrepreneurial values necessary for its survival in the Internet economy.
To assist project leaders in successfully managing digital enterprises, Ithaka embarked on a project to study the major challenges to the sustainability of these online academic resources. Working with support from the Joint Information Systems Committee and the Strategic Content Alliance, we interviewed a range of people both in the academy and industry. During that effort, the fruits of which were published last week, we identified several aspects of the entrepreneurial approach that seem particularly important to creating sustainable digital projects:
1. Grants are for start-up, not sustainability. Most often, project leaders should regard initial funding as precisely that -- start-up funding to help the project develop other reliable, recurring and diverse sources of support. The prevailing assumption that there will be a new influx of grant funding when the existing round runs out is counter-productive to building a sustainable approach. There are exceptions to this assertion -- for example, if a grantee offers a service that is vital to a foundation's mission or is exclusively serving an important programmatic focus of the funder -- but these cases are unusual.
2. Cost recovery is not sufficient: growth is necessary. Project leaders need to adopt a broader definition of "sustainability" that encompasses more than covering operating costs. The Web environment is evolving rapidly and relentlessly. It is incorrect to assume that, once the initial digitization effort is finished and content is up on the Web, the costs of maintaining a resource will drop to zero or nearly zero. Projects need to generate surplus revenue for ongoing reinvestment in their content and/or technology if they are to thrive.
3. Value is determined by impact. OAR project leaders tend to underestimate the importance of thinking about demand and impact and the connections between those elements and support from key stake holders. The scholarly reluctance to think in terms of "marketing" is a formula for invisibility on the Internet. Without a strategic understanding of the market place, it is only through serendipity that a resource will attract users and have an impact on a significant population or field of academic endeavor. And of course, attracting users is essential for garnering support from a variety of stake holders: host universities, philanthropies and government agencies, corporate sponsors and advertisers. The most promising and successful online resource projects are demand driven and strive for visibility, traffic and impact.
4. Projects should think in terms of building scale through partnerships, collaborations, mergers and even acquisitions. Project leaders need to consider a range of options for long-term governance. Start-ups in the private sector, for example, aim for independent profitability but they also consider it a success to merge with complementary businesses or to sell their companies to a larger enterprise with the means to carry those assets forward. Not-for-profit projects should think similarly about their options and pursue different forms of sustainability based on their particular strengths, their competition, and their spheres of activity. Given the high fixed costs of the online environment, collaborations and mergers are critical for helping single online academic resource projects keep their costs down and improve chances for sustainability.
5. In a competitive world, strategic planning is imperative. In the highly competitive environment of the Web, project leaders must embrace the best operating practices of their competitors -- a group that includes commercial enterprises -- for mindshare and resources. That means they will have to act strategically, develop marketing plans, seek out strategic partnerships, understand their competitive environment, and identify and measure themselves against clear goals and objectives for how they will accomplish their missions successfully and affordably. An academic disdain for "commercialism" can doom many a promising scholarly project to failure on the Internet.
Historically, academic projects have been shielded from commercial pressures, in part by funders, but mainly because their economic environment operated independently from other areas of commerce. This separation between the "academic" and "commercial" economies is no longer meaningful. The project leaders that are most likely to succeed in today's digital environment are those who can operate successfully under the pressures of competition and accountability, and in the messiness of innovation and continual reinvention.
6. Flexibility, nimbleness, and responsiveness are key. OARs need to develop the capability for rapid cycles of experimentation ("fail early and often"), rather than spending years attempting to build the optimal resource in isolation from the market. Unfortunately, many OARs are structurally set up to do the latter – their grants commit them to promised courses of action for several years and tie them to specific deliverables. Leaders of online academic resources may not realize that many funders would prefer nimbleness if it means that the OARs will have a greater impact. Funders, for their part, must recognize that multi-year plans need to be highly flexible to allow for adaptation to new developments in technology and the marketplace.
7. Dedicated and fully accountable leadership is essential. Running a start-up – and developing an online academic resource is running a start-up – is a full-time job requiring full-time leadership. The "principal investigator" model, in which an individual divides her time among a variety of research grants, teaching assignments, and other responsibilities, is not conducive to entrepreneurial success. New initiatives aiming for sustainability require fully dedicated, fully invested, and intensely focused leadership. If a principal investigator cannot provide it, he or she will have to retain a very capable person who can.
If new digital academic resources are going to survive in the increasingly competitive online environment, the academy needs a better understanding of the challenges of managing what are essentially digital publishing enterprises. Leaders and supporters of these projects must orient themselves to an entrepreneurial mindset and embrace principles of effective management. If they are unable to do that, important resources serving smaller scholarly disciplines will disappear, leaving only those projects that are commercially viable.
Kevin M. Guthrie is president of Ithaka, a nonprofit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for higher education. From 1995 to 2003, he was the founding president of JSTOR.
The late Jean Baudrillard – postmodern theorist and, in his day, major brand-name cash cow in the world of academic publishing – used to speculate about how technological objects were enacting their revenge upon us. But something else seemed to be happening at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, in Montreal late last week.
The audience would wait patiently as someone at the podium typed on a laptop, cuing a video clip appropriate to some theme. And then – nothing. YouTube seemed to be boycotting the proceedings. During another session, the speaker ran through important arguments as supporting evidence was projected, via PowerPoint slides, on a giant screen. But so were periodic bursts of static ... ripples from the cyber-ether ... digital burps. (Which, like the corporal sort, punctuate a lecture in ways that don't improves your concentration.)
It felt less like revenge than aloof indifference to puny human wishes. And don't think that the humans aren't noticing. In the course of numerous interviews and off-the-record chats, I got an earful about how people at university presses really feel about their new-media overlords.
Over the past few years, a certain boilerplate rhetoric has emerged about the need for university presses boldly to face the challenges of the information technology -- the better to seize the exciting new opportunities thus created, yadda yadda yadda. But beneath all the digital platitudes, one detects a growing frustration. The tone of discontent is usually pretty muted. Few people want to be known as Luddites. But after a while, they just don't want to hear about any more "exciting new opportunities" – least of all given the state of one's budget. The menu of existing options is more than sufficient, thanks very much.
And while the Ithaka Report stirred up a fair bit of discussion when it appeared almost a year ago, an informal survey of AAUP attendees suggests that its affect on the academic-publishing agenda has been very unevenly distributed.
The report urged scholarly publishers and university libraries to work together to resolve the contradictions in the established system for producing and distributing monographs. Why issue a specialized work with a potential audience of hundreds, at most, in an extremely expensive hardback that takes a big bite out of the library's budget? Would it not make sense to create a new digital publishing platform (basically, JSTOR on steroids) permitting wider circulation of a monograph at much lower cost?
As a conversation-starter in Montreal, I would to ask people how the Ithaka Report had influenced decision-making at their presses over the past year.
Some answered along the following lines: "The Ithaka Report is an incredibly important document that we all discussed when it appeared. [Pause] What was it about, again?"
A few responded that yes, they were now publishing e-books. Some mentioned that they knew that academic titles were now selling in Kindle-ready format.
As for the Ithakan vision of some vast new architecture that would revolutionize the publishing and dissemination of scholarly material ... well, it just did not loom on their horizon. You couldn't blame them. They had more urgent concerns. There is enough to do just getting the books ready for each season's catalog while trying to squeeze a dollar out of 83 cents.
On the other hand, a portion of the AAUP membership is trying to follow the Ithaka recommendation to cultivate a closer relationship with the librarians on their campuses.
"We started meeting with them a couple of months ago," said James McCoy, the marketing and sales director for the University of Iowa Press. "Librarians have a sense of how the products we publish are going to be used. In general they tend to be much more in touch than we are with emerging trends in information technology. We've become aware of things like the Charleston Conference and have learned a lot by reading Against the Grain."
McCoy was not the first person in Montreal to cite the annual conference on books and serials acquisition, held in Charleston, S.C, each November. (An informal gathering of librarians and other bookpeople, it is not sponsored an organization.) I had never heard the Charleston Conference mentioned at a previous AAUP meetings, but this time it was mentioned during panels as well as in less formal discussions. The Charlestonian journal Against the Grain describes itself as "your key to the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents." It, too, was referred to by numerous people in Montreal as a must-read for anyone in academic publishing who wants a glimpse of how their colleagues across campus are discussing the new information tools.
Mark Saunders, director of marketing for the University of Virginia Press, told me that he and his colleagues had been having monthly meetings with UVa's librarians for "about a year...to talk about sharing hardware and software and to increase awareness of complimentary programs we have underway." The press and the library also now share an IT person. "This is all happening from the bottom up," he said, "rather than as some kind of high-level initiative." It was not so much a matter of being inspired by the Ithaka Report itself as "continuing and deepening what we've already been doing."
James Peltz, an acquisitions editor for the State University of New York Press, says that members of the press are meeting with librarians from the SUNY system. He said there was a "five-year plan" to create the SUNY Center for Scholarly Communication.
Not quite clear whether this was an ironic allusion to Soviet economic models or a literal prospect, I later got in touch with Gary Dunham, the executive director for SUNY Press. He passed along a memorandum on the "series of far-reaching organizational changes," beginning this year, that "will incrementally transform the book publisher" into "a digital and print-on-demand publishing research portal tailored to the specific needs of the vast SUNY system and also geared toward disseminating research in targeted fields of research elsewhere." It will do so through "a shared digital platform." This is not just in the spirit of the Ithaka Report, but sounds pretty close to the letter.
Some panels in Montreal addressed ways to promote paper-and-ink books via digital means. A panel on "New Media for Scholarly Publishers" focused on one medium in particular as having important potential: online video. Participants emphasized the decreasing cost of digital movie cameras and editing equipment, the growing distribution of the skills required for using them, and the rapidly expanding segment of the public that regularly watches video on the internet.
This was persuasive in spite of the gremlins. The audience did at least get to see a Princeton University Press clip of Henry Frankfurt discussing the peculiar susceptibilities to bullshit of the highly educated. Panelists and members of the audience suggested that a press could build a "studio" from scratch for under ten thousand dollars. A ready pool of camera operators and video editors is there to be tapped by any university with a radio-television-film program. (And even, I suspect, by schools without one. By now there are probably Amish teenagers who want to direct.)
Two sessions were devoted to "Selling to Libraries," of which I managed to attend one. An interesting point made in passing was that while university librarians are meticulous about strengthening their collections on the basis of reviews printed in scholarly journals, online reviews such as those at H-NET are having a strong influence on the market.
And if the price of video production is going down, the expense of publishing and mailing each season's catalogs is headed in the opposite direction. Nor is it clear that such catalogs are especially useful to those in charge of building collections. While reviewers and retailers think in terms of publishing seasons, librarians don't. (Instead, they find subject listings much more useful.)
Either way, it sounds like a matter of time before printed catalogs begin being phased out in favor of something e-formatted. In fact, the last couple of catalogs from the University of Georgia Press have arrived by email in just such fashion. Such a change can be easily justified (or rationalized, if you prefer) by reference to "green" concerns or economic realities, or both.
Returning home from Montreal to my cubicle, I gazed at the stacks of Fall '08 catalogs and wondered if it might be a good idea to box them up for sale to collectors on e-Bay a few years from now.
By the morning of the final day of the conference, it seemed as if there were a disconnection between the question I had been asking everyone (what do you think of the Itkaka Report?) and the discussions during the scheduled panels. At the sessions I attended, the report was never mentioned.
The important exception came a bit later, during lunch, when incoming AAUP president Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press, cited the Ithaka Report in his first speech to the association. But this was in passing, and his talk did not sound particularly gung-ho about the exciting new opportunities of the digital age.
Rather, he noted the "air of worry over the coming financial year" and stressed the need to defend the particular and irreplaceable role that university presses played in scholarly life. (Holzman also announced that the coming year would see an extensive reappraisal and reform of the association's committee structure. More on this as it develops.)
Only upon running into Sue Havlish, the marketing director for Vanderbilt University Press, could I start to put the pieces of the conference together. This was the second time I have had the benefit of an audience with Sue at an AAUP conference. The experience is to be recommended. Much that was subtly evaded by others, she nailed down in sentence.
What did she think of the Ithaka Report? Havlish didn't just answer that question; she helped connect what, to an outsider, looked only like unrelated dots.
The report's proposal of a comprehensive new publishing platform "is the 800 pound gorilla in the room," she said. "Nobody wants to look at the gorilla because we're all scared of it. Some librarians think that putting a text in a repository is 'publishing' it. There's a fear of our role as publishers being subsumed by the libraries.But I still want – and I think most people still want – a book that been edited, that's been shaped into something and marketed to me by a publisher that I've heard of already."
Havlish discussed how university presses take a manuscript and transform it into a finished product. She started to use the term "value added" before catching herself. She refused to use management-speak. The issues could be better expressed in ordinary language.
"We're afraid that people are going to forget that there's a difference between publishing something and just printing it," she told me. "You need somebody to separate the wheat from the chaff, because it's the wheat you want."
And then she put her own critique in context: "Of course everything I'm saying may be go with being able to remember a time when gas was at 98 cents a gallon."
Quite so, given the ripple effects of fuel prices on production and distribution costs for non-digital books. (Now there's a hideous expression.) Many changes in the relationship between technology and publishing are going to be decided, not through visionary planning, but by bottom lines.
"With the economy shaping up as it seems to be," Havlish said, "we're going to see a 15 year leap in publishing in the next two years." This was not- - as it once might have seemed -- a profession of optimism.
Lynn Worsham, editor of JAC, a quarterly journal of rhetoric, writing, culture, and politics, recently wrote a helpful essay offering suggestions to professors to help them navigate the peer review process and have articles published in their field. It was so helpful, in fact, that I passed it out to our students who are thinking about one day entering into the disciplinary conversation. However, what I found missing from it was what we professors would like to see from editors and peer reviewers. As we are expected to follow some written and unwritten rules, editors and readers should be reminded of a few ideas, as well.
First, most professors I talk to about this issue complain a good deal about the amount of time it takes for them to hear back from editors and readers. Many of us know that the problem often lies in the hands of the peer reviewers, as we have been readers at one time or another ourselves. However, when we are the readers, we seem to forget about the professors at the other end of the submission process, so it only bothers us when we are the ones doing the submitting. There are times, though, where editors and readers are simply not holding up their end of the bargain by returning a decision in a timely fashion. If professors wait over a year for a response, their progress toward tenure is severely affected, especially if they actually honor some journals' requests for not submitting the same article to various journals simultaneously.
What can make this matter even worse is when professors have to keep track of which journals have responded to the articles they've submitted so that they can remind the editor of the submissions. I have encountered and heard stories of editors simply ignoring e-mail queries about where one's manuscript is in the process. Time that we have to take to investigate where we stand in the process is time away from the research we should be doing to keep up with our discipline.
Next, editors should also follow the rules that they set for us writers. For those journals that still require hard copies of submissions, a self-addressed stamped envelope is almost always requested (and should be sent anyway, as most professors know, though some choose to ignore that knowledge). However, I have had several journals send rejection notices via e-mail and keep the stamped envelope. This practice is a minor inconvenience, of course, especially for those of us who do not have to pay our own postage. However, for graduate students and part-time faculty, those mailing expenses can add up, and every stamp that is not used simply adds to the cost of submission. Just as professors' not numbering pages correctly or not quite following the correct formatting is a reflection of their inattention to details, editors' not following their own rules reflects poorly on the journal and its staff.
The last and most important issue when it comes to editors' and readers' responses to professors, though, is the tone of the response. Those of us who are engaged in academic discourse know that readers will disagree with our arguments, and we know that editors will decide, for whatever reason, that our submissions should not be published in their journals. However, that does not give them license to insult either our work or us. In speaking to friends and colleagues, we all have horror stories about responses from editors and readers that are nothing more than ad hominem attacks or a dismissal of ideas because of the readers' particular view of a work.
This type of response can be especially problematic for graduate students and professors just beginning in a field. When I was in graduate school, I submitted an essay on Edith Wharton to a journal. The essay was the best one I had ever written, as far as I could tell, and I was eager to begin participating in what I hoped would be my future discipline. I attended a college, though, where professors never discussed publishing, so I had no knowledge of it before I entered graduate school. Not surprisingly, the journal turned down the essay and rightly so, as it was certainly not the caliber of writing that editors should expect. However, the response has stuck with me for years, as the reader simply wrote, "This is a good essay, for an undergraduate." When I tell that to most people, they are surprised that I stayed in the profession and that I ever submitted anything again.
As professors we are not afraid of a healthy debate about ideas, and we seek honest feedback on our work. However, insults, whether directed at those ideas or at us personally, have no place in the critical debate. We would never allow our students to write essays using some of the responses I have seen from readers, nor would we write those comments on our students' papers. Instead, we would tell them to focus on the ideas of the critics, as we focus on the ideas our students present in their essays. We put aside our personal feelings about the students and try to truly engage the ideas in and of themselves.
What professors truly want is constructive feedback that will make them better writers, thinkers and researchers. If, especially in our early days, we have somehow overlooked a seminal work (or a work that a reader at least believes is seminal), or have faulty logic, then, please, tell us so, but do so in an effort to make us and, therefore, the discipline, stronger.
I have had several wonderful editors help me take an article that was not fully formed and change it into one that they and I could be proud of, simply by asking a few questions or making one or two truly helpful suggestions. One editor simply suggested looking at two or three sources; only one of them turned out to be helpful, but that one led me to turn a few-page opinion piece into a full-length article that went beyond a scope I could have imagined. When I submitted a book manuscript to a university press, I received a rejection letter that was a page and a half long, and, to be honest, it stung. However, after reflecting on the comments, I revised the manuscript, adding enough material to lengthen it by a third, then had another press pick it up.
We do not expect to be coddled, but we do expect to be treated decently and to have our efforts dealt with respectfully. In the same way that editors and readers wish to be treated as professionals who have guidelines that writers should follow, so, too, do professors wish to be treated as ones who are trying to make a contribution to our disciplines.
Kevin Brown is an associate professor of English at Lee University. His forthcoming book, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels (Kennesaw State University Press), will be published this year.
In the January issue of The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, tries to imagine a world in which "the well-wrought, slowly gestated essay" has replaced the monograph as the gold standard for scholarship in the humanities.
Some of his argument seems familiar. For one thing, Waters tried out an earlier version as a keynote address to the Council of Editors of Learned Journals when they met at MLA in 2007, where I heard it. For another thing, one idea in it came from me: the daydream of a world in which people would be penalized for publishing too much and too early in their careers. This is among the most cherished of my crackpot ideas. By now Waters has doubtless been subjected to some variation of it at lunch, probably more than once.
Of course there would be occasions when some wunderkind had so many ideas that brisk and frequent publication became a matter of urgent necessity. But that would be rare. A strictly enforced set of proscriptions would add excitement to things. Picking up a book or journal, you would know that it had involved some risk. Scholars might begin to publish pseudonymously, if they felt it was absolutely urgent to get a piece of research out. The spirit of adventure would probably be good for people's prose as well.
Well, someone has to draw up the floor plans for utopia. I found the page proofs of Waters's article while trying to clear my desktop before the start of the new administration. (Emphasis on "trying.") The title of the essay is "Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?" Another version ran as a Views piece here at Inside Higher Ed last year -- and if you missed it, as I did at the time, I'd recommend a look.
The alternative to utopia is not pretty, but a lot more probable.
The fundamental problem with the approach that Waters takes in his essay -- and in his little book Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (University of Chicago Press, 2004) -- is that it overlooks the essentially compulsive nature of the human urge to produce and accumulate garbage. Waters seems to assume that the production of badly written monographs is an unfortunate failing of the system that could be fixed if different standards were adopted. But this is wrong.
The system works just fine. Unreadable works are unreadable precisely because nobody was ever supposed to read them in the first place. Communication is not the point; accumulation is. The producer of text accumulates credit for publication, while the glory of an ambitious research collection is that it is complete, whether or not any given work is used. The beauty of e-publishing is that it reduces the amount of physical space required to store all the unread material.
As it happens, all of this was predicted almost 50 years ago by Hal Draper, a figure best known (at least among people who know this kind of thing) for numerous definitive works in the field of Marxology. Draper also translated literary works by Goethe and Heinrich Heine, and wrote a widely circulated book about the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I've heard that when the Sixties catchphrase "Don't trust anyone over the age of thirty" first caught on in Berkeley, people sometimes added "except for Hal Draper."
Draper's day job was as an acquisitions librarian at the University of California at Berkeley. His experience inspired him to write a short story called "MS Fnd in a Lbry," first published in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1961 and currently available online.
The anthropologist from Andromeda who narrates this piece of library-science fiction reconstructs the efforts of civilization to handle the accumulation of books generated as it spread throughout the galaxy. Libraries the size of a solar system were not enough to handle the human urge to churn out books. After billions of years of accumulation, a technological breakthrough allowed all of the material to be stored, in subatomic format, in a single drawer. Not to give too much away, but it isn't always easy to remember where you filed things.
Mark Twain once observed that "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Twain may not have been referring to what scholars assume humanities publishers want out of the peer-review process, but he probably would have appreciated the application.
According to the troubling "Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion" (2007), monograph publishing in the arts and humanities remains the key to the city of Academe. Moreover, in spite of plunging sales and soaring costs, monographs remain central to the mission of university presses and vital to the careers of scholars. In the monograph publishing equation, scholars play dual, crucial roles: they both write manuscripts and judge the value of others' manuscripts. Reviewing manuscripts can benefit scholars and bring them into a respected circle. It can also inadvertently become detrimental to one's career. Both roles demand academic rigor and a commitment to objectivity.
While the demonstration of academic rigor and objectivity is demanded of the author, it unfortunately at times collapses on the side of the reviewer. I'm not sure why this happens, but I know that it does. And when it does, the process gets dicey for publisher, author, and reviewer alike. Interestingly, while authors and publishers likely see the problem especially clearly, reviewers often seem alarmingly unaware of the stakes. In their role as peer reviewers, scholars might profit from knowing the publisher's unspoken expectations and objectives; such knowledge might help them avoid the potential fallout from missing those expectations.
Keeping in mind that university presses publish roughly 10,000 new books annually, and assuming that they publish only 1 out of every 10 manuscripts, that means university presses are filtering 100,000 manuscripts per year. Of those, probably 15,000–20,000 get sent out for peer review. Granted, reviewing a manuscript for a university press is tantamount to taking a vow of poverty, but it will be part of your career either as an author or a reviewer. Odds are pretty good that you will, at some point, be asked to review a manuscript. Odds are even better that you will not tackle the assignment in the same way as others, with the same skills, or with the same assumptions about what the publisher wants.
Most publishers do provide — or should provide — readers with guidelines for evaluating a manuscript. Generally publishers want feedback about originality, documentation, how the work interacts with scholarship, suitability for classroom use, etc. This article will not revisit those issues. Here I'd like to dig a little deeper to reveal what I look for in the review process that scholars may think they know, but which "ain't so." By becoming aware of what publishers want (and don't want), you might improve the value of your evaluation for all parties. Ultimately, a well-executed review should fulfill the professed scholarly allegiance to objectivity and academic rigor. Equally important, an ineffective review not only fails to give me what I want and need, it could jeopardize your future professional relationships with both publishers and other scholars.
Reviewers, even those who follow our guidelines, may think that they're giving me what I want, but they often wind up submitting something else. Here are a few of the more egregious disconnects.
The New York Times book review. The request to peer review a manuscript is not the same as the request to review a book. Evaluating a manuscript's merits and recommending or not recommending publication may seem like a book review, but it's not. A scholarly book review unpacks a book's argument, sets it in the context of similar works, and assesses the book's value in that scholarly discussion. The book reviewer thus must assay a fixed object and place it in the scholarly grid of information. While the evaluation of a manuscript may (perhaps even should) include some of these elements, reviewing an unpublished manuscript is a fundamentally different process. Most obviously, an unpublished manuscript is still pliable: a case can be argued more strongly, a thesis written more clearly, and conclusions can sharpened to further advance understanding. The genre of the manuscript in hand should also be weighed: If the volume is designed as a course text, it should not be evaluated in the same way as a revised dissertation. Less obviously, reviewers often forget –– or take perverse pleasure in knowing –– that the career and future of a scholar hinge on the successful publication of a book manuscript. The published monograph can be the signal event in a professor's career. Don't get me wrong: the responsible reviewer should not take this last circumstance too lightly in either direction. This poses no ethical dilemma but a heuristic decision. You must be both responsible and decisive in either recommending or not recommending publication, and you must be able to articulate the "why or why not" behind either. In other words, as a first step in evaluating a manuscript, you should apply the same academic rigor and objectivity to assessing a manuscript as you would in writing your own book. Then look over your shoulder and remember that the review –– for good or ill –– may have consequences for your own career.
The "why-didn't-you-write-a-different-book?" review. Really. It may not happen regularly but it occurs enough to be a vexing problem: A reviewer evaluates a manuscript as if it were written on a topic other than what the author has claimed. Many an editor has secured two reviewers who seem to be evaluating two different manuscripts. What is happening? Often one reviewer is evaluating an imaginary document other than the one that was written. For example, consider a manuscript examining the sociopolitical motives behind the burning of witches in 15th-century Europe. The author might have given only a passing nod to the economic and political history of firewood and forestry in 15th-century Europe. As one might imagine, a reviewer with expertise in late medieval firewood and forestry might perceive the lack of a discussion of the latter unforgivable. Piqued by the oversight the reviewer contends that the author has missed the whole point and takes the author to task for having discussed neither the history of the woodcutters' guild nor the origins of German hardwoods. And while that may be a fine book, it's not the manuscript the reviewer was asked to review and clearly not the book the author wished to write. Admittedly other causes can stand behind such a misreading: The author may have written unclearly in the first place. If that's the case, then the book's lack of an identifiable or a convincing thesis should be noted as a legitimate shortcoming. You should posit why the thesis fails or is indiscernible. But that's not the same as peremptorily deciding that the manuscript should be about another subject and reviewing it accordingly.
A second, familiar permutation of misreading a manuscript takes place when the reviewer puts the manuscript back in its manila folder, pours a glass of Merlot, and discusses instead the reviewer's own work, which by the way, should have been cited in the manuscript. This might be precipitated by ego, or it might be triggered by the failure to have actually read the manuscript. Lack of expertise might figure here as well. The outcome, however, is the same: I am left holding a feckless review that says more about you than the manuscript. As you submit the report, you may be pondering how good it feels to have corrected a major shortcoming of the manuscript, but I'm thinking it "ain't so." A review that so wildly misses the point forces me into an untenable position. What do I do with a vacuous review? The review has become part of the record. Sharing the review with the author risks a confrontation if not a lawsuit. Not submitting the review risks alienating you or violating procedures for handling manuscripts. Then there's the question, should I recruit a new reviewer or just scratch the project? The next step toward writing a successful review is reviewing the manuscript sent.
The slashing review. And then there's the slashing review. Clearly, more than a few peer reviewers regard the evaluation as an opportunity, to paraphrase Mencken, "to raise the black flag and begin slitting throats." Regrettably, such actions come off more like Freddie Krueger than H.L. Mencken. Some seem to assault a manuscript gleefully: Brandishing their own cleverness and wit, they slash through the pages, intent not on evaluating the manuscript but on demonstrating their prowess. While everyone loves a black flag –– and Mencken –– the purpose of a peer review is neither to slit the throat of the manuscript's author nor parade the reviewer's rapier wit.
First, that kind of criticism proves helpful neither to the author nor ultimately to you, and, again, such actions push me into a dark corner. How do I return a manuscript stained with the author's own blood? How do I say "thanks"? The slashing technique is misguided, but its creator clearly possesses an eye for weaknesses in the manuscript that might have be turned toward a more constructive reading. That would have actually helped. But the damage is done, and not just to the author and publisher. The slasher's review –– and any inappropriate review –– will probably receive its own asterisk in the file: "Don't ask Professor X to review manuscripts." When paired with the "why-didn't-you-write-a-different-book? review, the slasher's review is a show-stopper. Then there's the question, even in a double-blind arrangement, will I be able to protect your identity? Remember: in Academe only two degrees, not six, separate the author from the reviewer. Overspecialization means everyone knows everyone else. The short-term delight in savaging a manuscript will be hard to remember when the only person qualified to review your next book on woodcutter guilds in late medieval Germany is the individual whose manuscript you just shredded.
The intellectual comb over. Perhaps the most frustrating review and most impervious to fixing is the non-review, the intellectual comb over. This ploy simultaneously fails to review the manuscript and tries to cover up the failure by posing as an astute and perceptive scholarly assessment. While one might guess that this conceit occurs most frequently in negative evaluations, that is not the case. Reviews become even more problematic when they recommend publication without having exercised the kind of scholarly judgment and objectivity demanded by the evaluation process. The comb over is characterized by vague, unsubstantiated recommendations: tell-tale phrases like "needs to tighten up argument," "could use some reorganizing," "should consider restructuring argument," "needs to add signposts," or "needs to flesh-out this point" appear throughout. Add a long strand of so-called essential bibliographic references and a few names in the field, and voilà: A bogus review thinly conceals what might be (mis)interpreted as either laziness or incompetence. While all of these recommendations may indirectly address valid complaints, they are so vague as to be useless. Publishers — and authors –– need concrete, specific advice and the rationale behind it. I desire — indeed require — in the peer-review process the same academic objectivity and scrutiny that is demanded of scholarly writing itself.
I've read too many unhelpful reviews, plenty of valuable reviews, and a few stellar ones. The stellar ones remind me that the art of peer reviewing a manuscript remains one of the hallmarks of scholarship. Academics, especially humanists, often speak of themselves as being in "the guild." If ever there was a time for a member to mentor a fellow-guild member, it's in the peer-review evaluation. Here the craftsman or grandmaster can instruct the apprentice in the fine art of scholarship. And though the instruction may or may not result in publication, the report should emulate the twin standards of the guild: academic rigor and objectivity. Applying these standards to the peer-review process not only ensures a quality review; it keeps you in good stead with your peers. I also won't file your name under "Don't ask Professor X to review manuscripts," which, on the one hand, may sound like a relief, but on the other, it places you and maybe your career on the periphery of a vital scholarly circle.
Patrick H. Alexander is associate director and editor-in-chief of the Pennsylvania State University Press.
Fewer university presses than in recent years had booths at Book Expo America, the annual trade show for the publishing industry, held last weekend at the Javits Convention Center in New York City. Then again, the whole event seemed smaller than it has in some while.
There were nowhere near so many piles of potential best-sellers available as buzz-generating freebies. What piles there were tended to be smaller, and guarded by publicists. The usual mountains of swag (promotional t-shirts, book bags, coffee cups, and knicknacks) were rarer still. Nor were many people dressed in novelty garb working the aisles. I saw Elvis near the escalator, wandering lonely as a cloud, and crossed paths with a couple of rather lackadaisical pirates.
This is how you know it's a recession. Even the rent-a-pirates seem cautious.
Yet with surprising consistency, the mood around the university-press tables seemed ... well, let's not say "upbeat" exactly (that would be pushing it) but at least marked by a certain spirit of Stoic determination. Scholarly publishing has been in crisis mode for years; the global economic downturn seems just more of the same old same-old. Like the song says, "Been down so long, it looks like up to me."
Behemoth trade presses are driven to find the next Da Vinci Code or Oprah Book Club selection -- just to cover the expenses incurred by all the other prospective blockbusters that flopped.
While the scale was much smaller, there was definitely a trend in that direction for a while with some university presses. The right topical book, published at just the right moment, might be a way to break out of the specialist niche and into the commercial big time.
But like trying to pay the mortgage at the roulette wheel, this approach has not, for the most part, proven viable. Over the weekend year, just one university-press publicist volunteered the hope that a given title might land its author on "The Daily Show" -- and then, only wistfully. The reality principle is back in charge now, at least for a while.
So this year, instead of asking about possible breakthrough books, I decided to query people at the booths about something else. Not long ago, the University of Michigan Press announced it would shift most of its monograph publishing to digital format. I wondered how this example was shaping the plans at other academic presses. Were they preparing to make the same leap? Was the economy giving them a rough push into the future?
After all, publishing an academic book is an expensive and not wonderfully profitable exercise. The print runs for most scholarly titles are so small that no economies of scale apply. Copies then often sit in warehouses -- another expense eating away at any possible return on the investment. Wouldn't switching over to digital publishing make sense? Indeed, isn't it just a matter of time?
It all sounds so obvious, so clear-cut. Or so I assumed at first while wandering the aisles of the exhibit hall -- pausing long enough to watch, through the transparent walls of the Espresso Book Machine as it converted a digital file into a print-on-demand volume. This took about five minutes, after which the machine spat out a paperback like a sandwich from an automat. It was literally warm (if not hot) off the press.
But discussions with people at the university-press booths soon disabused me of my assumptions about how the economy was influencing the march towards digital publishing.
Mark Saunders, the electronic imprint manager at the University of Virginia Press, said that e-books were now part of its output. But that his colleagues felt they had "just gotten a handle" on the issue of rights in digital publishing. The option of publishing titles exclusively in e-book format is not on the table. "We're approaching it in the spirit of hybridity," he said. ""We want to be able to offer our books in different flavors," he said.
Any notion that that the recession has rendered print-and-ink publishing too expensive is just wrong. On the contrary, the economic pinch means that lots of old-fashioned printers are willing to make a bargain. "On any book you need to print more than 500 copies of," Saunders said, "offset printing is still a very good option."
Shifting to digital is not the quick, smooth, cost-free move that it's sometime made out to be. For one thing, it's necessary to invest considerable time and resources into figuring out just what your options are. For small presses, it can simply make more sense to stick with what you have a track record doing.
Steven Yates, marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi, told me that the press is "looking for someone to handle digital content management" -- but that even doing that much "would be easier if cash flow were not a problem."
The same sentiment came through when I spoke to Debora Diehl, exhibits manager at the University of Kentucky Press. For now, she said, it made sense to "stick to the tried and true" because "money is just not available" to undertake much experimentation.
It's commonly assumed that e-books won't incur the same down-the-pike expenses that bound volumes do -- in particular, the cost of warehousing them. Server space isn't free, however. And it's worth keeping in mind the comment of one representative of a mid-sized university press who asked not to be identified.
"We have two guys working in our warehouse," this person told me. "The payroll for both of them costs less than hiring another IT person."
Everyone had heard about Michigan's switch to publishing monographs in digital format, of course. But are other scholarly publishers taking this as a model to which to aspire? I found no evidence that they were. Even presses that have made already made a significant commitment to e-publishing are proceeding carefully.
"We're selling e-books," said Colleen Lanick, the publicist for MIT Press, "and continuing to experiment with digital publishing, but I wouldn't say it is the economy that's driving it." Instead, much of the push has come from the press's own authors and public. Many of its titles concern technology -- and as a matter of course, authors "want their stuff online," says Lanick.
By chance, sitting right near my elbow I type up my notes from the weekend, there is a new MIT volume called Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes by Elizabeth Losh. Three chapters of it are available at the MIT Press site. Well, of course. Making scholarship available in digital form "is a question of how people want to get their books," says Lanick, "not of the expense of production."
At the same time, it clearly makes some difference whether or not a press has already invested in the resources required for digital publishing. Michael McCullough, books sales manager at Duke University Press, said that they were starting to sell e-books to consumers via Amazon as well as to academic libraries. McCullough attributes Duke's ability to expand its digital offerings to the infrastructure it built up to handle its stable of scholarly journals. "We were able to move into e-books," he said, "because of the journals -- it's generally accepted that journals are way ahead in this area."
Meanwhile, Harvard University Press is preparing to launch a new monograph series in digital format. Edited by Peter N. Miller, the dean of the Bard Graduate Center, the series is called Cultural Histories of the Material World. Daniel Lee, the press's director of digital content development, says the first volumes should be available in 2010. Titles in the series will thereby also become available in hard copies, through short-run printing and print-on-demand.
Many people take it for granted that the economic downturn amounts to a a tipping point in e-publishing, at least for scholarly presses, and perhaps especially for them.But even the publishers moving steadily deeper into the digital terrain are doing so watchfully.
The expression "tipping point" (with its implication of "point of no return") hardly seems to apply, to judge by this year's Book Expo. A more fitting term might be the one used by Ellen Trachtenberg, a publicist for the University of Pennsylvania Press. "We're at a tension point," she told me. "We don't have any e-books, but our board of trustees is keen on doing them, so we are looking into it."
And I suspect there are plenty of presses where discussion sometimes runs along the lines that Yates reports often happens at the University Press of Mississippi.
When the editors are going over an intensely specialized manuscript, he says, they will sometimes say, "This is a great book that should be published in digital format only -- and by somebody else."
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.
The fall books have already started piling up. There are titles I've asked the publishers to send, and the ones volunteered by eager publicists, and the ceaseless influx of small books of poetry, which fill me with guilt for watching "Law & Order" reruns instead of reading them. (But verily, man cannot live by print alone.)
Before the new publishing season begins and they are lost in the flood, let me take a quick look here at a few recent titles – books I have found absorbing and rewarding, but not had a chance to discuss in this column. The list is miscellaneous, and the tip of an iceberg. I doubt they have much in common. But each title is a reminder of the fine and irreplaceable work that university presses do with no fanfare, and seldom much recognition. And let's not even talk about profit.
The arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. (a.k.a. Gates-gate) has generated great heat but not much light. Various media loudmouths have been outdoing themselves in portraying the Harvard professor as some kind of wild-eyed radical. This is, of course, a matter of ignorance, robust and unashamed. Gates is in reality the most anodyne of centrists. But at least the furious fantasies he has provoked should put to rest for good any notion that the United States has lately turned into a "postracial" society.
It seems like a good moment to recommend Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Hahn's new book The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, a compact but challenging volume published by Harvard University Press. The author is a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. His three chapters -- each a miniature monograph -- are based on a series of lectures at Harvard, given at Gates's invitation.
Hahn looks at the complex way the African-American struggle for emancipation took shape both under slavery and in the wake of its abolition. This process involved the creation of institutions for self-governance, as seen in "the efforts of newly freed people to reconstitute their kinship groups, to form squads and other family-based work groups, to pool community resources, and, of course, to acquire land."
These weren't just social movements. They contained, argues Hahn, a political element. Hahn considers whether the activity of black Southerners during the Civil War amounted to a variety of slave revolt, and he sketches aspects of the political life of Marcus Garvey's pan-Africanist group in the United States in the early part of the 20th century. Only the mo
st small-minded conception of American life would assume that these are matters of interest only to black readers. In a healthy culture, this little book would be a best-seller.
A few months ago, an editor asked me to review Adina Hoffman's biography of Taha Muhammad Ali, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, published by Yale University Press. To tell the truth, my heart did not initially leap at the opportunity. For I had never read any of his poetry, and rather feared that it might be full of slogans -- that, indeed, the poet's own life might be one long slogan.
This proves that I am an idiot. A couple of sessions with his selected works revealed Ali to be a wry, ambivalent, and often understated lyricist. (In translation, at least, he seems a little bit like Edgar Lee Masters.) The figure who emerges from Hoffman's biography is that of a quiet shopkeeper in Nazareth who carefully studied Arabic literary tradition, and also absorbed the influence of the Palestinian nationalist "resistance literature" – then created his own distinctive style: one stripped-down and unrhetorical, but sensitive as a burn.
One of the remarkable things about this biography, as indicated in my review, is that it evokes not only the political and historical context of Ali's work, but also how his poetry took shape. Its quietness and simplicity are hard-won.
At the other extreme from Ali, perhaps, is Walt Whitman, whose poetic voice is booming, and whose persona always seems a couple of sizes too large for the North American continent. A couple of years back, Duke University Press reprinted his one and only novel: a cautionary tale of the perils of strong drink called Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate. I have somehow never gotten around to reading it, and probably never will. But it is impressive to think that Whitman grew to his familiar cosmic dimensions while stone cold sober.
His poetry certainly intoxicated the readers portrayed in Michael Robertson's Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples, published by Princeton University Press. The noun in its subtitle is no exaggeration. The readers portrayed here found in Whitman's work something akin to a new scripture -- nearly as much as followers of Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy did the Book of Mormon or Science and Health.
You can still find R.M. Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (1901) -- where Whitman is identified as "the best, most perfect example the world has so far had of the Cosmic Sense" -- in New Age shops. Other disciples took his "chants democratic" as hymns for a worldwide socialist commonwealth. And his invocation of manly "adhesiveness" were understood by a few readers to be a call for what later generations would term gay liberation. Whitman insisted that his homophile readers had misunderstood him, and that when not writing poetry he had been busy fathering illegitimate children all over these United States. The biographers will continue to hash that one out -- though it's clear that his literary persona, at least, is ready to couple with anything that moves, regardless of gender.
Whitman's work gave some of his Victorian readers a vision of the world extending far beyond the horizon of the familiar and the acceptable. No surprise that they revered him as a prophet. Robertson, a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, tells the story of his steadily expanding circle of enthusiasts (which at one point aspired to become a global movement) with due appreciation for how profound the literary experience can be, when the right book falls into the right person's hands.
Of course there are times when reading is a nothing but a guilty pleasure. So to go from the sublime to the sleazy, I have to recommend Jack Vitek's The Godfather of Tabloid: Generoso Pope Jr. and the National Enquirer, published by the University Press of Kentucky late last year.
Not that the book itself is sleazy. The Enquirer may specialize in celebrity gossip, horrific crimes, UFO abductions, and Elvis Presley's posthumous itinerary. But that's not to say that the author -- an associate professor of English and journalism at Edgewood College, in Madison, Wisc. -- is anything but serious and measured in his approach. Vitek tackles his subject with all due awareness of its lingering cultural relevance. Pope modeled himself on newspaper tycoons such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
The publisher also happens to have had family "connections" (as the preferred expression has it) with what its members do not call the Mafia. He also spent about a year working for the Central Intelligence Agency. This makes it especially interesting to consider the mission statement Pope released when he bought a local tabloid called the New York Enquirer in 1953. "In an age darkened by imperialist tyranny and war," it said, "the New York Enquirer will fight for the rights of man, the rights of the individual, and will champion human decency and dignity, freedom and peace."
Any biography moving between lofty rhetoric and very low company is bound to be pretty absorbing. The Enquirer, after it went national, reached a peak circulation of 6.7 million copies per issue in the late 1970s, with Pope playing an aggressive role in crafting its distinctive strain of populist sensationalism.
In a footnote, Vitek points out that Fredric Jameson's analysis of postmodernism somehow overlooked Pope's role as formative influence within what Jameson calls "the degraded landscape of schlock and kitsch." Quite right -- and it is good to have this oversight finally corrected.
It is possible that I have too many books. There, I said it. (That felt weird.)
Heading off to visit her mother before all of us rendezvous for Thanksgiving, my spouse dropped a gentle hint: "Maybe while I'm gone you could do some reshelving?" The most recent effort to impose some order had involved transferring books from the coffee table and windowsill to a consolidated mound on the living room floor. This was, I thought, progress – though evidently this is debatable. Then four or five huge boxes and a dozen padded envelopes arrived from publishers, in connection with a literary award I'm helping to judge. Americans may not read much poetry but they sure do write a lot of it.
So ... point taken. I've been wheeling belles lettres by the pound over to the Inside Higher Ed offices. At home I pack the already doubled-layered shelves as tightly as circumstances allow. This process has its downside: the rediscovery of volumes acquired years ago that now go into a "must read soon" pile.
This is not defeating chaos so much as rearranging it. In the midst of all this, I've stopped to look over the new issue of Against the Grain, with its symposium asking "Is There Any Such Thing as an Out-of-Print Book Anymore?" The short answer, it seems, is "no." I feel like a junkie learning there will be heroin in heaven.
Against the Grain is the most interesting periodical you have probably never heard of. It appears bimonthly. It is written by, and intended for, what could be called the metapublic for scholarly writing: the research librarians, academic press people, booksellers, and digital publishing mavens. This is where they gather to compare notes. The magazine's layout is plain, even severe. The intent is obviously to squeeze as many articles, interviews, reviews, rumors, and nerdy diatribes into the available space as possible.
Much of the content ends up online eventually. To get the full ATG effect, though, you have to read the print edition, and not just because of the lag time. The pages swarm with ads for books, databases, and specialized encyclopedias. For the ordinary bookish person, this fusion of commerce and conversation is intriguing and revelatory. It leaves you with a better sense of what happens to scholarly writing in the interval between the peer-review process and readers finding it in the library.
The November issue contains a special section of 10 pieces on what has happened to the concept of "out of print" work. New media, print-on-demand, and the online secondhand book market have rendered the label anachronistic. The lead article by John Riley (one of the magazine's associate editors) conveys the scale of the transformation: "It is estimated that one hundred million separate titles have been printed since Gutenberg. At the rate that books are being scanned, we can expect to see the majority of important out-of-print books available online or as POD [print-on-demand] within a few years."
Unfortunately this process has been uneven and chaotic – with digital warehousing proceeding apace, while bibliographical competence is a distant afterthought. Books are routinely miscategorized or assigned spurious publication dates. And the quality of the scanned text can leave a lot to be desired.
Here, my own experience may be worth mentioning. A few months ago, I was happy to be able to acquire an obscure volume of essays from the 1920s in a print-on-demand paperback edition. The book was something it seemed unlikely, a few years ago, ever to see reissued. Now it was suddenly available from online booksellers at a fair (in not exactly low) cost.
But when it arrived, I had a less pleasant surprise. The reprint house had not bothered to get a clean copy of the original text. It was full of underlined passages and marginal scribblings (all of them, as it happens, strikingly inane).This kind of disappointment is far from unusual. Other reprints may come with missing pages -- or a shot of the hand of whoever did the scanning.
"Perhaps we are on the cusp of every bibliomaniac's dream," writes Riley: "a universal library of all the important books from all times and places....There is a threat, however, that this utopia might actually turn into a dystopia as we risk trading all of our bookstores and libraries for a database of confused editions and missing text."
The issue also discusses how libraries are using the robust secondhand market online to replace missing titles in their collection – or sometimes to acquire recent books at a bargain. A statistical overview of these changing buying habits appears in an important article by Narda Tafuri, an acquisitions librarian at the University of Scranton, who reports on a survey conducted in August.
Using data collected from collections-development specialists at 144 institutions – more than 86 percent of them academic libraries – Tafuri shows the role that used and discount book services such as Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon now play. Most of the libraries responding (59 percent) had an annual acquisitions budget of under $500,000 a year.
Not quite 30 percent spent more than $1 million on acquisitions. The one thing held in common by the overwhelming majority (92.4 percent) of institutions was that they acquired books from the secondhand market. The few librarians who didn't cited vendor contracts or lack of an institutional credit card as the reason. Among the reasons cited for buying books online were to replace copies of books gone missing or to acquire rare volumes.
But a surprisingly large number of institutions -- more than 72 percent -- "indicated that they were purchasing used or out-of-print books as part of 'regular purchases' for their library's collection." Most indicated that they devoted no more than 10 percent of their budgets to used books. The 15 percent or so earmarking more for secondhand acquisitions fell into a distinct group: "All of those individuals [who] responded that their library's used and out-of-print purchases accounted for up to 11 to 25 percent of their book budget were from academic libraries."
Other articles describe the digital-edition and secondhand markets from the other side of the transaction, including Bob Holley's account of his own double life: "At work, I'm Dr. Jekyll – professor, scholar, and consumer of high culture. At home, I've gone over to the dark side to become Mr. Hyde, the Internet vendor who values books, CDs, and movies not for their intellectual content but for their marketability."
Holley, a professor of library and information science at Wayne State University, has turned his basement into a warehouse for his online business. "Mr. Hyde scarcely looks at the great works of literature unless they are very cheap or used as college texts," he writes, "but instead seeks out quirky non-fiction. He especially buys books on self-help, astrology, religion, or sex. While Dr. Jekyll wouldn't ever read these books, Mr. Hyde is quite willing to sell them since they offer a good profit."
Alas, people at university presses may read this and decide to bring out self-help books on astrological sex religions. It is probably a matter of time. Over the longer term, contributors to the symposium seem to be describing an emergent situation in which the online sales will drive down the price of new titles while academic collections are hoovering up scarce old books that will then be digitized, and so kept in print forever.
One of the survey questions that Narda Tafuri discusses gives a glimpse of what the next step might look like.When asked whether they had any plans to make digital titles available at their libraries through print-on-demand, almost 91 percent of respondents answered "no." But when asked if they might want to offer such titles for sale as a source of revenue, more than 40 percent said that it was something they would be willing to consider.
Only 2.8 percent indicated they had immediate plans to do so. Given the cost of a print-on-demand book machine runs from $75,000 to $95,000, this is probably not the wave of the short-term future. But in ten years, who knows? The nature of progress is that it multiplies temptations. Diligently reshelving before I leave for the holiday, I'm not sure if this is a development for which to give thanks.
Seldom do professors have more than a vague notion of publishing as an industry -- of all that happens between the moment when the manuscript of a book is accepted and its final materialization on the shelves of bookstores and libraries. And this is as it should be. Innocence is no fault. It is best to think of the whole thing as miraculous. You write, and a grateful world reads.
My own naivete began to erode a few years ago from attending Book Expo America, the annual trade show for the publishing industry. This is a gigantic affair, lasting just over two days, usually scheduled over the weekend before Memorial Day. For some reason BEA 2010 has been scheduled for the middle of the week. By the time this column appears, I will be on my way to the cavernous display hall of the Javits Center in New York City, where Mammon exacts tribute from the Muses.
Hundreds of publishers from around the world meet with distributors and with buyers for major bookstores. The big trade presses have massive displays for their potential bestsellers, overshadowing even the most prestigious of university presses. There is a constant hum of busy people making transactions. Rights are secured. Translations are arranged. Members of the media (print and digital, mass and micro, professional and amateur) visit the booths to learn what new books are coming down the pike. Small crowds watch as translucent print-on-demand machines turn digital texts into fresh, hot paperbacks. There will be someone dressed as, say, Nostradamus, promoting a new historical novel in which he was both a vampire and a member of the Knights Templar. He may attempt to bite passers-by.
Authors make appearances and sign books – though usually not at the university press booths, which is probably for the best. There is such a thing as going from innocence to experience much too quickly.
Better to debate theories about commodification than to land in the big middle of it. You may not think of your scholarship as a commodity, but that is exactly what it is at Book Expo.
Or maybe not, this year. Preparing to make the long march up and down the aisles of the BEA, I've noticed how many university presses won't have exhibits this time.
We're not talking about a total collapse of the scholarly book trade or anything close to it. Many large university presses will be there, including Cambridge, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, SUNY, and Yale. So will the presses of Fordham, Mercer, Minnesota, North Carolina, and many others.
Not counting something called Summit University Press (which publishes the teachings of various disembodied "Ascended Masters" regarding cosmic energies and the end of the world), there are at least 30 scholarly presses listed among the exhibitors. But there are conspicuous absences from the directory this time. The University of California Press is not listed, nor are the university presses of Iowa, Oxford, Stanford, Temple, or Texas.
I've been in touch with people from various presses to find out more about their decision to attend, or not. In some cases, it turns out their personnel will be roaming around the hall, rather than operating from a booth. Others have simply concluded that Book Expo has outlived its centrality. At least a couple of the presses listed in the directory will have a smaller presence than they have in the past.
Much of this is, of course, a predictable response to recent economic strains. Small publishers have long grumbled about the expense of having an exhibit. The smallest available booth size (a cozy one hundred square feet) costs $3,810. There are charges for every amenity, including chairs; you cannot bring your own. It is necessary for publishers to ship books, galleys, catalogs and so forth -- running to a few hundred dollars, at least, and often much more. People staffing the booth must find lodgings. And failure to pack a lunch will leave them at the mercy of rapacious hot dog vendors.
"We haven't been to BEA in a few years," Joseph Parsons, the acquisitions editor for the University of Iowa Press, tells me. "I talked with my marketing colleagues about this, and they told me it was a decision based on efficient allocation of resources: time and money. BEA is so big and expensive and time is at such a premium in that setting that we've found it a lot more productive to send our publicity manager to New York and Chicago twice a year, where she meets with media people over several days in one-on-one settings and can have real conversations about the books in the catalog. If it's about building relationships, which it is, our approach has worked out well."
MIT Press won't have a booth in the exhibit hall, as in previous years -- though members of its sales force will have a spot in one of the meeting rooms set aside elsewhere on site. Colleen Lanick, MIT's publicity director, will be attending in a footloose capacity, rendezvousing with journalists and bloggers at various locations around the convention center.
"Not having a booth means I will miss some of the walk-by traffic," she says, "but it also has an upside, since I can attend more panels and sessions."
The University of Chicago Press has a strong profile for both specialized and crossover titles, so I fully expected to visit its booth for a look at forthcoming titles. But while there will be personnel to handle inquiries about publishing rights (an increasingly important matter, given the digital market) the press won't have books in the exhibit hall.
"We'll have a table in the rights area," says Levi Stahl, the press's publicity director, "but not the typical booth out on the floor....With the economy as troubled as it was last summer, when we had to make our decision about this year's show, we weren't convinced that having a booth there was the most efficient use of our resources."
I wondered if this was the shape of things to come. "That's not to say there's no chance we'll ever be back," says Stahl. "Rather, we'll be evaluating this year-by-year for a good while, I expect."
In the past, Duke University Press has occupied two booths. This time, the staff will be operating out of a single one, where its representatives can meet "not only with traditional distributors and our sales reps," says publicity director Laura Sell, "but also with some of the many e-Book vendors, metadata distributors, and various other electronic vendors who frequent the show."
But the publicist herself won't be attending this time. In keeping with a theme that has emerged from my discussions with other university press folk, she indicates that Book Expo is simply not the red-letter event it once was.
"I did not find the show very productive for media encounters last year," she tells me, "and I'd rather schedule a separate trip to NYC for regular publicity calls. I think we reach the book bloggers well on Twitter, so it's not worth it to go just for them."
The decision not to have a booth for Temple University Press "was pretty much a no-brainer given financial considerations," says Ann-Marie Anderson, its marketing director. Book Expo America "is a rather large expense on the budget with no good arguable return. Then the marketing budget was reduced; it was obvious BEA was no longer feasible."
Anderson's says Temple's publicist and foreign-rights coordinator will head up to New York to make the rounds, even so. But Anderson herself isn't interested.
"I have asked myself as marketing director why I no longer feel a need to attend," she says. "My answer is that since so few booksellers attend, I no longer get orders, so why go? I can send our special to all my accounts and to our sales reps. I use BEA merely as a professional and social networking tool. Yes, I fear our 'trade' titles miss out on the seasonal buzz but I ask, given the fickleness of bookbuying these days, would it have made any difference?"
Hard to say, of course. If you are publishing a book that somehow catches the attention of a person from Jon Stewart's staff, I guess it is worth the trouble and very considerable expense.
But that is a long gamble. Most books have small, distinctive audiences -- and the drift of the past few years has been toward using the less expensive (if not necessarily less demanding) approach of finding those audiences online. When you talk with university press publicists, it is clear that they are counting more now than in previous years on their authors knowing what websites, blogs, or social networking venues will be most helpful in getting out the word about their books.
Does this mean that scholars need to learn to think about that, whether they pay attention to the rest of the publishing industry or not? I'm afraid it does. There is such a thing as being too innocent. And anyway, it could be a lot worse. At least nobody is forcing you to dress like Nostradamus.
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Gunmen shoot, kill Juarez teen; second student injured
POSTED: Friday, October 25, 2013 - 7:44pm
UPDATED: Friday, October 25, 2013 - 7:45pm
Cd. Juarez, Chih. (KTSM) — A Juarez high school student was shot and killed Friday afternoon. A second student was injured.
According to Juarez officials, the pair was attacked by several suspects as they walked outside of a downtown Juarez school.
The victim's names and ages have not been released.
A motive has not been determined.
No arrests have been made.
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Rodeway Inn Skyland
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Historical Traveler Reviews Rodeway Inn Skyland Gatlinburg
Never Again/ Zoder's Inn Is The Best
I do not know where to begin with the problems
here the rooms are fair but not worth staying here
for. Agree that staff is not helpful nor friendly.
We decided to try this place but never again!
Will be staying where we always stayed before.
You want excellent rooms, clean, customer service
stay at Best Western Zoder's Inn. Zoder's has
spoiled us but this place is nothing like that.
Questionable Quality For the Price
As mentioned by previous reviewers, at this motel, the price, the size of the rooms, the pool, the location to Gatlinburg's attractions and the view are pluses. However, having to almost need a tow rope to get up to the rooms makes access for disabled people very difficult. Also, I agree with other reviewers that the desk personnel were NOT very friendly at all.
In my book, customer service says it all, and this place is practically mute in that area. Maybe they've been in the business too long, and they should turn it over to people who are HAPPY to see patrons visit their establisment.
Wow!! We were very disappointed!!! Positive: location was great, room size was good. Negatives: 1)Small black flying insects all throughout our room & bathroom by the 2nd day, hovering around lights, on the walls, dive bombing you even at night. Killed approximately 30 myself. 2)Maid left no additional roll of toilet paper after cleaning, so at 3:00 a.m. when the roll ran out, we were left with 2 kleenex. 3)Maid apparently kept or threw away a brand new razor & plastic holder with 5 razor blades ($12.00) which were sitting on a shelf in the shower. 4)Issued smoking room & handed a can of air neutralizer, when non-smoking was available. 5)Route to pool from our room was nothing less than gross, mildew on walkway above your head, water dripping on your head, just nasty! Nothing much was said by manager, took him 5 minutes to issue another roll of toilet paper!!! We will absolutely not be returning again!!!
Wasn't What I Expected
Staff was very very unfriendly at check-in. Hotel room was ok, bathroom was terible. The shower leaked and soaked the floor everytime it was turned on. Noticed quite a few dead bugs through out the room and bathroom. My family will not stay at this hotel again.
~Great Stay~
Traveled to Gatlinburg the second week in July. I've been there a twice before but stayed in Pigeon Forge once and then in a cabin with a dozen folks. As I started planning, I quickly learned the time around the Fourth of July and Christmas are the two BUSIEST tourist times.
Was glad to find this $60 room for 2 adults and 2 toddlers. Was glad to see positive reviews (here) and reserved the room. Hotel is RIGHT off the strip! DO NOT DRIVE IN GATLINBURG, just walk a couple of blocks to the aquarium and catch the .25 trolley!
NOTE: this site and others say there is no breakfast or just free coffee. As pamphlets started arriving, we realized there was a continental breakfast. Including apple and orange juice on tap, coffee, various mini-donuts, various mini-muffins, bagels, english muffins, cream cheese, honey, etc, microwave and toaster. The set up is simple but ample with all the food in self-serve drawers, as opposed to sitting out all morning.
We arrived and the room was ready. The exterior hallway was a little odd. It felt like going into an underground tunnel, but as the hotel is on a mountainside, we were on the ground floor, our room was still a level below the office. Anyhow, we got a bad feeling as walked the short, dim hall.
We got to our room and we VERY pleased! Two double beds and a half a wall of windows looking into the woods, complete with door onto the large balcony overlooking the woods. True, if you went out and looked down, it was the back of another hotel, but that was about 4 stories below us. If you didn't look WAY down or looked out from inside the room, it was just trees and leaves; very peacefull!
Room was very clean, had a fridge and mircrowave (perfect for popcorn) and an enclosed bath (tub/shower, toilet, sink) as well as another dressing area with second sink. Room was not huge, but very comfortable two double beds, table and chairs and large TV.
Swam in the pool for hours and enjoyed the fantastic view of the mountains in the distance. Good sized pool with lots of chairs, tables, etc. Also, the room was not very cool when we got there, but after a quick trip for food, the place was nice and cold. Nothing worse than trying to sleep in a hot room!
Great stay! Would definately stop here again! Don't let the scary hall fool you. It's not that we didn't feel safe, just worried about what the room would look like. And we could not have been more pleased with that, esp for the price!
Spacious Accomodations
We were surprised when we found our room to be so spacious...two bedrooms with king beds, two bathrooms, two televisions, a sitting room with sofa, and a private balcony. There was also a small refrigerator and a microwave. It was perfect for our family of four. Our only complaints were that our room was located down a couple of short flights of stairs and a musty smell that we soon discovered was caused from a water seepage problem in the back bedroom. We thought something was up when we saw the dehumidifier in the room and then my husband stepped next to his side of the bed onto carpet soaked in water. The location of the motel was great...just a short walk to the strip...don't bother to drive or you'll never find a place to park...much easier to park at the motel and walk to all the exitement. Not sure I would stay here again...but the rate was great at just $53 and I guess you get what you pay for.
Great view!!!
My family and I stayed here summer 2003. The room was very spacious, comfortable and CLEAN. Our balcony was in the woods with not so great a view, but very relaxing. The pool was nice and clean. My husband and I checked out the jacuzzi rooms which were along the street side of the hotel. We made a decision to come back for our anniversary. We did so in March 2004. We were very pleased with the room and the view from the suite. This is not a luxury hotel, so if you are looking for room service and a mint on your pillow, Rodeway is not it. But if you are looking for a clean, friendly and great hotel at a great price, you'll find it with Rodeway Skyland. We enjoyed our family trip staying here and our "romantic getaway" as well.
Best Hotel on our trip
My husband can be fussy about hotels but he LOVED this hotel. The room was so nice. It had a microwave and a fridge. A BEAUTIFUL view. The people were all nice. It is close to downtown (2 seconds). There is NO WAY this is a one star. I would go back in a second.
Pleasantly suprised by Rodeway Inn
My husband and I stayed there for 3 nights at the end of October. I was very worried abour the hotel because it is only rated 1 star, and very reasonable. We were very pleasantly suprised by the view from the room, the size of the room and the quality of the complimentary breakfast. The location was great and the service very friendly, definitly worth staying again. Sometimes I do not understand how hotels get rated.
Very nice, and Affordable
This was a great place for our family, the room was very nice and clean. Right outside our door were picnic tables and a grill. And just a few steps away was the swimming pool. The kids had a great time. Also, we were just a block away from downtown Gatlinburg!!! I give this hotel 5 stars!!!! The staff was great also!!!!
TripAdvisor Reviews Rodeway Inn Skyland Gatlinburg
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5 Days & Counting
... the case and he's going to knock it out.
On our apres-fruhstuck walk, we saw cranes, cranes everywhere. The whole of Gay Street, where we live, was blocked and full of them. Oh, these are the lifting kind of cranes, not the flying kind that I like to chase. They're using a very big crane to take something from the top of one of the high buildings. In fact, it's so big that they brought a smaller crane to erect the ...
Champ Preps for his Big Adventure
... roll the way I normally do, I'll be fine.
We have made good progress though. I can report that ALL of the dog food, cookies and toys are packed. So, as you can see, I watched another fab sunset thru the Sun Sphere, and did a little light puzzle work to keep the ole noggin sharp.
Now, with all the important dog stuff packed, we just have to take care of ...
Richmond to Knoxville 430 miles
... than our Imperial gallon it's still pretty good to fill up for $34! I actually had a drive for the first time while Peter had a nap, of course as soon as I sat in the drivers seat it started raining and also had road works. Westward to Asheville going through the the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, we had intended to go to Cherokee but the guide book says its dominated by a 21 storey hotel and Casino - not ...
Lori's snow at Ober Gatlinburg
... 00 a person. Unfortunately because of the long wait we just did have time to ride the scenic chairlift to the very top before they closed it down. By the time we got up to the top it was dark so didn't see the view so much and it was cold up there. There was a ice skating rink inside and some shops etc. Was a nice trip but if you go try goin when its not so crowded and start ...
Final getaway of 2014
... each day in with different activities for the kids; more than we should have. We spent the first afternoon/evening in Gatlinburg enjoying various activities there. On the second day we visited Dollywood, which was great! The weather was not the best but we decided to put up with it and it turned out being the right decision as we practically had the entire park to ourselves. The longest line we had to stand in was ...


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Bars in Denver
Bars are the perennial meeting ground for all things social, romantic, and professional. Whether it's hanging with friends, meeting a date, or blowing off steam with colleagues after a long day of work, Denver bars are where everyone goes to meet, greet, and commiserate. While it may seem like very little separates the average bar from all the rest, an increasing number of Denver bars are going out of their way to become unique and lure potential regulars by catering to their specific tastes and interests.
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Wingate By Wyndham Greenwood Village / Denver Tech
Greenwood Village, CO
Avg per night$89.24
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1453 Larimer St.
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