Category Archives: New Business Models

Sustaining and Reimagining the Monograph

Digital Formats, New Business Models, Open Access, Pilot Projects

By Lisa Bayer

Lisa Bayer is AUPresses President (2021-2022) and the director of the University of Georgia Press. This article is based on her remarks to the National Information Standards Organization’s 2021 Humanities Roundtable, “The Monograph in an Evolving Humanities Ecosystem.”

During a podcast interview last year Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia and Zillow, was asked how he’d pitched the idea of Expedia to Bill Gates back in 1996. He replied, “We were encouraged to swing big.” It’s an apt metaphor for university press publishing in general too, particularly for this community’s collaborative work, with each other and with the entire scholarly ecosystem, to sustain and reimagine monographs.

University presses individually and as a team—in the form of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses)—are in league with humanities scholars and a variety of other individual and institutional partners around the world. Long-form scholarship, otherwise known as the monograph, is the game ball or the diamond, depending on your perspective. A 2019 survey of some 5,000 scholars by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press found that “the monograph remains a vital part of the scholarly ecosystem . . .  especially in the Humanities.” But monograph publishing has not ever been about the final product alone. Respondents said that the process of writing, of conducting research, of thinking it through, of creativity and intellectual freedom, allowed them to develop “interconnected, complex arguments” that became new knowledge through delivery in long-form texts. Survey respondents did feel, however, that “experimentation and evolution,” especially regarding access and discoverability, were necessary for monographs to remain relevant and useful—which is why this conversation continues, and continues to matter.

Continue reading Sustaining and Reimagining the Monograph →

“University Presses in Space” Launches into Orbit

Books for Understanding, Pilot Projects, , ,

upinspace_mitpressOne small step for collaboration

by Ellen Faran, Director, The MIT Press

March 20 marks the liftoff of “University Presses in Space,” a website promoting university press books about outer space and space exploration. The site, www.upinspace.org, features 30 titles selected by the 15 participating presses as among their best space books. These titles are cross-linked with the individual book pages in presses’ web catalogs so that we may share web traffic. In addition, all the presses and their authors may share links to the site through catalogs, email, social media, and at exhibits and meetings.

The MIT Press conceived of this joint promotion in conjunction with our lead Spring 2014 title, Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program. We worked closely with three partners—the University Press of Florida, Purdue University Press, and the University of Nebraska Press—to develop the idea and then invited all AAUP member presses to join as participants. MIT designed and launched the site; Nebraska will then take over the site after it enters its regular orbit. Nebraska has arranged to bring “University Presses in Space” to the attention of attendees at SpaceFest (“THE event for the space enthusiast”) in Pasadena this May.

We believe that space buffs, as well as general readers interested in space, don’t stop at just one book. We believe that they appreciate the quality of university press publishing. Thus we hope that the discovery experience provided by “University Presses in Space” will stimulate sales, both for the featured titles and the many more space books to be found by exploring university press lists. The site includes a link to AAUP’s Books for Understanding which has a Space Flight category.

This is a modest experiment in collaborative promotion; modest in part because the site does not offer a combined shopping experience. But we hope that the response to “University Presses in Space” will point us toward effective ways to promote books in specific fields across our community, throughout the galaxy, and beyond.

Please share the news with any space explorers in your part of the universe. Our Twitter hashtag is #upspacebooks.

Serving the Commonwealth

General, New Business Models,

Tony Sanfilippo talks acquiring, marketing, digital publishing

by Juliet Barney, AAUP Marketing and Social Media Intern

As part of my series of interviews as AAUP intern, learning about scholarly publishing from my layman’s perspective, I recently talked to Tony Sanfilippo, Assistant Press Director and Marketing and Sales Director at Penn State University Press. Knowing his expertise and experience in digital publishing, especially in regard to acquisitions and marketing, I hoped he would be able to help me better understand each area.

From previous interviews, I had picked up some basics about acquisitions and marketing: I knew that acquisitions editors work to find manuscripts that fit the needs of their press, not necessarily their personal needs; that marketing for these titles, whether they are print or digital, is modeled by the particulars of each specific project. I was curious what Sanfilippo had to add to what I have already encountered—and interestingly, he did have a new perspective: he explained that you don’t always stick to acquiring texts within your usual editorial focus, and that you can also revive out-of-print books you still believe are valuable.

From Sanfilippo, I learned that acquisitions aren’t just about finding the right manuscript, but also building up a worthwhile project and making it accessible to a wide range of people. Sanfilippo also revisited his college bookstore idea that has the potential to positively impact college students like myself.

(The full interview has been edited for publication.)

What is your experience with patron-driven acquisitions? Is it an effective model?

This is something I’m actually very concerned about. The major question surrounding PDA—which is also referred to as demand-driven acquisitions—is, “Are the current usage triggers sustainable?” A lot of publishers and vendors are having a big conversation on the model. What we’re seeing is that libraries are no longer purchasing books, but instead, are opting to do this short-term rental more often than they’re purchasing. So, not only are they changing the nature of the library’s collection to something that’s more of a popularity driven selection, it’s also significantly cutting publishers’ revenue. For example, I know University of Mississippi Press noted that they’ve seen a significant cut in print sales and the DDA model is only making up a fraction of that lost revenue.

I think if the model is going to be sustainable, two things need to happen. (1) We need to change the model so that some sort of compensation is given to the publishers to make up for the lost revenue. If we don’t, university presses won’t be able to continue publishing the amount of books they’ve published in the past. Also, we will probably begin to publish only popular scholarship as opposed to good scholarship, which are extremely different things. (2) We also need to think about alternatives to the rentals. For example, if there’s an opportunity for the individual to purchase a copy for himself or herself rather than only offering the library the opportunity to purchase a copy: that sort of revenue could make up for the loss.

Otherwise, PDA/DDA won’t be something publishers can continue to participate in on a long-term basis.

In your article “Rethinking the College Bookstore,” you bring up the idea of borrowing textbooks or new scholarship, both for students and faculty, but wouldn’t that affect the publishers marketing those texts?

What’s different about the model I recommend and what’s currently going on is that there isn’t that opportunity now for a purchase to occur by the individual in a library. Libraries have a mission of sharing. They get a certain amount of resources that they can use totry to purchase materials with, and they try to decide what’s the best way to share those materials. But promoting book ownership—that’s not the part of the library mission. What I propose actually adds that element. Patrons often also have their own personal libraries, but with the loss of bookstores, they have few opportunities for discovery for those personal libraries. Instead that’s been happening for readers more and more often at lending libraries. Publishers can afford to rent more books and allow more borrowing of books if they are also given the opportunity to sell a book in the same space, and to the same audience.

There’s an interesting statistic that I encountered recently, here, at Penn State. We got an email from the help desk at the university library: the #1 most-asked question was, “Where is the bathroom?” #2 question: “Where can I find my textbooks?” Students weren’t going to the university bookstore and asking that question, they were going to the library. There is an expectation from students that if the learning materials aren’t a part of a content management system, they should be on reserve in the library. I think there is some resistance from librarians on this topic. But, if it’s what the students need, maybe we should consider it.

There’s one popular theory that people will pay for the use of material on a borrowed basis. Sort of like a Netflix model. You don’t actually own films or TV shows; you borrow them. If you look at libraries using the Demand Driven and Short Term Loan models, combined they’re sort of like a Netflix for books mixed with the physicality of a Blockbuster. If you borrow a book and spend too much time on it, rather than just paying the late fee, you have to buy the book. It’s like renting a movie and never returning it.

When looking for new manuscripts, what do you consider?

The acquisitions I do are very different from the scholarly acquisitions that Penn State Press typically does. In our mission statement, we talk about how the majority of what we do is for serving the scholarly community, but we also have a line in there about serving the people of Pennsylvania. As a state school, we feel a responsibility to give back to the commonwealth, so we also try to publish books of interest to them.

For me, what makes a good book is going to be different than the standards of those acquiring our scholarship. Our scholarly acquisitions staff are looking at whether the manuscript uses the language of the discipline and whether or not it’s engaging with a current argument in that field. In contrast, the questions I ask myself are, “Is it useful to the people of the commonwealth, and if so, what’s the market? Would we serve a good portion of the regional market or is it too narrow a focus?” So whereas marketing is a minor part of scholarly acquisitions, it plays a major role for me and regional acquisitions. I’m also looking at the writing. If you’re not a great academic writer, that’s not always important. And if you’re really engaging with the language of your discipline, the book will have trouble with a wider audience; jargon is not accessible to the average reader. I’m looking for really great writers who can engage their readers, and who are going to appeal to a much broader audience. It’s not only what they’re saying, but also how they’re saying it.

I’m also generally thinking about publicity, because our regional books have a better opportunity to benefit from publicity. There are so many local radio stations where I can book an author because they’re talking about deer hunting. Our Continental philosophers? Not so much.

When acquiring a text, do you take into consideration whether it will be in print or digital?

psupress_birdatlasLet me give an example—not of a book that I acquired, but a recommendation that I made. We did an atlas on the breeding birds in Pennsylvania. It comes out of work that the Pennsylvania DCNR (Department of Conservation and Natural Resources) does here. Folks go out and count the number of breeding birds they find in the wild: pairs, and nests. The volunteers are out there every weekend documenting these numbers on paper. They did this for 10 years and came up with this amazing data set of the distribution of birds and their breeding habits, including where and when they could be found. We published all that data into a book. My first thought on that was, “Wow, wouldn’t that make a wonderful app?” Not only for species identification, but also to continue monitoring the distribution of the breeding species.

Once we started looking into the cost of a project like that and it became more daunting. We weren’t able to proceed, but it’s the kind of thing I thought about in the terms of, “Does this project make more sense in print or digital?” There’s an argument to be made for both. But as a project, if it were to be ongoing and continuously recording data, it seems that as an app, you can create an opportunity, not only for the user to look up a particular bird, but also to report that sighting back to the database.

It depends upon the project. When considering whether to publish in print or digital, I’m not only thinking about the audience, I’m also thinking more about the actual project. That said, there are very few projects where we’re forced to choose between only one or the other.

What’s the most interesting project you’re currently working on?

psupress_angelswildthingsThere was a book we published a long time ago called Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak, by John Cech. I think the world of Sendak; I think he was an American treasure. There was so little written about him that was really scholarly in nature, and here was this book that we published that had unfortunately gone out of print. So I tried really hard to bring that book back into print. The folks who actually controlled most of Sendak’s illustrations were generally HarperCollins (they were his publisher through most of his career). We would have to negotiate another deal with them to use the illustrations again, and our initial attempts were pretty discouraging. They wanted quite a bit of money for the necessary permissions required for a reprint.

But then serendipitously, one of our acquisitions editors found herself talking to a friend of Sendak. When she realized the connection, our editor started talking about the book, and the friend offered to “see what he could do.” So a few weeks after that party, we got a call from HarperCollins’ rights department saying that Sendak asked them to give us unrestricted print rights to his images for use in our book, and to do it gratis. (For print only, though; they weren’t so generous with the digital rights.) So in the end, we were able to bring the book back into print after more than a decade, primarily because Sendak himself intervened. I’m extremely proud to been able to bring that book back into print.

More Metadata

Pilot Projects, ,

ORCID

ORCID® Aims for Universal Scholar ID System

Going digital means new types of products are being created, along with new ways to track them and extrapolate useful metadata. University presses have a central investment in product-centered metadata, but in today’s data-driven world, there are an increasing number of other angles to explore.

One important angle is to track the individual scholar. This is the idea behind ORCID—short for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. The ORCID system is new: the nonprofit was formed in 2010, and the identifier system officially launched a year ago in October 2012. ORCID is now in a promotional phase; in order for the system to fulfill its potential, scholars—or their institutions—need to (continue to) sign up. As an introduction, NFAIS hosted a midday webinar on October 23, “An Overview of ORCID: The Unique Identifier of Researchers Worldwide.”

In a nutshell, ORCID is a registry that matches scholars with a unique 16-digit identifier, which can be linked to anything from publications and grant awards to patents and conference registrations. The Wellcome Trust already uses the identifiers in their grant application process; Open Access publisher F1000 will soon request peer reviewers to provide their ORCID identifiers. The ORCID identifier is basically an ISBN for a scholar, providing more reliable attribution than a name, which can be abbreviated, initialized, or otherwise changed, adding to confusion at a time when ambiguities can already be amplified by the increasingly global and virtual elements of scholarly communication.

When attached to the end of the http://orcid.org URL, the identifier leads to an individualized webpage with the scholar’s name and any attached attributions. While the minimalistic profiles are intentionally not meant to form a new social network, they are semi-customizable, with the option to link to a personal website or LinkedIn profile, add a short bio, tag certain keywords. The page details, as with the ORCID identifier, are set up for free by the individual scholar, who can also choose which listings to make public and which to set limitations on or keep private.

But the intent is for the identifiers to serve beyond the ORCID website. The ORCID organization provides tools for embedding the identifier in other systems, to make the identifier a truly universal tool. For example, presses could include an ORCID identifier field in their own databases, royalty systems, and websites.

To speed up the adoption process, organizations themselves—such as a university, or a university press—can also become a “member” of ORCID and, in doing so, receive authorization to proactively enroll the scholars they work with in the ORCID system and start publicly linking their work. However, the ultimate control remains in the hands of the individual scholar: even if enrolled by an institution, they are allowed to go back and adjust the settings of their individual identifier account, such as choosing which attributions remain public. Boston University, for example, is a member and is creating ORCID records for their faculty, on an opt-out basis, and for their students as well, on an opt-in basis. While universities make up a third of ORCID members, publishers follow close behind, comprising another quarter.

To date, ORCID has assigned almost 400,000 identifiers, and records at least 1,000 unique visitors a month each from 66 different countries. (The registry supports multiple languages and character sets.) More information can be found online, on the ORCID website, blog, or Twitter feed.

Have you considered ORCID? Have authors discussed ORCID identifiers with you? Have you considered working ORCID identifiers into your press’s existing metadata? Tell us more in the comments below.

Say Yes First, Figure it Out Later

Digital Formats, Pilot Projects

Stories along the Road to Innovation from the Johns Hopkins University Press

by Becky Brasington Clark and Claire McCabe Tamberino

Our consumer health editor, Jackie Wehmueller, had turned up a promising opportunity. She had contacted a prominent dermatologist about writing a book on chronic itch, a condition that affects millions of individuals. The market potential for the book was enormous and the dermatologist was renowned. He liked the idea and agreed to write the book with one key condition: it had to be a fully interactive e-book with patient videos and three-dimensional graphics, and it had to be published as a multi-touch iBook.

The author was coming to Baltimore in a few weeks. Did we want to meet with him and learn more?

The answer was an enthusiastic yes. As a longstanding publisher of titles in consumer health—including the bestselling Thirty-Six Hour Day—the Johns Hopkins University Press was the natural home for this path-breaking project.

There was a small twinge of anxiety over the fact that we had never before used iBooks Author—the multi-touch platform that seamlessly incorporates video, audio, 3-D graphics, and other interactive features directly into the e-book file—but that kind of anxiety is familiar in an industry where change is the only constant. “We’ll figure it out,” we said, and quickly got to work.

Meet the JHU Press screenshot
JHUP medical publishing: from manuscript to iBook.

Figuring it out is the charge of the Online Books Division (OBD)—a big name for a three-person operation within JHUP’s Books Marketing Department. We seek commercially promising opportunities for digital innovation and figure out how to integrate them into the Book Division’s workflow. Since 2010, we’ve developed and posted supplemental material on CD and online for dozens of titles, we’ve incorporated 3,000 new pages to our online reference, The Early Republic, and we published the 2nd edition of the Johns Hopkins Atlas of Digital EEG (a proprietary software product accompanied by a print book). We’ve also digitized our course adoption campaigns, expanded and refined our list-serv, and segmented 20,000 e-mail subscribers by subject area preference—all while adding new vendors and territories to our e-book program.

We’ve learned a few things along the way, perhaps nothing as important as this: innovation requires not only a willingness to learn, but a stomach for frustration and occasional failure. It requires us to engage fully with that which we do not know, and to begin anew the long journey of mastery. It requires us to add new challenges to already heavy workloads, disrupt routines, and make new kinds of mistakes. And sometimes it requires that we say “yes” to a project before we are 100% certain that we know exactly how to get it done.

Learning iBooks Author

A couple of weeks in advance of the author meeting, two members of the OBD staff—Claire McCabe Tamberino and Michael Carroll—enrolled in a two-day training course on iBooks Author. They came back full of enthusiasm for the platform and confident that we could master it quickly.

We all agreed that we needed a beta project that would allow us to become proficient with iBooks Author in advance of using it for our first commercial endeavor. The search for a practice project came in the midst of a press-wide strategic communications discussion, in which we had identified the need for multi-media collateral material for JHU Press. That’s when it hit us: why not use iBooks Author to develop a multi-touch iBook about the Press?

Turning the Camera on Ourselves

Screenshot of Meet the JHU Press
Interactive maps invite readers to explore the history of the press.

With that, Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press was born. The vision was simple enough: repurpose descriptive copy about the Press and its four divisions—Books, Journals, HFS, and Project MUSE—and enhance it with multimedia.

Inspired by the video UNC Press had recently released to highlight the appointment of director John Sherer, we decided to conduct video interviews with Press leaders. That’s where things got a little tricky. We didn’t have a resident videographer on staff, and we couldn’t afford the steep rates charged by the university. So we decided to do it ourselves.

With another small investment in software and training (iMovie), we were ready to start shooting video using the Press’s newest iPad. We wrote scripts, scheduled video shoots, and called “action.”

The shooting went smoothly enough, but we quickly discovered two unanticipated problems. First, the interviews were far too long. Second, the video quality was compromised by the lack of professional lighting. Reshooting all of the interviews simply wasn’t an option. We were already on a tight schedule and the budget was even tighter.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. In this case, it led to creative thinking and innovation. We decided to shorten the video interviews considerably, and since the audio quality was better than the video quality, we decided to use small snippets of video, then continue the audio with still shots and animated B-roll.

Nearly a dozen people[1] came together to finish the project. We published Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press in April and made it available free of charge in the iTunes store. We’ve been using it to introduce the Press to university stakeholders, prospective clients, funders, and authors, and the reaction to it has been overwhelmingly positive.

Lessons Learned

Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press helped us achieve our primary goal: becoming proficient in iBooks Author in advance of our first commercial project, Living with Itch, which will be published in August (more on that project in a future column). But the beta project bestowed some additional benefits that we found instructive.

First, we gained confidence in our ability to master new ways of publishing. When faced with a challenge like publishing in iBooks Author, it can be easy to assume that we aren’t big enough to handle it, that such opportunity is better left to trade houses and large commercial publishers. That simply isn’t the case.  University presses are staffed by smart, adaptable professionals who master new challenges every day. Why worry that we can’t when we demonstrate day after day that we can?

Second, the project forced us to share information across divisions, a process that has been encouraged via our Press-wide strategic messaging efforts. Not only is it interesting to learn more about the work of our colleagues, but this kind of information sharing helps us leverage our collective strength and identify new responses to industry and market challenges.

Third, we were reminded of the value of professional services. Sure, we can shoot and edit video on the iPad, but it isn’t going to be of the same quality as work from professional videographers. For future book-length projects requiring video, we’ll ask the author to deliver high-quality video or we’ll hire a pro.

See for Yourself

Meet the JHU Press screenshot
A stop on JHU Press’s digital journey.

Meet the Johns Hopkins University Press incorporates the multi-touch functionality of iBooks Author, with text, three-dimensional graphics, interactive maps, video, audio, and a self-grading quiz. If you’d like to see it for yourself, go to the iTunes store and download a free copy. We’d love to get your feedback. Feel free to email Claire McCabe Tamberino with your comments and questions at cmt@press.jhu.edu. And watch this space for a future column on Living with Itch: A Patient’s Guide and an update on how we’ve used Meet the Press in our strategic communications.

[1]Bill Breichner, Davida Breier, Greg Britton, Glen Burris, Michael Carroll, Jack Holmes, Kathleen Keane, Mary Lou Kenney, Dean Smith, Claire McCabe Tamberino

Rethinking the College Bookstore

Business, General, New Business Models, , , , , , , , , ,

Image
Gettysburg College 2012 by Tomwsulcer

There was a lot of chatter in the book community a couple of weeks ago over an announcement that Len Riggio, Chairman of Barnes & Noble, made about his interest in buying back his company. Riggio has done this more than once since he first purchased the company back in 1971. But what I’ve found most interesting about the announcement is a detail I haven’t seen anyone else mention. It’s what Mr. Riggio doesn’t want to include in the deal. In what he doesn’t want, everyone seems focused on his exclusion of the nook platform, but what’s of much greater interest to me is the other thing he doesn’t want, the college bookstore division.

Now in thinking about this, let’s review specifically just what we’re talking about. Barnes and Noble currently has about 689 “regular” bookstores, but it also runs 674 college bookstores. Note that it doesn’t own 674 college stores, it manages them and in most cases the building the store is located in is part of the college or university, usually right on campus. Typically, Barnes and Noble won the concession in a bidding process from the home institutions, like Pepsi did at the stadium, and now it has exclusive rights to sell textbooks and t-shirts on the campuses of those institutions. If you’re talking about a large institution with a successful and popular sports program, like the one I work for here at Penn State, then the t-shirt piece of that can be as lucrative as the bookstore/textbook piece of it, probably more so, and it is very unlikely that we’re going to see that change anytime soon.

But there’s one thing Len Riggio correctly identified a couple of years ago which is that the textbook market is changing rapidly. Last year, at the George Washington Conference on Ethics and Publishing, Dr. Al Greco, Professor of Marketing at Fordham who specializes in the book market, predicted that the market for print textbooks would go from a $4 Billion market in 2012 to $173 million by 2017, about a 95% drop in the next five years. That trend toward digital learning materials combined with the end of what was once a captive customer base forced by geography and proprietary adoption lists to purchase their textbooks from the campus store, has led to an amazing decline in the profitability of college bookstores. This is why, understandably, Len wants out. He saw the coming boom in campus stores back in the Seventies when he bought the chain, and I think he now sees what Al Greco sees.

So what does this mean for those of us at an institution with a B&N managed campus store? Well, probably nothing right away, but eventually those concession contracts will come up for renewal, and if what’s left of B&N after Riggio buys back the brick and mortar bookstores is nook and B&N College, well I can’t possibly imagine the nook division wanting anything to do with selling team hoodies, art supplies, and Blue Books. So when those agreements come up for renewal, what should happen? Well, if you’ll indulge me for a minute, I actually have an idea about this.

If we could start from scratch with a campus bookstore, what would we want it to do? Well, who are the affected constituents? It would seem students, faculty, and authors. If you’re a student, your answer might include doing something about textbook prices. If you’re a scholar it would probably include access, typically to the most recent scholarship. If you’re a writer, and not surprisingly colleges and universities are filled with those, both in the guise of publishing faculty and paper-writing students, you might want tools and expertise. But above all, I don’t think any of these constituencies wants to see the books go away. Instead, perhaps it’s high time something else left the building, the t-shirts.

If we are to reimagine the campus bookstore let’s first talk about what it doesn’t need to be. It doesn’t need to be a clothing outlet. Take the shirts and such out of the store and find a new home for it. It shouldn’t be difficult, there are probably already seven or fifteen or thirty other places on and near campus that can handle the distribution of officially licensed goods. Instead, let’s radically recommend that the bookstore handle what it says it does right in the name, books.

Next, let’s think about where else on campus books are a focus. Hmmmm. Wait, what’s that across the street? Is that the library? Might it be useful for the library to partner here? Are there efficiencies to be had? They both receive large quantities of books on a daily basis, process those arrivals, and then shelve them for browsing. They both collect course texts for students and distribute them at the request of faculty. They both purchase brand new material for their faculty and graduate students, so that they might have access to the latest scholarship being published. Well, yes, on the surface it does look like there are efficiencies to be had. But could this new kind of campus book place do more than just a bookstore or a library by combining some of what they each do? I think it probably could.

So let’s say for a moment that over the weekend I destroyed a giant, evil, purple, crystal Gorgon that had been tormenting a peaceable valley kingdom, and that as a reward for saving them, the people of the kingdom gave me this really cool golden magical wishing sword. (Yeah, I don’t know why they didn’t just use it themselves against the Gorgon, but whatever) So what would I do with it? Well, first I would ask for a million more wishes. It would then, of course, be pointed out to me that’s against magic wishing sword rules. I only get three wishes, and, oh yeah, they can only be used for good.

Okay, three wishes, and only for good. Hmm. What good could I do… Wait, how about those students and those high textbook prices? Can I use my magic sword to make things better for them? Well, now that I think about it, yeah, that would be kind of easy. And I might not even need to waste a wish on it. Under the current textbook paradigm, most textbooks are created and sold primarily by those with strong motivations to get the highest possible margin out of the sale those materials. What if we flipped that? What if we brought the librarian ethos to the textbook problem? Should libraries lend textbooks? In some cases that makes excellent sense, but ultimately why couldn’t students be offered both options, purchase or borrow? And if we take the profit incentive out of the retail sale of textbooks, and put librarians in charge of distributing these materials, might librarians have more incentive than B&N to help faculty find lower cost (or free) alternatives to higher priced learning materials? Might they even be willing to help faculty create those materials? Wait, libraries publishing? Who ever heard of such a silly thing?

So what else might I wish for that could help people on campus… How about the faculty, how can we help them? What if we offered them all of the latest books in their field at this bookstore? Imagine walking into a campus bookstore and actually finding books there, relevant books. That’s how I’d spend my second wish. Wouldn’t it make more sense for the university for new scholarship to be offered to faculty for browsing before either they or the library purchased it? As a bookstore, this could occur. The practice of returns in the book industry is a problematic one, though one that ebooks and POD are addressing, but in this instance, the ability to return an unwanted book makes a lot of sense. If publisher X University Press (XUP for short) publishes a book about say reliquaries, wouldn’t it make sense for XUP to send a copy to every campus with faculty who would be interested in that topic? If no one on campus needed the book, it could be returned, but if a faculty member wanted to read it, they might really like having the option to either borrow the book, or to purchase it. Either way, the campus bookstore would purchase the book from XUP, and if the faculty member wanted to borrow it, the library would own it after it was returned, and if the faculty member wanted to keep it, the faculty member could pay the bookstore/library for that copy. At which point the bookstore/library could decide if they’d like another copy, or not.

I suppose what I’m proposing is a little like the Patron-Driven Acquisitions model that a lot of ebook aggregators and wholesalers are experimenting with, but this would be done with physical books. And like the Lookstore model I wrote about last year, this one might make more sense on a consignment basis, with the onus put on the publishers to find which campuses, or more specifically which departments would be most interested in a new book in a particular field, and then sending the campus stores serving those departments a copy of the relevant book, on consignment for 9 months, after which it is either paid for and shelved, or returned to XUP.

Now, I’ve got one more wish left, and the last constituency on campus worth considering when rethinking the campus bookstore is writers—both students and faculty. So how might I use that last wish to help them. Well perhaps the most important thing we can do is keep the store open. Most writers seem to recognize that the recent disappearance of bookstores on the American landscape isn’t really a good development for them. Not only does it reduce the number of outlets where their work can be found, it diminishes book culture and reduces the overall number of commons devoted to books. Beyond just having books available though, I think a better use for some of the space might be for a writing and publishing center. Not only could it offer expertise for students, maybe it could also offer services to faculty. In fact, if libraries are serious about publishing and about Open Access, having a place on campus dedicated to offering publishing services specifically to their own faculty might be a way to ensure faculty are aware of alternatives to commercial publishing, are negotiating the best terms for the content, and using Institutional Depositories.

I realize that little if any of this is actually going to happen. I guess it’s the risk one takes when one’s call for reform is entirely dependent on a magical wishing sword. Nonetheless, Gorgon excluded, it probably should happen. I don’t know how many of those almost 700 campuses are going to find themselves without a campus bookstore next year, but I’m finding it hard to imagine a scenario where, like the independents before them, they aren’t going to start to close. When talking about what we’re going to do with those empty book buildings on our campuses, I hope administrators will at least be thinking beyond the concession contract and seriously consider the role that books play in the life and work of their community. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with textbook prices, perhaps all faculty already see all the new scholarship in their respective fields at conferences, and maybe writing and publishing centers aren’t something campus communities need. Maybe. But it seems much more likely that what most folks on campuses don’t need is another opportunity to purchase a t-shirt.

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First posted at Content Storage Unit. I would like to point out that before 9pm EDT on May 2nd, this post linked to a service that B&N offered call PubIt, which was a self-publishing platform aimed at both faculty and students for general self-publishing and customized textbooks using B&N distribution. Since I first posted that B&N has redirected that link to their general self-publishing platform and I assume will end the PubIt program. For that reason I removed the original reference to that service in the 2nd to last paragraph.

Posted by Tony Sanfilippo, Ohio State University Press