University Presses: A Time for Change?

 

To move forward sometimes we have to go back to basics and in business school we all learned about strategic business moves such as retrenchment. Retrenchment was used as a strategy in WWI (trench warfare): soldiers gave up some ground so they can dig in again more firmly.

 

Retrenchment is still used today as a strategy by many businesses, especially in times of economic distress, which find themselves stretched too far. It is a strategy whereby the businesses cut back in order to spread themselves evenly so that they can move forward from a stronger position.

 

In the publishing World, as within any industry, retrenchment involves looking at your value chain to make sure you, and your stakeholders are getting the most out of limited resources and finding stronger ways to move forward. Changes in production (POD), distribution (direct to consumer) and marketing (utilizing social media) have been occurring, saving and making money, for the last few years. As publishers look to move forward and come out of the trenches fighting, we took a look at a few of the collaborative options being discussed to problem solve issues within the industry that go unsolved yet heavily debated.

 

One Large Problem

 

One of the biggest obstacles facing university presses today is a lack of resources to take advantage of new opportunities being developed in the publishing industry today. Moving forward, and taking steps to change a system which has been in place for decades take a great deal of time, money and HR.

 

According to Michael T. Clarke from Clarke Publishing Group “Many university presses had hopes that migrating to electronic publication would reduce costs while increasing dissemination but this, for the most part, has not occurred. New electronic publishing systems are expensive to implement and require ongoing development, maintenance, and additional staff. For a small university press publishing, at most, a couple of hundred titles a year, it is very hard to justify the expenditures required to keep pace with new technologies.”

 

It’s all well and good to say you just need to use new technologies, print on demand, produce a few e-books, but as we all know saying and doing are totally different. So, how can university presses move forward? They utilize every resource internally (a university has some of the best scholars in the country), and they work together with other industry members.

 

The Future Is Collaboration

 

A recent discussion that ensued at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, over the much needed change in the University Press industry. The theme of the discussion was collaboration. Collaboration between University Presses and Libraries, and industry members to face the fact that the system in place is no longer working in favor of the universities.

 

Resources are limited at University Presses. Consequently presses are starting to seek support from authors to help with publishing costs and are expanding their book collections to meet the wider needs of the market. Working together, authors can still get their work published by a prestigious institution, but at a cost where the university takes less risk. Less risk means less money, which can translate into more authors being published by that university.

 

 “In the wake of this shrinking market for single-author books, university presses have redirected their publishing efforts increasingly toward general interest topics and have become ever more dependent upon individual scholars to support publishing costs.” Likewise the experts added, “As libraries find themselves perpetually bombarded by skyrocketing commercial journal prices, a surfeit of published scholarship, and contracting collections budgets, they have gradually curtailed their acquisition of the mainstay offering of the university press…”. [1]

 

Cooperation between university presses and libraries is mutually beneficial as libraries have access to a plethora of academic materials, at a competitive cost. And presses have an added market for their materials as well as the prestige of having

 

In joint this scenario the press would provide information to the library and the library would in turn provide easy access of that information both online and through library databases. 

 

Why is collaboration between the two units beneficial for the future of the publishing industry?

 

Nathan MacBrien, publications director for the University of California’s International and Area Studies said “Drawing on ideas from institutional sociology and social network analysis …small publishing units gain stability through increased linkages across their university.”

 

University presses will particularly gain constancy with support from divisions of the university, and will benefit from the opportunity to publish information online through mutually beneficial partnerships. Even though presses are faced with tough times, change is long overdue. The overall benefit of a recession is that we scale back, and as such we can take a step back in order to take a step forward. We can look at where money can be better spent and we can take advantage of new technologies to drive us forward. We can lean on each other and put all of our heads together to come up with a solution that takes advantage of advances in the industry.

 

[1] Local, Sustainable, and Organic Publishing: A Library-Press Collaboration at the University of California, Laura Cerruti the Director of Digital Content Development, University of California Press and Catherine A. Mitchell the Director of eScholarship Publishing Group at California Digital Library.