Over the past 30 years, academic publishing has often become a matter of sales and budgets. Book proposals are accepted or declined based on the sales projections or net financial anticipations. New scholars with recent dissertations are told to rewrite them in order to increase sales. And so on.
Money has become the primary agenda for all publishers, not just university presses and Independent Scholarly Publishers (ISPs). Jason Epstein’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (W.W. Norton, 2002) documents how since the 1950s profits have needed to be returned to owners and investors. Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (Verso, 2001), is even clearer. He notes how editors know the return on investment down to several decimal points because their salaries and bonuses on linked to such returns (107).
I venture a reason beneath business.
Scholarly research, by its very nature, is a force for social critique and change. Recall the racist, colonialist, patriarchal, classist world of just 100 years ago. What prompted such radical change? Humanistic scholarship has surely played a central part.
Notice how such change can upset markets, shift buying patterns, or even create or close opportunities. Conservative forces want stable markets, not culture-transforming humanistic research.
Yet, who wants to openly take this position? Cultural conservatives do not openly say they oppose humanitic research. Instead they support a proper return on investment, which some kinds of books–monographs and dissertations–unfortunately cannot ever seem to achieve.
The fact is, however, that scholarly books in the humanities do make enough money to cover their costs. So the claim that books written by scholars for scholars won’t make enough is not an economic statement, but a political statement. The practical consequence of such a statement is to impede scholar-to-scholar communication and undermine humanistic research.
What are your experiences? How do you view this situation?
–Arthur Scholar
