The Baby and the Bath Water
Posted: January 15th, 2008, by Joseph J. EspositoThe University of Pittsburgh Press has just made an extraordinary announcement. The Press plans to make its entire backlist available for free online two years after formal, print publication. Here is what the AAUP newsletter has to say about this:
Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make its entire back catalog available online, free of charge, through Pitt’s University Library System (ULS). New titles will be added to UPP Digital Editions, part of ULS’s D-Scribe program, after the books have been in print for two years.
The reason this is extraordinary is that it violates the basic economic principle of book publishing, namely, you lose money on frontlist and make money (sometimes) on the backlist. Pittsburgh’s program will over time (it won’t happen overnight) erode backlist sales, reduce the Press’s income, and thus make it more difficult for the Press to underwrite new books. (I don’t know the specifics of the Press’s financial situation, but if it is like most other university presses, part of its operations are subsidized by its parent institution. Having said that, revenue from book sales, especially of the backlist, is surely part of its overall economic picture.)
Backlist sales are the bedrock of book publishing economics, and they are tied to an important corollary: Good books backlist, bad books disappear. (Yes, the term “backlist” is a verb as well as a noun. Publishers are not always the most zealous guardians of the language.) It may be that Pittsburgh is not concerned about the erosion of backlist sales because they don’t have any. If so, then what appears on the surface to be an open access initiative may in fact be the outcome of undistinguished editorial judgment.
There is a fundamental difference between book sales and the subscription sales of academic journals. Most revenue for journals are for current issues. Thus many journal publishers now make their backlists or backfiles, as they are called, open access after six months or one year; sometimes this form of open access is mandated by funding agencies. The revenue loss to such journal publishers is likely to be negligible. The economics of book publishing and journal publishing are precisely the reverse of one another. It would make more sense for a book publisher to post new books for free online for six months and then charge for them thereafter. (The ratio of frontlist to backlist sales varies by publisher, subject category, author, and publishing segment.)
This is not to say that open access cannot be used to help to sell books. One of the real innovators in this regard is a contributor to the Publishing Frontier blog, Michael Jensen of National Academies Press. NAP has done extensive testing of the relationship between open access material and the sale of books, whether in print or digital form. Shrewd publishers can and should learn from NAP. I advise all my clients to test various forms of open access as a form of product sampling. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Pittsburgh has put into place the various marketing techniques that have enabled NAP to experiment with open access and still manage its operation responsibly.
The AAUP uses the word “innovation” in its story about Pittsburgh. Wrong word, I believe. Somewhat paradoxically, the Press’s initiative is a bet that digital media don’t matter. I believe the opposite, that digital media matter very much and that the flirtation with hybrid models that marry print to electronics is a useful but transitory phase; in the end (I won’t predict when that will be) all publishing will be digital. Pittsburgh is counting on print and electronics occupying parallel universes forever, where one medium does not effect the other (except, perhaps, positively, but this is wishful thinking). This is myopia, not innovation.
The University of Pittsburgh Press has started down the slippery slope. While it may receive some support from its parent now, over time that support will grow until all the costs for the Press must be covered by the parent. The parent may then decide, as many universities have already determined, that the support for the Press is too great. Support gets cut back, the number of books published then drops, and scholars everywhere lament the fact that there are fewer and fewer outlets for their work. No one should be surprised when commercial publishers increase their presence in academic publishing, picking off the most profitable programs. This is not a way to build a university press, nor is it a harbinger of a bright future for scholarly communications. Open access is not an innovation but one aspect of a complex marketing program. I wish the University of Pittsburgh Press had such a program in place.
January 17th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
This piece, to me, highlights that consumer book publishing and academic book publishing are very different businesses. I am quite certain that if a trade publisher — Harper or Random House — did what is being suggested here that they would see an across-the-board sales lift. But, of course, their books are mostly meant to be enjoyed as start-to-finish reads. One presumes that is not the case in the marketing of academic backlist.
I have a standing challenge to consumer publishers to be told of just ONE book where excessive availability of free text online could be shown to have injured book sales. In a world where — even WITH the Kindle — we can’t persuade people to consume the product on screens, it would seem you’d win much more through discovery than you’d lose in cannibalization. Nobody’s shown me that book yet. Clearly, Michael Jensen would know of some examples from his world that would meet my challenge.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:44 am
I’m not sure when Joe looked at the AAUP newsletter, but right now the page he links to *doesn’t* say the Press will make the entire backlist available online, but “selected backlist titles”. Which would seem to undermine the basis for his argument, as they *are* giving themselves the flexibility to decide when it makes sense to put a particular title online for free, and when it doesn’t.
If the AAUP newsletter did change, it would appear to be a correction on the AAUP’s part, rather than a reconsideration on Pittsburgh’s. The U-Pittsburgh Press’ own press release (which is easily found on their site) says “Ultimately, *most* of the Press’ titles over two years old will be provided through this open access
platform.” (Emphasis added.) I can find contemporary quotes from this in various blogs, so it’s doubtful that this was changed after the fact.
As we in libraries often recommend, going to the original source, rather than relying on secondhand sources, can often save you a lot of time and trouble.
January 30th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
An update to the original post: Actually, the situation at Pittsburgh is even worse than I thought. It turns out that ALL new books will be put into the open access program two years after publication. This means that if and when the time comes when people read texts from ebook readers instead of in hardcopy or sampling them online, Pittsburgh will have literally zero revenue from its backlist. Better raise that college tuition because somebody will have to pay for this.
February 15th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Joe, thanks for the kind words about the National Academies Press site. We keep learning things through it, and I’ll try to report on some of those over the next few months.
It’s worth going and taking a look at the Pittsburgh digital library site. It’s hardly a threat to immersive reading, with an interface only a librarian would love. Looks to me like it’s optimal only for browsing, sampling, tasting.
It took a lot of work to get to the books themselves; I had to browse hard before finally getting to a book — and note that the Contents are “below the fold,” nearly invisible. The presentation is page scans, not XML or HTML, so it won’t work well with handheld readers.
The URLs are hideous, navigation tremendously clumsy — it’s an advertisement for the “non-optimal interface” that I’ve written about elsewhere, that promotes the “real” interface that the work was written for — the book.
Overall I’m more heartened by this project than see it as the beginning of the end. Latin American Studies monographs — heck, even most scholarly monographs — don’t sell well enough to justify or allow significant marketing and promotion efforts. A few hundred to 800 copies is about all the market seems to bear these days. The best promotion of the book is the book itself.
I’m also heartened to see strong university/library/press relations — academic publishing is undergoing huge transformations, and having skilled publishers on staff, striving to make public the fruits of scholarship, is exactly the mission most presses were founded to manifest. University presses need more support-in-kind from their institutions.
For university presses, this model, tiptoe-y as it is, makes sense to me. For other publishers, the Google Book Search approach may be better. But regardless, getting their books visible, link-to-able, and socially promotable, seems to me the only way small-market publications can find their audiences — which will be much larger than they could ever get with print only.
February 15th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
[...] The Baby and the Bath Water [...]
February 21st, 2008 at 7:09 am
I have to agree with Michael Jensen that the interface used by the U of Pittsburgh digital library is clunky and makes actually reading a text online a serious challenge. (As a former librarian who specialized in digital libraries, I the decision to use that system was based on its lack of user friendly features). So, it actually might promote sales of the print book.
Indeed, perhaps this approach could even drive sales of e-books, e.g., the full book in an easy-to-view PDF.
I have to point out that down here in Argentina, I’m more than glad to buy an academic e-book since the print version likely will never make it through the international mail or may take months.