Considering Publishers
Background
We started with the following hunches about publishers in the scholarly monograph ecosystem, born largely of the experience from members of our team who have worked in digital publishing technologies:
- Scholarly monographs have low unit sales, and sales are declining.
- Scholarly monographs are nonetheless seen as important to the mission of university presses, even if their economics are increasingly difficult.
- Libraries are the main buyers of scholarly monographs.
- EPUB is the lingua franca of publishing digital versions of monographs.
- Publishers are not willing to publish digital versions without DRM.
- Working with university presses on new digital initiatives is difficult.
It is important to note that not all of these hunches are correct, as we discuss below, and as highlighted in the conclusions to this section.
We have synthesized the results of our interviews with academic publishers into the following themes.
The Challenges of Monographs
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first theme to emerge from our interviews was the current challenges in monograph publishing. While monographs continue to be important to the mission of the university press, the economics around them are increasingly difficult. As one publisher of a smaller press says:
“Monograph sales have been dropping my entire career. I’ve been in the business about 24 years, when I started the Chicken Little moment was, ‘Oh my God, monograph sales are falling below 2,000 copies a year, what are we going to do?’ Today we’re lucky if we sell 300.”
This has impacts across the press, both in economics of the whole publishing operation, but also on decisions about acquisitions:
“Books that … have not really done anything for us in terms of list, building a reputation and also we’re losing money, those are the ones that we’re thinking we should just not publish.”
Still, while sales numbers for monographs are declining, in aggregate, backlist sales can be important:
“A monograph will move onto the backlist after a couple of years, and will still continue to sell, in both print and ebook formats, albeit in relatively small numbers. But that long tail of the backlist contributes to a little bit of an annuity almost, that the press has every year, that they can depend on.”
This means that while any given monograph might have questionable economics, for some publishers, the overall collection backlist of monographs can contribute significantly to revenues. Given the tenuous nature of university press finances, any threats to existing revenue streams will be approached with caution.
Sales from monographs represent a relatively small portion of revenues for a university press, but they are still significant enough that some care has to be taken around any project that might disrupt revenues, small as they might be, from monograph sales.
Print vs. Digital
Print remains the primary revenue stream for monographs, with reports from our interviewees ranging from 70