Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Journal of Scholarly Publishing 35.2 (2004) 118-121

The Transom
'De Libris Incognitis'

William W. Savage, Jr.

Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education last summer, University of Illinois Press Director Willis G. Regier remarked that the fiscal problems now confronting scholarly publishers could be resolved quickly if members of the academic community would only purchase more scholarly books. Exactly twenty-six books per professor per year would do the trick, according to his calculations. ¹

With all due respect, I'd say that'll happen shortly after an unaffiliated Pan troglodytes receives the Nobel Prize in physics and brachiates in celebration down the streets of Stockholm.

Which is to say, about the time that university presses learn how to sell a book to an individual.

Once, they knew how. I can remember receiving in the mail an assortment of seasonal catalogues, underscoring for me what I'd have supposed was the cardinal principle of university press marketing: To sell a book, one must first let people know that the book exists. But some in high places apparently have now decided that there are cheaper ways to announce their wares than printing descriptive catalogues and paying to have them delivered to thousands of people who might find in them something of interest. The potential buyer is thus challenged: 'Just you try finding out what we're doing,' the publisher dares. 'Look for our advertisements, buried among dozens of nearly identical others in the back pages of professional journals of limited circulation. If you find them, you'll note that they contain only the titles of books, the names of authors, list prices, and maybe some tiny pictures of dust jacket art. And you'll note that, while we don't tell you what's in a particular book, we might offer a line or two of puffery, rendered at our request by a respected scholar in your field, whose [End Page 118] good opinion is surely of more value to you than mere information about the content of what we expect you to spend the better part of fifty bucks for. Or, hey, you could wait for the reviews and learn about our list that way.'

A peevish publisher would almost certainly add something about the house's Web site, a prime source of information and always available for consultation by the impatient. What a clever marketing strategy that is. Put the potential customer online, where he or she can engage in comparison shopping and possibly find book prices lower than the publisher's list. I'd bet that the enterprising professorial browser could buy twenty-six brand-new university press books a year from Internet auctions, never once doing business with a university press. ² Is that the idea? I wouldn't have thought so.

Reviews in professional journals appear at least one year, sometimes two years, and occasionally even three years after publication of the books that are their subjects. By that time, a book may already be obsolete, according to the presentist canon of the modern academy. What's worse, it may not have sold enough copies in a year or two to satisfy the bean-counters concerned with inventory and warehouse space, in which case it might have been remaindered before most readers even knew it had ever seen the light of day. I've had the unhappy experience of reading a fresh-off-the-presses review in a quarterly journal and attempting to order the book it described, only to be told by employees of various book-selling emporia, 'Nope, we don't have it, and we can't get it. It's O.P. Says so right here on the computer.' But I've also had the pleasantly surprising experience of finding that selfsame book a month later in a remainder catalogue, selling at a fraction of its old list price.

The remainder houses still mail catalogues to people. Most university presses no longer engage in that activity. It doesn't keep them from complaining about their diminished revenues, something they seek to remedy by...