The Democratization of Media Reisa Levine 8. The Texts of Digital Publishing Academic Publishing at the Crossroads John B. The Digital Citizen Digital Citizenship Timothy W. Grassroots Politics in Popular Online Spaces: Balancing Alliances Julie Uldam From Disability to Functional Diversity: Power, Knowledge, Surveillance The Wired Body and Event Construction: Configuring the Face as a Technology of Citizenship: Ethical Concerns about Digital Property: New search User lists Site feedback Ask a librarian Help. Advanced search Search history. Browse titles authors subjects uniform titles series callnumbers dewey numbers starting from optional.
See what's been added to the collection in the current 1 2 3 4 5 6 weeks months years. Cite this Email this Add to favourites Print this page. Catalogue Persistent Identifier https: You must be logged in to Tag Records. Introduction Digital communication Defining new media The texts of digital publishing The digital citizen Power, knowledge, surveillance Digital property The digital commons new infrastructures of science Digital aesthetics more Introduction Digital communication Defining new media The texts of digital publishing The digital citizen Power, knowledge, surveillance Digital property The digital commons new infrastructures of science Digital aesthetics Digital labor Technology, culture, and society Digital identities Information globalism Reading machines Conclusion.
In the Library Request this item to view in the Library's reading rooms using your library card. They have always taken as their central activity the conversion of data into useful knowledge and into wisdom.
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This is the role of communication experts, however, not journalists who have no in-depth knowledge in areas such as economics, law, science, and policy. The New York Times, for example, registered a This financial hemorrhaging was very grave news for traditional journalism: Laying off journalists is the worst possible strategy for a newspaper such as the New York Times because, obviously, this would undermine the quality that distinguishes it from free newspapers and the Internet.
Other exemplary newspapers suffered similar losses: Among the weekly news magazines, Time saw losses of 30 percent and Newsweek losses of 40 percent in the second quarter of There is a similar trend in Europe. Oddly enough, however, there is one sector that is surviving: The Wall Street Journal grew by 12, copies in for a total of 2. Its leadership attributes that financial success to the new iPod and Blackberry applications. While the majority of weekly news magazines were in decline, The Economist doubled its circulation from , copies in and 1,, copies in What is their secret?
Specialized information, as they supply trust- worthy, specialized information, and yet they are also open to other subject matter once covered by the generalists. The strategy at the Wall Street Journal and The Economist has been to snatch a portion of the market from the gener- alists while maintaining their specialist focus. In the second quarter of , specialized magazines such as the Disney publication Family Fun grew by It is too soon, however, to speculate on the outcome.
For the time being, it is in the experimental section livingstories. One interesting but disturbing observation is that the journalism that survives is the journalism that focuses on very specific disciplines such as economics, politics, science, or armaments, not the journalism of first-class writing that rises to literary excellence.
It appears that the good stories will be found on the Internet while the analysis by experts and highly special- ized journalists will be found in print. The most striking case is that of the Atlantic Monthly, the celebrated periodical where journalists of such renown as Faulkner, Twain, and Hemingway have put their signature on feature articles. Considering that its website has more visitors than that of its great competitor, the New Yorker, this has been a relatively successful move. Such success, however, derives from replacing journalists and journalistic report- ing with blogs and editorials by such figures as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics, and by professional politicians who are at odds with each other such as Christopher Hitchens staunch defender of the Iraq inva- sion and an avowed atheist and Andrew Sullivan homosexual, HIV-positive, Roman Catholic, and economically liberal Republican , for this generates the controversy that brings visitors to the website.
All of that, however, is a far cry from those feature articles of days gone by that were written with such literary flair that they had power to change the course of history, for example, helping to bring about the abolition of slavery in the US. He has also observed, however, that the public is willing to pay for information only if it is highly special- ized and very well explained and contextualized—in other words, expert information. Philip Meyer has calculated that will be the last year that newspapers are printed in the US. Obviously, newspapers will disappear long before that, however, because they will not last until there is only one reader left.
Yet Meyer is optimistic. While he believes that newspapers definitely will not continue to enjoy the revenues and readership they have had until now, because readers, primarily, but also revenues are forsaking them for the Internet, they do still have a future, and it lies in selecting the information and providing the analytical and explanatory content that keeps the finan- cial and intellectual elite informed.
Those elite are very important because they represent newspaper customers, Meyer argues. This is the role Le Monde Diplomatique plays in the realm of European politics, for example, which brings us right back to our original premise, for Le Monde Diplomatique has hardly any journalists. The majority of its writers are sharp political, finan- cial, and scientific analysts who belong, primarily, to the elite among intel- lectuals and university professors.
To put it another way, in this model of the future, a generalist education in journalism studies is good for nothing. The alternative would be for the generalist, the traditional communications studies graduate, to focus on breaking news. Instead of feeling that we are in control, we feel unable to cope Schwartz The public loses interest and becomes voluntarily uninformed when it comes to that type of brief, breaking news that has always been top prior- ity in journalism.
It was suitable for television in the s, for example, because someone who wanted to watch television at a particular time would be forced to see that news. People have no reason to do that now, however, which is why television journalism has drifted into news-entertainment. That will also happen with web journalism.
Nonetheless, an influential elite does indeed need and value contextual- ized information, and that information must be created by people with a full, university-level command of the discipline science, economics, politics, law, and the like in which they report. Approaching it from a different standpoint, as described a few months ago on Salon. He believes that journalism will survive, but what will disappear is the news Kamiya According to Kamiya, the Internet gives readers what they want and gives the newspapers what they need.
The physi- cal layout of a newspaper means that people read information even if they are not looking for it. A person buys a newspaper to read the science news, for example, and on the front page, there is some international news or a politi- cal analysis. He or she was not looking for that news but, in the end, reads it. This does not happen on the Internet because the reader proceeds directly to specific portals. Audiences are split between the Internet and digital televi- sion, and that involves specialization, too, but in the opposite sense.
Only the intellectual elite are capable of making the effort, financially and mentally, to read content they need but, in principle, have no a priori interest in. That new journalism will be in print and intended for these influential elite, however, so it must be written by journalists among the elite who have university-level and even doctoral-level knowledge in the specific discipline they are report- ing, as well as enough understanding of journalism to write engaging text. Information obtained from a NASA press conference and analyzed on the educa- tional portal http: New York University Press.
The Economics of Attention. The University of Chicago Press. Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for Saving Journalism in the Information Age. University of Missouri Press. The Next Social Revolution. Preserving the Past in a Digital Era. The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. CS and PC were inspired by the famous Challenge for Change program, which ran out of the NFB in the s and s, putting filmmaking tools directly into the hands of ordinary citizens.
The mandate of Challenge for Change was to provide the voiceless popu- lation of Canada with the means to communicate… it used film to pro- mote social change and allowed the people themselves, not the experts, to express the social issues that concerned them. CS and PC were online before YouTube and Facebook and were among the earliest pioneering websites to aggregate and produce social issue media.
But CS and PC are so much more than two websites. Through live events such as screenings, discussions, workshops and film launches, our sites are deeply rooted in communities and we connect with people through a wide variety of networks. If the twentieth century was the age of broadcasting, the twenty-first century is the era of conversation and the new language is visual media.
This includes small produc- tion grants to filmmakers, the server space to house their media, training on using social networking and outreach techniques and, perhaps most impor- tantly, a context in which to make their voices heard. One crucial lesson that we have learned is that real engagement and com- munity building is not automatic; it takes work, demonstrated integrity and commitment to the causes. CS and PC are constantly breaking new ground as we run the projects using a bottom-up, community-driven approach. We skirted the controversial copyright debate by adopting the Creative Commons licensing model, we use Open Source software and we employ the latest collaborative work tools and processes.
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As a project of the National Film Board of Canada, a federal government agency, we had to carefully craft our editorial line to be inclusive and respectful; we are a platform to host debate, but the point of view comes from the community not from our staff. This policy has served us well over the years, and has kept us on track through controversies that can arise when discussing politically charged issues.
In this new context, we are once again redefining ourselves in order to con- tinue to meet the needs of our community. With camcorders, cell phones, digital cameras, and laptops in the hands of ordinary citizens, people are now telling their own stories more than ever.
CS and PC continue to thrive as important players within this global movement to empower individuals through the language and tools of media. Bibliography CitizenShift Web Platform: Parole Citoyenne Web Platform: In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved June 10, , from http: Retrieved June 11, , from http: Some Community Tips for Retrieved January 22, from http: Retrieved April 26, from http: Published by the Documentary Organization of Canada. Three months later Twitter again entered public discourse when the Library of Congress announced that it would house all of the so-called tweets posted on the rather expansive website—sparking almost instant public debate Bliumis and Scoble Much of the controversy surrounding this deci- sion was based on physical location, as it was the proximity of the archive to important documents such as the Gettysburg Address that caused concern.
But one thing that these critics do not address is how to archive new digital forms of rhetoric. Although one could potentially argue that Twitter itself acts as a kind of archive, it seems essential to main- tain a separate public archive for presidential speeches rather than relying on a private corporation for this service. There are multiple accounts associated with Obama. While neither is directly updated by him, both reflect the rhetoric of his administration.
Like all forms of rhetoric, the Obama administration is using Twitter as another way to speak directly to citizens in an attempt to influence public opinion. But how exactly is President Obama using Twitter? During his State of the Union Address, the speech itself appeared on Twitter, but only selected quotes were posted. The shortening of the speech itself was most likely due to the well-known character limit placed on individual posts. The Twitter version of the speech was condensed to exactly 12 quotes and comprises a mere words, much shorter than the full minute speech, which was close to words.
While one can safely assume that Obama hopes most American citizens will watch the more extensive speech, those who cannot watch, do not have time, or simply want the short version can read the condensed Twitter version. How should scholars treat this new form of condensed digital rhetoric? And what questions does it open up for scholars who study presidential rhetoric?
For political strategists, Twitter equates to a new way to commu- nicate directly with the public and, in turn, creates new rhetorical speech- writing methods. These individuals will be faced with decisions such as how to work the tweets that make up the speech, so that it will have the most impact in its condensed form. Scholars interested in technology and communication will hope to understand the way in which media affects the message; in other words, they will hope to answer the question: Or, perhaps, scholars will study the way in which Twitter is contributing to an increasingly flattened communication system, one where nuanced arguments are becoming replaced with easily digested rhetorical chunks.
Whatever the approach, one thing is clear; a new form of presidential rhetoric is emerging that needs new forms of analysis. However, most importantly it opens up presidential rhetoric to a new medium, which may, one day, fundamentally change the way that US citizens relate to their president. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Using digital media and, more specifically, Web 2. For example, the Indianapolis Museum of Art website www. Users of the site have the ability to upload images, videos and personal stories to the site as well as search for different media through its database.
These efforts are laying the groundwork for a more inclusive museum environment. Nevertheless, at this point in time, a great deal of research and risk-taking is still necessary by museums to answer such questions as: How can museums employ questioning strategies to further engage the visitor using social media applications? How might museums employ video strategies to create more meaningful and engaging pre-visit and stand-alone educational material?
And how can museums use internet-based technologies to create more visceral experiences? Eilean Hooper-Greenhill writes, Where the modernist museum was and is imagined as a building, the museum in the future may be imagined as a process or an experience. The post-museum will take, and is already beginning to take, many archi- tectural forms.
It is, however, not limited to its own walls, but moves as a set of processes into the spaces, the concerns and the ambitions of communities … [T]he post-museum will negotiate responsiveness, encour- age mutually nurturing partnerships, and celebrate diversity. Bibliography Anderson, Gail ed.
Emerging Technology and Changing Paradigms, eds. Katherine Jones-Garmil and Maxwell Anderson. American Association of Museums. A Think Guide, eds. Herminia Din and Phyllis Hecht. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. What is Web 2. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope. Thompson The new millennium is proving to be a testing time for academic publishers Thompson Growth rates of university presses have fallen to the lowest levels in many years, returns from booksellers have reached unprecedented heights, and some university presses have been faced with the prospect of imminent closure.
Nor has it been plain sailing for the big college-textbook publishers. Accustomed to annual growth rates of 6—8 percent, textbook publishers have suddenly found themselves faced with declining unit sales and surrounded by allegations that they are fleec- ing students with inflated prices Lewin Why do academic publishers find themselves in such difficult circumstances and what, if anything, can they do about it?
To understand the problems of academic publishers today, we have to see that their current predicament is the outcome of a long process of develop- ment that stretches back to the s and before. Curiously, and despite the unquestionable importance of books for teaching and the dissemination of knowledge in higher education, there has been no serious academic study of the modern book-publishing industry for more than two decades.
Probably the best attempt to provide a detailed analysis of the modern book publishing industry is the now classic study by Coser, Kadushin and Powell , but this is now very dated and it sheds little light on the profound changes that have swept through the industry over the last couple of decades. In The Business of Books, Schiffrin offers an impassioned reflection on what has happened to publishing in the age of conglomerates, while in Book Business, Epstein reflects on the trans- formation of publishing from a cottage industry to a business dominated by big corporations and retail chains.
These are not even-handed accounts of an industry in the midst of change, nor do they purport to be: They are personal memoirs with a critical edge, and they only underline the need for a more systematic study of the changes that are transforming the nature and prospects of the book-publishing industry today. It is with that aim in mind that I set out, in the summer of , to gain a deeper understanding of the industry in the US and Britain.
My focus was on academic and higher education publishing. To the outsider these worlds may look the same, but anyone who studies them in detail will discover very quickly that they are, quite literally, worlds apart. To be sure, they are both involved in producing books for higher educa- tion, but they belong to universes that are structured in very different ways.
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A field is a structured space of power and resources with its own forms of competition and reward. Markets are an important part of fields, but fields are much more than markets: They are also made up of agents and organizations and the relations among them, of networks and supply chains, of different kinds and quantities of power and resources that are distributed in certain ways, of specific practices and forms of competition, and so on.
Each field has a distinctive dynamic that has evolved over time. The logic of the field defines the conditions under which agents and organizations can participate in the field and flourish or falter within it, that is, the conditions under which they can play the game. So if we want to understand the problems faced by academic publishers today, we have to reconstruct the logics of the fields to which they belong.
Only a deeper analysis of that kind will enable us to see that those problems are not temporary and superficial disturbances in an otherwise smoothly operating system, but rather are symptomatic of a profound structural transformation. The field of scholarly book publishing has been shaped by two powerful dynamics that have trapped academic publishers, and especially American university presses, in a pincer movement. On the one hand, the kind of book that has been the standard fare of scholarly publishers—the monograph— has undergone a process of continuous decline since the s.
Experiences vary from publisher to publisher, but the overall pattern is indisputable. In the s scholarly publishers in the US and Britain would commonly print between and hardback copies of a monograph and expect to sell a substantial proportion if not all of them. Thompson 63 a relatively straightforward business. For the most part, presses could take the market for granted and concentrate their energies on deciding which books merited publication. But by the s that comfortable position had been radically transformed. Today most scholarly publishers find that the total sales of hardback-only monographs are often as low as — copies worldwide.
As unit sales have fallen to a quarter or less of what they were in the s, what was once a fairly straightforward and profitable kind of publishing has become extremely difficult in financial terms. Why have monograph sales declined so dramatically? Is it because readers are turning to other sources of information like the Internet, as many observ- ers have speculated?
The main explanation almost certainly lies elsewhere. Research libraries constitute a principal market for scholarly monographs, and in the course of the s and s they were subjected to intense pressures of their own. One of the most significant pressures was the steep rise in the prices of scientific journals. This, together with the increasing costs of infor- mation technology in libraries, placed downward pressure on the purchase of monographs. Library budgets were limited and something had to give. In the period from to —9, the number of monographs purchased annu- ally by research libraries in the US declined by more than 25 percent; similar trends were evident in the UK.
As academic publishers were also producing more monographs each year, an ever-increasing range of available titles was competing for a dwindling pool of resources. Academic publishers found that they were selling fewer copies of their monographs into university libraries and that the revenue generated per title was declining with time. At the same time, many American university presses were coming under pressure from another source: Universities faced their own fiscal constraints, and university presses, with their somewhat ambiguous status were they academic units or business units?
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How that has played itself out has varied from one institution to another. Some university presses have expe- rienced substantial reductions in the levels of support received from their host institutions, while others continue to receive subsidies comparable to or even higher than earlier years. There is no single pattern here. But what has unquestionably happened is that university presses have been subjected to more intensive financial scrutiny than in the past.
The professional lives of those working for university presses or other aca- demic publishers over the last decade or two have been shaped above all by these two fundamental developments. Many strategies have been pursued, experiments undertaken and changes forced through, all with the aim of trying, in one way or another, to bolster the finances of academic publish- ers at the very time when the market for scholarly monographs has been collapsing.
Perhaps the most significant change has involved the attempt to shift editorial programs away from monographs and toward other kinds of books that offer the possibility of generating more reliable revenue streams. In other words, university presses and other academic publishers have migrated into other fields. Trade publishing has been a favored destination for many American uni- versity presses, as is regional publishing; some have also tried to commission more books likely to be adopted as so-called supplemental textbooks at col- leges and universities.
That is not so much a move downmarket or a sacrific- ing of quality on the altar of commerce as some critics like Schiffrin have suggested. Rather, it has been a perfectly sensible response to a logic of devel- opment that has transformed the field of academic publishing and forced aca- demic publishers to look for new sources of revenue to sustain a monograph publishing program that is increasingly unsustainable on its own terms. The paradoxical outcome of that development is that academic publish- ers can survive today only if they become something other than academic publishers, that is, only if they are able and willing to move beyond the field of academic publishing per se and publish different kinds of books for different kinds of markets.
They are obliged to diversify their lists. The mix of books is the key. Such pressures have been experienced by all academic publishers to vary- ing degrees, but they have been experienced more intensely by American university presses than by their British counterparts, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press.
That is partly because OUP and CUP are much larger and more international than American university presses, and partly because they had already diversified into other forms of publishing most notably, English-language teaching, which was a major source of rev- enue before the decline in monograph sales became a serious problem. But they are not immune to the changes that are sweeping through the world of academic publishing and they, too, have been forced to adapt. The need to diversify presents new opportunities for academic publishers, but it also places new burdens on them. Now they must acquire new skills and develop new forms of knowledge and expertise about publishing fields that work in different ways, and about which they may know very little.
They also find themselves faced with risks on a scale to which they have pre- viously been unaccustomed. Thompson 65 looked immensely attractive to university presses, but they have sometimes found themselves paying advances that are too high, overprinting books, underpricing them, seeing their margins squeezed by high discounts and finally ending up with a warehouse full of returns and unsold stock. With monographs it is easy to lose money; with trade books you can lose your shirt. In many ways, moving into textbook publishing would have been a less risky and more sensible strategy for academic publishers faced with declining monograph sales; indeed, some of the British-based commercial academic publishers did exactly that.
However, American university presses have been less inclined to move in that direction. Partly that is because editors in university presses have tended to understand their role as one of publishing original scholarly research, not providing pedagogical materi- als for higher education; the idea of publishing textbooks has seemed like a formulaic activity at odds with what they perceive to be the essence of scholarly publishing. But partly it is also because textbook publishing has been seen to be the province of the big college textbook publishers, like McGraw-Hill and the various subsidiaries of Pearson and Thomson, and it has been felt by many that those big players have pretty well sewn up the American market.
There is some truth in that, but only some. The field of college textbook publishing is a field with its own distinctive structures and dynamics of change. To understand how it works, one has to see that textbook publish- ing is based fundamentally on the adoption system, which means that text- books are marketed to professors and sold to students.
The professors are the gatekeepers in the marketing chain. But the person who recommends the textbook is not the person who buys it. Hence the considerations that weigh uppermost in the minds of the gatekeepers are not necessarily the consid- erations that matter most to the students ultimately required to buy the book.
The adoption system thus creates a form of non-price competition— competition among publishers on grounds other than price that has shaped the evolution of the textbook publishing business. But while the struggle for adoptions ratchets up the scale of invest- ment, the only way of generating a return on that investment is through the sale of printed textbooks to students.
Most of the electronic and multimedia supplements are given away to professors with the aim of influencing their adoption decisions. Thus the only way to recoup escalating costs has been to concentrate on lower levels of the curriculum, where student numbers are large, and to increase the prices of textbooks. They have concentrated on the first and second years of the college curriculum, and they have commonly increased textbook prices by at least 6—8 percent per year. But the increase in prices has tended to fuel a second development, which has played a crucial role in the field of textbook publishing: The practice of buying and selling used textbooks is not new, but in the course of the s and s the used-book market in the US became increasingly national and organized.
That was facilitated by the prolifera- tion of used-book jobbers, who bought up used textbooks and sold them to retail outlets, and by the increasing involvement of the retail sector in the used-textbook business. While the rise of the used-book market has been good business for retailers, it has been disastrous for textbook publishers. It has meant, in effect, that the sales horizon of textbooks has been greatly shortened.
Before the used-book market really took off in the s, textbook publishers generally assumed an attrition rate of 10—20 percent; if a textbook sold, say, 20, copies in year one, publishers would generally assume that it would sell around 16, in year two. But with the rise of the used-book market, the attrition rate has sky- rocketed to 60—70 percent, in some cases to 80 percent or more.
So now the textbook that sells 20, copies in year one will typically sell only to in year two, and by year three it will be dead in its tracks. With the dra- matic increase in the attrition rate, the backlist revenue stream has dried up. Textbook publishers have tried various strategies to counter the debilitat- ing impact of the used-book market, but at the end of the day there has been only one strategy that works: However, as the used-book market took off, publishers began to speed up the cycle of new editions to render earlier edi- tions obsolete.
Now the typical cycle for new editions of the most successful textbooks is two or three years. Textbook publishers invest a great deal of time and effort in maintaining their successful textbooks in what is virtually a state of continuous revision. That is not an option but a necessity, because in the context of a flourishing used book market, the continuous revision of content and frequent repack- aging are the only ways of preventing your assets from rapidly declining in value.
Moreover, since a textbook now has only two years of effective life, all the costs involved in developing and producing the books, as well as the costs involved in producing a range of ever more elaborate ancillaries, have to be recouped in a very short time. Thompson 67 pressure on publishers to increase the price of textbooks. That dynamic, which lies at the heart of the textbook publishing business, can be sustained only as long as the end users, the students, continue to buy the textbooks that are adopted by their professors.
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But there are growing signs that that can no longer be taken for granted. The student was always the silent partner in the traditional textbook model. Publishers listened carefully to the gatekeepers because they needed their adoptions to survive, but they did not pay much attention to students because they assumed that students would buy what they were told to buy.
Now the silent partner is demanding to be heard in the only voice that really matters in this game. They are refusing to buy. They regard prices as too high and are inventing all sorts of ways to avoid doing the one thing they are supposed to do, which is to buy the books. They are borrowing books, sharing books, going online to shop around for the cheapest books they can find, and so on. Enterprising jobbers are importing cheaper foreign editions and undercutting the sales of American editions.
Textbook publishers are experiencing increasing rates of return and declining levels of sell-through. They are worried, and the future is unclear. So what is likely to happen? In the field of college textbook publishing, the struggles for adoptions will undoubtedly intensify, and there are likely to be further casualties, as the remaining big players continue to absorb smaller publishers and take over lists that are shed by other houses. Much ingenuity will be displayed in attempts to stimulate sell-through by offering a range of lower-cost alternative texts and customized editions and by set- ting up online bookstores to sell directly to students.
Further down the road, textbook publishers may be able to reduce their production and distribution costs by disseminating more content online, but so far the experiments with online textbooks have, for the most part, been disappointing. As for the university presses, many face an uncertain future. At a time when colleges and universities are facing growing pressures on their finances, some institutions may be forced to make tough decisions about what they regard as essential, and it cannot be taken for granted that a subsidized press will always fall on the fortunate side of the line.
Without wishing to suggest that these points are particularly novel, let me highlight five measures that university presses can take to increase their chances of survival. First, university presses need to reform their monograph publishing prac- tices.
Of course, they have changed those practices in many respects over the last decade, but they still tend to publish monographs in ways that were designed for earlier market conditions. The books are overproduced and underpriced. Unlike Oxford, Cambridge, and commercial academic publish- ers in Britain and Europe, American university presses have been reluctant to increase monograph prices.
There are various reasons for that. But that is beginning to change, and university presses will come under increasing pressure to gear their prices more accurately to the costs they are actually incurring in their monograph publishing programs.
Second, they should be more selective in terms of their list-building activities. Again, some presses have introduced measures to reduce the number of mono- graphs they produce and to redirect their commissioning activities, but they should be prepared to be even more proactive. The growth in monograph out- put over the last couple of decades has been driven not by an overall growth in demand but by a combination of other factors including the demand from academics for credentials that can be used in the tenure-and-review process and the short-term need of presses to meet their sales forecasts.
Publishing fewer monographs and concentrating only on works of outstanding quality might result in some friction with local faculty members, and some temporary shortfalls in front list revenue, but if it is accompanied by an effective shift of editorial strategy to other kinds of commissioning, it would strengthen the position of the presses in the long run. Third, university presses will have to look to other sources of revenue to support themselves.
It will not suffice simply to improve the way they pub- lish monographs. While the American university presses have tended to look to trade publishing as a way of generating additional revenue, that is, as we have seen, a path strewn with dangers. It would be prudent for the presses to take a more cautious view of the trade potential of their books and to devote more effort to commissioning other kinds of books, including reference works and books that stand a good chance of securing adoptions at colleges and universities. The presses could strengthen their positions considerably by focusing their attention on publishing for the higher education market, especially for those levels of the curriculum, like upper level undergraduate and graduate courses, that have been neglected by the big textbook publish- ers, which have been forced by the logic of their own field to concentrate on the lower levels of the curriculum.