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https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/03/02/costs-publishing-monographs-report-ithaka-essay
Accounting for Scholarship
A recent report on the cost of publishing monographs should be of some
interest to many people who buy, read and/or write scholarly books, says
Scott McLemee.
March 2, 2016
By Scott McLemee
Nearly a month has passed since the release of “The Costs of Publishing
Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology,” a document prepared by
the consulting and research division of Ithaka S+R. (Ithaka is also
associated with JSTOR, the scholarly journals repository.) The report
seems not to have drawn much attention outside the ranks of the
Association of American University Presses, which seems odd. It ought to
be of some interest to the larger constituency of those who buy, read
and/or write scholarly books.
If you mention the price of academic-press books to people who’ve never
purchased one, the effect is akin to a cartoon character with eyeballs
popping out and exclamation marks hovering in the air, with a thought
balloon reading, “What a racket!” (On one occasion I heard it said
aloud.) The dismay will usually cool off some as you explain how the
specialist nature of scholarly publications tends to preclude economies
of scale. A small audience means low press runs, yielding high per-unit
costs. That’s not the whole story, of course, but it often suffices to
explain why, say, a slender new book interpreting Moby Dick might cost
five times as much as a Melville biography thick enough to serve as a
doorstop -- and why no one in the family has purchased Aunt Louise’s
book, even if they’re proud she got tenure for it.
The authors of the new Ithaka report mention a ballpark estimate of the
expense to a press of preparing a scholarly book for publication (not
printing, just getting it to that point) that has been bandied about
over the past couple: $20,000. It’s problematic, but let’s imagine, for
the sake of argument, that it costs that much to prepare and to print a
monograph, and that every single one of its 400 copies is sold. In that
case the absolute lowest wholesale price of a single volume has to be
$50, just to break even. Many trade publishers would consider a print
run 10 times that size to be small -- with each copy selling at a much
lower price while still making a profit. It’s not that trade presses are
models of efficiency that scholarly presses ought somehow to emulate --
not at all. They resemble one another about as much as an ostrich egg
and a cannonball do, and the differences cannot be tinkered away.
Ithaka’s researchers collected information on the expenses involved in
bringing out 382 books from the arts, humanities and social sciences
published by 20 American university presses during their 2014 fiscal
year. The data assembled were granular -- drawn from the sort of
in-house bookkeeping each department (editorial, production, marketing,
etc.) had to do while handling each title. Some expenses are more
discretely defined than others. The cost of sending a manuscript out for
copyediting, for example, is not too hard to determine; just look at the
invoice. Calculating the fraction of an acquisition editor’s salary that
went into a given book seems more difficult -- besides which there are
the overhead expenses of clerical labor, rent, tech support and so on,
some of them provided by the hosting university.
The 20 presses surveyed range from small presses (averaging roughly 11
employees publishing 46 titles per year, with an annual revenue from
books of under $1.5 million) to powerhouses (circa 82 employees, 253
titles and more than $6 million annual revenue). They are segmented into
four size categories, with five presses each, and with some effort made
for geographical diversity and varying publishing foci (monographs,
journals, regional titles).
In short, it must be one hell of a spreadsheet -- and the researchers
establish three ways of defining cost per book to reflect the varying
impacts of staff time, overhead expense and institutional support. One
effect of the analysis is that the figure of $20,000 per book in
preparation expenses goes right out the window: the study “yielded a
wide range of costs per title, from a low of $15,140 to a high of
$129,909, and the range of costs is wide both within and across groups.”
Taking in the varying ways of assessing the expenses of almost 400
titles, the researchers find that the average cost per monograph is
between $28,747 (using the minimal baseline) and not quite $40,000
(factoring in indirect overhead expenses). It bears repeating that this
is not the final cost of publishing, printing, binding and warehousing
monographs of the predigital sort would entail additional expense.
The Ithaka report focuses, rather, “on the costs of producing the first
digital copy of ‘a high-quality digital monograph.’” For that to be the
benchmark -- rather than the traditional hardback monograph -- is in
keeping with the expectation that scholarship be made available in
open-access form, as both federal mandates and the emerging academic
ethos increasingly demand.
For scholarly publishing to meet the standards of quality established
over the past century will require continued investment in the kinds of
intensive, skilled labor that university presses foster. How to meet
that demand while simultaneously developing ways of funding open-access
publishing remains to be worked out. Ithaka S+R’s report doesn’t
underestimate the difficulties; it just reminds us that the problem is
on the agenda, or needs to be. Otherwise, the shape of things to come in
scholarly publishing could get very messy -- and not in an especially
creative way.
---
I messaged Scott after reading this:
I thought your article on the costs of publishing scholarly books was
very interesting. My wife's book based on her dissertation is over $100,
for example. I can see the logic of what you wrote but out of curiosity
I looked into the NY Times archives to find some archaeology book that
was reviewed between 1965 and 1967 and found the price much more
manageable. I seem to remember when I was at the New School at the time,
a book I needed for one of my philosophy seminars did not seem so
exorbitantly priced as they are today. This needs more investigation.
---
His reply:
Thanks -- that's an interesting point and bears thinking about. One
thing I should have clarified) is that not all univ press titles are
monographs, and "academic trade" books -- the kind of thing that gets
reviewed in publications read by the general public -- tend to be pricey
but not outrageously expensive.
What's happened over the past 20 years is that budget cuts have meant
the collapse of standing orders from research libraries -- an
arrangement where they'd buy pretty much everything in a given
discipline. Where a specialized title once might have sold two or three
thousand copies, now the print run is a fraction of that, so the books
get more expensive, and fewer libraries can afford them, etc. -- a
vicious circle.
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