Facing ‘Oblivion,’ University Presses
Rally ‘Round New Distribution Models
Deep in a dark closet in the bowels of the University of Chicago Press’ main building resides whatmay be the answer to all university presses’ distribution woes. On a computer server, dubbed the BiblioVault, sit 5,000 books in digital format from close to 30 university presses. Assuming everything goes as planned, BiblioVault will hold 12,000 titles from about 40 presses by June 2005, and continue to grow. Any scholar with a Web connection can search entire texts on BiblioVault (www.bibliovault.org), and then link to a publisher’s website to buy a book; at the other end, the publisher electronically manages its list, requesting from 5 to 300 copies from the on-site Edwards Brothers short-run printing facility when a book is purchased (in the future, they may be able to send their electronic files to any vendor). Not just another digital pipe dream, BiblioVault is one example of how budget-strapped university presses are banding together to cut distribution costs and fend off obsolescence. And, more often than not, this means turning to digitizing content for short-run offset printing, digital print on demand, and in some cases, electronic distribution to keep themselves and their backlists afloat.
Nearly universal among university presses is a lament for the decreasing sales of scholarly titles. With fewer independent booksellers to peddle academic material and college library purses pinched during the past few years, there’s just no shelf awaiting the scholarly monograph. Those presses that mingle academic lists with trade-bound books tend to fair a bit better, with the latter supplementing the poor sales of the former. Even technology is proving a Catch-22: as more and more scholarly monographs and journals are available in electronic formats, libraries and scholars are buying fewer hard copies, which in turn forces small presses to re-evaluate their print run sizes and warehousing. However, according to American Association of University Presses’ (AAUP) executive director Peter Givler, there is some hope. Estimated book sales for its 125 members were $455 million in fiscal 2003, up from $444 million in 2002. Most of the presses reported being in the black in fiscal 2004. “And returns were down. It wasn’t a terrific year, but at least people are on budget,” he says. Consolidation is the new name of the game, he added. “There is a gradual trend for the smaller press to get a larger press to distribute for them. Warehousing is one of those functions where economies of scale really do come into effect.” Another cost-saving measure is Internet-based distribution, which he says is “a lot further along in the university presses than in the commercial realm.”
Doug Armatto, director of the University of Minnesota Press and the new president of AAUP, is one of the biggest fans of BiblioVault. With 250 titles in the repository, nearly 20 of which have already been reprinted, UMP has incorporated it into its regular distribution work flow, even adding front-list titles. UMP is also working with IBT to do 10 first print runs digitally. “The real advantage [to BiblioVault and other digital databases] is that it makes for one seamless process. We don’t have to set up a whole new distribution chain each time, but can make a decision through our main distribution warehouse. Same with out customers — they can go to one place,” he enthused. In addition to BiblioVault’s print-on-demand capabilities, the CDDC also makes it possible for client presses to order short runs. “The beauty of marrying the short-run printing facility with the warehouse is that marketing people no longer have to do research to look at sales patterns every time a book goes out of print. Now they can do that once, and then instruct the computer to print when inventory is low,” adds Paula Duffy, director of the University of Chicago Press. Like many university press executives, Duffy migrated from trade (S&S’s Free Press). She touts two basic differences between the two marketplaces. First, “commercial presses would never keep a book in print if it wasn’t performing, and university presses are obliged to,” says Duffy. Second, due to the less competitive non-profit environment, university presses openly share industry information. “They realize the future will need to be a joint venture. No one body can do it on its own,” she added. Though they operate under the same antitrust laws prohibiting pricing discussions, university presses will share just about any other tips with each other. It’s a learning environment, so to speak.
Several university presses trumpet this spirit of free flowing dissemination of information: MIT Press has contributed to an institution-wide initiative, the Web-based OpenCourseWare (free notes, texts, tests — including the answers — and sometimes even streaming video footage of lectures), which MIT administration calls “intellectual philanthropy.” Though not yet on the bandwagon, Anna Bullard, director of sales and new business development at the University of California Press, admitted open courseware is all the buzz and may be the way of the future. Meanwhile, National Academies Press (NAP) publishes more than 170 books a year, simultaneously in print and PDF formats (the latter is available for free on its website, though the one-page-at-a-time viewing format makes for a frustrating read, and studies show, ultimately contribute to NAP’s annual sales of 400,000 print books, said director Barbara Kline-Pope).
Giving it away for free may seem extreme, but one thing is certain: the familiar distribution model used by university presses for years is currently being challenged. Richard Abel, director of the University Presses of New England (UPNE), a consortium of five university presses that share an editorial office and warehouse, said the changes are mostly results of the Internet. “We’re in a transitional stage right now, where the traditional distribution models are still around — by that I mean, we’re still selling to bookstores and libraries. But many of our buyers are individuals now. The end product hasn’t changed very much, but the electronic means has — it has changed a lot,” he explains. “We are broadening our marketing efforts, and increasingly looking to ways to find special interest groups (such as listservs and websites). We’re trying to be much more inventive to let the end user know that a book exists. Distribution and marketing are very closely related.” UPNE, which saw sales increase by 22% from fiscal year 2003 to 2004, is in discussions with Northeastern University Press to “see whether them joining would be a good fit for both.”
Johns Hopkins University Press is doctoring up the distribution of another core university press property: the scholarly journal. Project MUSE is an online subscription-based database that contains the full text to about 250 scholarly journals from 40 different publishers. Yet another collaborative is the investigative stages at Oxford University Press, where Project TORCH, or The Online Resource Center in Humanities, plans to revolutionize distribution of the scholarly manuscript. Initially funded by the Mellon Foundation, the project pays for the digitization of clients’ content, which is between $50-$200 per title. To ensure TORCH remains a beacon, executive director Phil Friedman said, “We’re taking a lot of advice from presses, libraries and scholars. There’s real value to be gained from digitizing scholarly content,” such as linking to other sources and searching across a database of books. “Given the state of the scholarly manuscript in print … this may be a way to reinvigorate the monograph as a way of scholarly communication, despite the decline in sales.”
Even when their Ivy League parent institutions scrimmage for the best reputation and top students, the presses are more often joining hands in peaceful accord. Four years ago, Yale University Press, MIT and Harvard University Press built a joint warehouse in Rhode Island, which is now up and running. Tina Weiner, publishing director at Yale, said it is in the position to take on new client publishers, if it finds the right match. “We’ve been expanding over the past five years. We built with an eye to the future. There’s even room to build more, if we need to,” she says.
Using a more traditional mode of distribution, the University of Toronto Press offers a simple solution for crossing into the frozen north to Canada. All a publisher has to do is get its books to the warehouse in Buffalo, N.Y., where the press makes daily pickups and takes care of all the border-crossing paperwork. Though it doesn’t offer sales and marketing, it takes care of everything else, with state-of-the-art online information and is EDI compliant.
The university press used to be a bit more carefree, and less concerned with the bottom line. But, let’s face the facts, the non-profit world is under pressure to at least break even these days. According to Columbia University Press CFO Rebecca Schrader, one of the main financial hurdles pushing more presses to rely on the big players for distribution is that they can’t afford the five-digit investment in software upgrades that are becoming essential in the evolving marketplace. Columbia is currently considering taking on some domestic publishing clients, despite a history of serving only foreign houses. “We’re seeing more demand in the marketplace, and we think we have an asset. We’re looking at several prospects, and they’ve all come to us,” Schrader said. “As a result of the severe crisis we’ve been through, university presses have had to become more aware and alert about business than they used to. There’s so little insulation between the small university press and oblivion.”
