Despite what several speakers described as one of the toughest market environments they have ever faced, nearly 600 university press people gathered in St. Louis June 22—25 for their annual convention, a time for declarations of determination and nourishing a sense of solidarity.
The meeting, whose stated theme was "We're All in This Together," came against a background of both public and private anxiety about the presses' position, at a time of diminished sales, rising returns and much disagreement as to whether publishing books with a stronger trade flavor is the best way to mend their fortunes or whether it simply leads to higher returns. North Carolina Press director Kate Torrey suggested the conference theme be renamed "Sleepless in St. Louis."
The public anxiety was expressed by University of Illinois Press director Willis Regier, who wrote in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that the presses are suffering from higher financial demands from their parent institutions, the decline of foundation funding, the takeover of professional journals publishing by international conglomerates whose prices strain academic library budgets and the fact that scholarly book production was growing much faster than the market. Private concerns were expressed in a closed-door directors meeting before the convention began, at which Phil Pochoda and Doug Armato, directors at Michigan and Minnesota, respectively, were reported to have declared the present situation an "unprecedented financial crisis" for many presses. They urged franker exchanges among directors, and with the AAUP itself, about the extent of their various fiscal plights. A public case must be more strongly made, the two urged, for the role in the culture played by the presses, and a more coherent plan collegially conceived for dealing with the crisis.
The first plenary session was unusual for including a couple of university administrators, often the butt of UP complaints. David Shulenberger, provost at the University of Kansas, said that when budgets were being cut by the state, "and budgets are being cut almost everywhere," the concentration has to be on teaching and research. Serials costs, he said, had quadrupled in the past 15 years, a rise three times that of scholarly monographs, yet academic libraries had cut out far more monographs from their purchases. "Libraries do what faculty members want, and it's journals they want." He could see humanities subjects moving away from books as a primary venue, with electronic sources preferred over print in most instances.
Joseph Weixlmann, provost at St. Louis University and editor of the journal African American Review, said he had been hit by the decline of independent booksellers and distributors. He focused on a thought tha came up more than once during the meeting: How good a customer for scholarly books is the average faculty member, who may in fact depend for achievement of his tenure partly on UP publication? He had found faculty often complained the library was failing to buy "essential" books they could easily buy themselves. In the end, both administrators agreed that there were systemic economic problems that had to be addressed in terms of state funding, problems that bore heavily on the UPs themselves.
The emphasis of the many panels and workshops this year was not as much as usual on new electronic developments— on which most UPs are now well up to speed—but on financials: sales and revenue forecasting, pricing, building rights sales, payment of advances and royalties, working with discounts and the like. Perhaps the most potent thought came from Yale UP's publishing director Tina Weiner, who observed in one session: "The good news for this year is often the bad news for next year, when those big advance sales come back as returns." The marketplace, she noted, was more unstable than ever, with used-book sales, Internet sales, fewer independents, changing interests in the chains and the decline in monograph sales to libraries. She repeated a mantra she had heard at the recent BEA show: "Flat is the new up."
Outgoing board president Peter Milroy of the University of British Columbia Press urged presses to keep up their "holy calling," warning that otherwise "you deserve to be replaced by library database managers." The costs of the wars being waged by the "military industrial communications complex" was crippling the ability to disseminate a more thoughtful examination of the problems that face the world.
The incoming board president, Seetha Srinivasan, director of the University of Mississippi Press, noted that the presses' mission to disseminate knowledge was often "culturally unfashionable, politically unpopular and commercially unprofitable." She went on: "The ground is always shifting beneath our feet, and I sometimes wonder how we keep going. But we really have no choice: university press books are the coin of the realm of knowledge."
