The tension between the digital world and the world of the printed book was highlighted during “Why Books Still Matter,” a one-day symposium on scholarly publishing held November 14 at Yale University. The conference was sponsored by Yale's Whitney Humanities Center, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Yale University Press to mark the press's centennial.
John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, invoked the theme—the hazy economic future of print works in an increasingly digitized publishing environment—in his keynote address, saying, “Many look forward to the day in which we can etherize books online and commit what the director of the Beinecke Library, Frank Turner, calls 'bibliographic euthanasia.' ”
The protechnology view was represented by speakers at the day's first panel, “The Digital Future of Scholarly Publishing.” Yochai Benkler, a professor of entrepreneurial legal studies at Harvard, and Michael Heller, an expert on property theory at Columbia Law School, challenged the current publishing business model, emphasizing that all forms of culture today, from music to news, involve assembling information from various sources.
Digital publishing easily allows the compilation of content from a wide variety of sources, and Heller emphasized that “universities should be supporting the cutting edge of cultural production. Today, that cutting edge is all about assembly of multiple bits of information. In the classroom, it's course readers and online sharing.” But rather than making such assembly less costly, Heller said, universities and their presses “shrink fair use, clamp down on copyright 'pirates,' monetize every shard of an idea. I'm all for the survival of university presses, but let's not fund them by crushing the leading edge of art and science.”
Other panelists rebutted this view, defending the traditional book as the best means of exploring ideas in depth. As Akhil Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale, put it, “Books have something big to say.” Amar was part of the second panel, “The Idea of the Press in the Modern University,” along with three other Yale faculty members and Yale's president, Richard Levin, moderating. Of the five, the most provocative was Anthony Kronman, a professor of law and philosophy, who said that, contrary to the current practice of specialized publications for small audiences, university presses should “be partners in the struggle against specialization.” Kronman called on presses to “diffuse knowledge” by making scholarship accessible to the “interested nonexperts.”
The final panel, “Whither the University Press,” featured four heads of presses—Donatich of Yale, Peter Dougherty of Princeton, Ellen Faran of MIT and William Sisler of Harvard—who dealt with the nuts and bolts of experiments in digital and open-access publishing and surveyed other ways of expanding their readership. Faran reported on MIT publishing books simultaneously in print and open-access formats. In areas of business and economics, she said, the model has worked. “What I mean by 'work,' ” she explained, “is that we sold 4,000 to 6,000 copies” of the print edition.”
Sisler reported that Harvard's press is working on an open-access journal with the law school and is seeking ways of collaborating with various arms of the university. Dougherty suggested university presses seek international markets and shift their emphasis from the humanities and social sciences to hard sciences. Pointing out that consolidation has weakened trade houses' publication of textbooks, Dougherty suggested that university presses move into the area of “textbooks and treatises that can redefine a field.”
Donatich reported several online efforts underway at Yale, including the Digital Stalin Archive of translated, hyperlinked primary sources (the project is subsidized by a Mellon Foundation grant) and the press's purchase of the Anchor Bible, with the aim of “turn[ing] it into a kind of virtual concordance online.”
But the question of revenue and overhead remained central to the press directors during a time when universities are shrinking subsidies to their presses. Faran stressed that switching to digital publishing often increases costs without any short-term savings, and Donatich noted that decreased income from an open-access model would increase presses' need to rely on subsidies to cover overhead costs.
In the final analysis, Faran said, “all authors want print,” and Dougherty concluded with the hope that the panel question “whither the university press” wouldn't become “wither the university press.”
