Online access, competing digital formats, and open access publishing models have all contributed to the sales crash of print editions of academic monographs. But publishers, researchers, universities, and funders, however, aren’t ready yet to give up on a favorite form.
Interview with Brian O'Leary
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Email | Download
A two-year research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council reported in 2017 on the ominous health of academic book publishing. As the number of titles sold rose by nearly half, from 43,000 to 63,000 between 2005 and 2014, unit sales in the same period for academic books fell 13%, from 4.34 million copies to 3.76 million annually, a drop of nearly 600,000. According to a report in the Times of London Higher Education Supplement, that drop meant average sales per title fell from 100 to 60 books.
Any effort to save scholarly monograph publishing will rely on usage data, though that remains hard to come by. With a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Book Industry Study Group and several other collaborators in the US and the UK recently undertook a review of factors holding back adoption of e-book monographs. The conclusion – granular and comparable data on users and usage of such works is needed to justify not only publishing programs, but also research activities.
The challenge is that the information needs to be in some way normalized. As well, not everybody’s collecting information on every book, so there are gaps in the information,” explains BISG executive director Brian O’Leary. “Finding a way to bring people together to figure out how to do all this better was part of the goal of the project that we were part of.”
