Because vanity presses are not as selective as commercial publication, publication by a vanity press is typically not seen as conferring the same recognition or prestige. Vanity presses do offer more independence for authors than does the mainstream publishing industry but their fees are high and sometimes restrictive contracts are required.
International trends in the production and use of scholarly
Library acquisitions tend increasingly to focus on catering for broader readerships. Scholars active in focused disciplines typically have to deal with a small market, which affects their ability to publish the necessary number of publications to proceed through the ranks.
In a more recent paper, Margaret Dalton14examined the concerns of the relevant parties involved in the chain of book publishing: publishers, booksellers, librarians, students, general readers and authors.
Scholars: The increasing linkage of tenure and status with publications has led to a kind of `forced productivity' linked to a search for measures of impact. In the humanities, publishing books remains the dominant goal of faculty members; issues of quality and impact are now fre- quently and problematically raised in their working environment. Con- siderations such as the significance and multi-dimensionality of book topics, their scope, and the depth of the approach tend to become secondary in comparison with the clear positioning of journal articles in terms of citation rates and impact factors.
Publishers: The main purpose of university presses, which is to publish the best scholarship available in their institutions and elsewhere, appears unable to offset the importance of being economically viable, at least in the minds of the strategic leadership of such institutions, which fre- quently, however, undertake subsidisation from central budgets of many other possibly analogous activities and projects considered to be
`core to the mission'. University presses are always expected to `balance their books'; with falling numbers and sales of monographs, they have been forced to expand their focus to include the publication of refer- ence books, textbooks and books removed as unmarketable from the lists of commercial publishers. University presses are forced to consider what will sell, and rejection rates for manuscripts are high. In the race to deliver marketable publications it has become more-or-less irrelevant whether a manuscript constitutes ground-breaking research.
In rearguard attempts to attract the best subject-specific monographs, some university presses have gone to great lengths in marketing them- selves as publishers specialising in certain subject areas. Others have taken part in advocacy towards a reappraisal of their role, arguing that a revitalised and broad commitment to institutional publishing can en- hance the impact of their academic programmes, attract brilliant scholars, enhance collective reputations, maintain a strong voice in what constitutes sound/outstanding scholarship, and even (at the prac- tical level) reduce costs.14This goes along with the imminent develop-
ment of digital institutional repositories, which may re-focus attention on the in-house workings of a scholarly community, newly energised by deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments.
Non-university scholarly pressesare currently also subject to serious pressures. The ‘decline of the monograph’ is strikingly evident in average print runs and sales15; library budgets are used up increasingly to satisfy bundled subscriptions/licences for periodicals, and devices similar to those described above in the case of university presses diminish the focus on scholarship and quality in favour of more easily marketable products. Thompson has summarised the various responses that publish- ers have made to shrinking retail book sales in a generalised change in their organisational culture.15
• Reduction of production costs,through process streamlining, tech- nological innovations, reduction of royalties, smaller print runs, pa- perbacks instead of cloth, etc;
• Increasing prices;
• Changing publishing strategies,including greater selectivity in title acquisition and list-building, specialisation, migration of publishing focus to better-selling areas like textbooks or trade books, exiting from the scholarly side of business, or developing the book equivalent of
‘bundled’ licences for online access to sets of scholarly journals;
• Enhanced use of diversified marketingapproaches; and
• Diversificationinto joint print and online models, often involving free internet ‘sampling’ of digital text with the option of full-text purchase, in or out of partnership with online retailers, bundled licences, etc.
Booksellers, book buyers and libraries: Libraries,being the principal mar- ket of university press publications, have responded to limited financial resources by maintaining very expensively packaged subscriptions to serials instead of purchasing books, often investing in electronic-only re- sources, expanding inter-library shared-purchasing and loan agree- ments, and even turning a blind eye to the photocopying of books instead of buying them. Many factors have diminished the ability of scholarsto buy books themselves, the hallmark of ‘old’ forms of schol- arship. In order for booksellers to make a profit in constrained spaces, rapid turnover is crucial, and unsold books are often quickly returned to publishers. Whole books are read less and less by students, who are fre- quently given compilations (readers) or who are directed to, or opt for, more recent and/or shorter publication options such as book reviews and summary articles, often on the internet.
The economics of publishing by university presses and commercial scholarly academic presses need to be taken into account. In terms of costs, 62.7% is attributable to printing, paper, binding and other produc- tion items, while promotion, distribution and fulfilment make up 12.7% of costs, with editorial expenditures also being significant. Monograph prices have accordingly increased by 82% between 1986 and 2003.
It is important to note that pricing practices for book sales vary consid- erably from country to country. Close to home was the trenchant ob- servation that Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, first published in South Africa, retailed for R150 here at the same time as it was available for the equivalent of R70 in the USA, R80 in the UK, and R75 in India; these comparative figures were not relatable to the so-called ‘Big-Mac’ indi- cators, i.e. they were not caused by systematic differences in monetary buying power between the countries concerned.