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.
A new era in authoring, publishing and reading scholarly
technological development that is driving changes in the publishing in- dustry, or whether change agents are capitalising on technological op- portunities in the light of a long-static industry.15,16
One of the most telling concepts in modern publishing is that of the
‘long tail’; this arises from two-way plots between the numbers of sales and volumes published in a given period16; the at-first pessimistic mes- sage of the predominance of items with small sales is convertible into optimism that new approaches to publishing technology and marketing can create a large number of opportunities in relation to the majority of worthwhile books.
In A ‘Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the 21st Century’, Lloyd has advo- cated a re-positioning of traditional publishers in the changing media flows of the time.17She argues that publishers will have to accept deep cultural , economic and educational changes and respond actively, thinking more about the possible diverse applications of the content of publications, and less about individual, integral products (books), the very nature of which is changing. Author-publisher-reader-user relation- ships are being re-defined in a much more ‘democratic’ and to-and- fro way. Ideas like Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ (see below), with authors becoming mere text initiators, and every reading changes meanings, are typical of the Zeitgeist. Stein in turn has described the
‘networked book’of the future, talking of “the book as a place, as social software – but basically …..the book is at its most essential, a structured, sustained intellectual experience, a mover of ideas, re-invented in a peer-to-peer ecology.”18
It is worth quoting Lloyd in full on her suggestions for the directions in which publishers will need to go17:
”Perhaps the only way to answer this will be for publishers to focus back on developing specialist expertise around vertical niches, taking advan- tage of the ‘deep niche’ provided by the long-tail world of the inter- net... In this context publishers would focus value on subject of genre expertise and intimate, direct marketing knowledge, providing editorial and marketing functions beyond the merely technical. In this scenario, publishers would need to move back further into the territory of filter and editorial consultant, and to re-focus energies on their (oft-forsaken) role as career nurturers for authors (a space currently shared at least by agents). They would also need to develop brands in subject of genre niches so that their platforms are able to gain traction over those de- veloped by competitors, and to become far, far better at direct sales
and marketing. Publishers will need to press further into the retail space, developing direct relationships with the consumers of their content, if they are to become an effective bridge between authors and readers.
Whatever shape the future holds, it looks like publishers won’t survive unless they regain some of the roles that over the years have been handed over to other partners in the field.”
Lloyd goes on to say that few publishers have begun to manage their task of “systematically creating, storing and seeding sample chapters, excerpts, audio or video interviews, author appearances, media cov- erage, features on social networking sites, and rich bibliographic ma- terial”.17
The scanning of huge numbers of out-of-copyright (and many that are still under copyright) books and manuscripts in some of the world’s greatest library collections conducted by Google and others is one of the dramatic projects of our time.19The implications are only now being realised, including the exploration of ‘what happens when books con- nect’, and the hugely expanding use of links and tags to diversify uses of, and connections between content. Copyright issues loom large in this domain, and this is reflected in the ground-breaking settlement being concluded between Google and publishers/authors which im- poses the commercial model of ‘full-text only for payment’ on the large and critical segment of scholarly books that are out-of-print but still under copyright protection, while the creation of an irreversible monop- oly may have potentially serious long-term implications of the kinds of cost increases that have been the main feature of commercial journal publishing over the last few decades.20
Jensen has written about the ‘new metrics of scholarly authority’ in the evolving world of networked books.21He defined the characteristics of Web 1.0 (1992 until about 2002) as one in “which authoritative, quality information was still cherished: content was king, and ……intrinsically valuable, with business models for online variants of print publications using the standard print wholesaler model.” Web 2.0, by contrast, “pre- sumes the majority of users will have access to broadband, with unlim- ited, always-on access to the internet, and few barriers to participation,
……harnessing collective intelligence…an era of endless information abundance, greatly changing the habits and business imperatives of the online environment.” Authority is measured by the ‘page-ranking’
methodology pioneered by Google, augmented by ‘voting by tag’
and many other elaborations of the networked society, culminating in
the evolving algorithmic authority-ranking methods of Web 3.0.The new era will allow assessment of the impact of individual works in multiple ways, ranging from the prestige of the publisher, the pre-reviewers and post-reviewers to that of other commenters/bloggers; raw and pre-val- ued links to the work or parts of it; prestige (including that of other work) of the author(s) and institution(s); reference or citation network and its temporal parameters (long-lived attention); inclusion in lists and other human-selected distillations; assignment of tags and by whom; etc.
All this can only be done by computers using particular algorithmic search programmes.
It is obvious that book publishing in this Web 3.0 environment will be a very different enterprise, and scholarly activity will acquire new char- acteristics.
The most comprehensive examination of book publishing in the digital ageis that of the same name written in 2005 by Thompson.15The author follows the ideas of Bourdieu in relation to ‘social fields’ and ‘capital forms’of book publishing22, and provides a large array of relevant infor- mation about the situation in North America and Britain. He identifies four major interconnected trends: Concentration of publishing activity in a few multinational companies; a similar concentration of bookselling in a small number of multinational companies; globalisation of markets and dominance of English; and the rapid, often sequential introduction of new technologies.There is considerable emphasis on text cycles, and the way in which publishers seek to maintain their control and profitabil- ity in the face of technological change and altered business practices (see above). The interests of authors, readers, publishers and intermedi- aries are separately examined and theorised.
The biggest issue in the new era of ‘abundant digital information’ is that of access, and the most prominent crusade is that for open (free online) accessto as many materials on the web as possible. The issue permeates all consideration of Web 2.0, and especially 3.0 environments, and ushers in the profound question of the sustainability, reliability, and serviceability of the new systems. It is accordingly examined in the next section.