Goodbye Monograph?

April 10, 2007

The internet has done plenty to ruffle the world of commerce. Lots of business models have had to be updated. Its influence will be comparable when it comes to academic publishing. I noted the following comment in the recent edition of Religious Studies News (March 2007):

Fifteen years ago Fortress Press could print 3,000 copies of E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), expect libraries to purchase 500 to 600 copies, and feel confident that they could sell the rest within three years. Today many publishers cannot afford to publish monographs at all, and those that do are more likely to print 300 copies than 3,000. [15]

That strikes me as a ridiculously small number of books to publish. Almost all of those will go to large research universities.. since monographs are priced out of the range of ordinary working mortals. All that work to write a focused book on a narrow topic.. and then it disappears into the stacks of a handful of research libraries.

I would not argue that specialized books have a terribly large public waiting to devour them. But they could be more widely accessible. Imagine this scenario: a web organization which publishes full-text PDFs of selected monographs. This would put the information directly into the hands of the few scholars who work on this material. Writers don't actually make money from such books.. so it is not as if anyone will feel a loss there.

The major issue with my internet publishing plan stems from the fact that monographs are valuable in the academic tenure process. A monograph published by Brill or Cambridge Scholars Press is an important career-helping work. My goal would be to set up a site that utilized a peer review process in order to vet the books that would be available online. Essentially there would be no limit to the number of books accepted.. nor any need to consider whether a book on the ancient Scythians has any real market, academic or otherwise. If it proved to be a well-researched book it could be posted on the site.

This strikes me as an obvious way to get out of the publishing logjam that is currently in place.. which is fueled by the need for academics to publish books but slowed by the small market of actual buyers of books. In the system I propose anyone who writes a good book could get it published online.. and then the trick would be publicizing that work and letting other scholars know it is out there.

If I could make one more point.. tangentially related. Not too long ago I watched the DVD extra that came with Neil Young's Prairie Wind album. It consisted largely of bios of the musicians who played with him on the album. I was struck by the random backgrounds of all these session musicians.. the unknown schools and odd paths which carried them into their musical career. In the end it was only whether they could play or not that got them a spot on the album. As I looked through those musical bios I reflected on how different the academic world is.. where pedigree means so much: where you went to school, where you work, who you worked with, where you publish. We live with all these signs of prestige. It would not be surprising to me if the internet and its open channels of information eventually knock down a few of those signs of prestige.. and make us a little more like musicians.