Some thoughts on the impact (or lack thereof) of the Web on university presses:
Many people in the publishing industry have fretted about the prospect of books going the way of music, freely pirated off the Web. The online world will no doubt offer many challenges, difficult to anticipate and even more vexing to navigate. The ultimate impact, for instance, of Amazon.com\’s decision to list used books on its site has yet to be determined. But whatever changes lie ahead, publishers, particularly university presses, are unlikely to find themselves endangered.
Whether heavily endowed or self-sustaining, public or private, large or small, regional or international, university presses straddle two very different cultures. And it is precisely that dual identity, that Janus-headed quality, that ensures their existence, now and in the future.
Full article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. Also in the Chronicle, Malcolm Litchfield suggests academic libraries may have something to teach scholarly publishers:
While university presses have been experimenting with exploiting the marketplace, university libraries have been acquiring electronic information-management expertise. University presses have been perfecting the \”push\” technique of getting their product into as many hands as possible; university libraries have been perfecting the \”pull\” technique of facilitating easy searching across the many data stores in the modern library.
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