Re: publishers' #1 short-term problem

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

As I have been reflecting about what challenges face university 
presses in the near term, and reading more about what is 
happening in other parts of the publishing industry, I feel 
confident in declaring that the #1 problem that book (not 
journal) publishers in almost all sectors face for the 
foreseeable future (5-10 years) is how to accomplish the 
transition from print-based to electronic publishing 
successfully. The truth is that, while in percentage growth 
e-book sales are made great strides in recent years (one hears of 
growth exceeding 300% year to year), they still total as an 
overall percentage of book sales a very small amount, not 
exceeding in most sectors even 5% yet.

Economically, publishers have to figure out how to continue 
making enough money from declining print sales in order to make 
the investment in technology and trained staff necessary to 
prepare for the future when e-book sales will begin to bring in 
the majority of revenues. This transition happened relatively 
quickly in journal publishing, in less than a decade. The 
complications, however, for books are far greater and more 
complex, meaning that the risks of not being able to survive long 
enough to see the transition through are very real and immediate.

Michigan Press director Phil Pochoda touches on this in his 
recent article "UP 2.0: Some Theses on the Future of Academic 
Publishing " in the Journal of Electronic Publishing. But he is 
not alone. In the latest issue of Book Business, I read similar 
concerns from publishers in other sectors of our industry. The 
head of Minneapolis-based Lerner Publishing Group, which 
identifies its main customers as "school libraries and 
institutional markets," says: "While it's understood that the 
majority of every book publisher's revenue now is still derived 
from print revenue, without digital elements, print will suffer 
because the relevancy of the house will diminish....There's a 
myriad of challenges here....It's a challenge because creating a 
digital infrastructure is not an inexpensive thing....So it's a 
real fine line to be able to fund the change in workflow [to XML] 
without necessarily counting on revenue--digital revenue.

Another article titled "Hitting a Moving Target" also articulates 
the challenges for publishers in "balancing short-and long-term 
investment," in light of the fact that "so much of the business 
is still wrapped up in print sales" but planning now for a future 
of predominantly e-book sales is imperative for survival.  The 
publisher of Harlequin romance novels is among those who face 
this dilemma, as revealed in the article.

As industry guru Mike Shatzkin is quoted in the article as 
saying: "When you make an acquisition decision for a book that's 
going to be published in two years, that book will be published 
into a print market that is not as robust as the print market is 
now. So you need to lead the target on those kinds of decisions" 
and be thinking already of making adjustments in workflow to 
re-purpose the content for use on as many different available 
electronic platforms as possible, without succumbing to the 
temptation to get into the business of producing those platforms 
themselves, which he thinks it is a bad idea for publishers to do 
since they have no real experience with that side of the 
business.

Many university presses right now are struggling with how to get 
from here to there, and the early results, as Penn State's 
Patrick Alexander reported at the ALA meeting in January on our 
experiment with "open access" e-book cum print publishing is not 
terribly encouraging. So, pray for us all out there and hope we 
can find a way to cut through this Gordian knot.

Sanford G. Thatcher
Executive Editor for Social Sciences and Humanities
Penn State University Press
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu
Phone: (214) 705-9010
http://www.psupress.org