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Copyright 2002 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education

May 3, 2002, Friday

SECTION: THE CHRONICLE REVIEW; Pg. 15

LENGTH: 1693 words

HEADLINE: E-Publish or Perish

BYLINE: MARSHALL POE

BODY:
What do good publishers do? They produce quality books in a timely fashion at reasonable prices and distribute them widely. Until recently, academic publishers were good publishers. Now, many are not. Increasingly, they will publish only books that have the prospect of being profitable; their publishing process is glacial; they often charge large sums for small books; and their mode of distribution is, in the age of the Internet, primitive.

Instead of good publishers, they have become "good" publishers -- that is, they have prestigious reputations. Yet we continue to go back to them. Like tradition-bound monks of the early print era, we maintain the old, inefficient ways while a revolution is occurring all around us. It need not be so.

In 1994, having received my Ph.D. in early Russian history the year before, I set out to find a tenure-track job. Given that one in two Ph.D.'s in history never finds such a position, I knew the odds were against me. My mentors informed me of the hard truth: To get a job, I needed a book. And not just any book, but one from a "good" publisher.

I had already produced a published bibliography, but that wouldn't be sufficient. So I wrote a monograph on early European descriptions of Russia and offered it to a whole slew of "good" academic publishers. All but one declined. Most pleaded financial constraints: Obscure monographs do not sell well. The one interested press sent my book out to be vetted. After a number of months, I received the reviews. I had a good idea who the reviewers were (it's a very small field); happily, both recommended publication with minor amendment. It would have been difficult for them to say anything else, because they knew I had to publish or perish.

I considered myself lucky. I knew many young scholars who were turned away by the entire raft of "good" publishers. But I had a book contract and expected to get that tenure-track job. I didn't. For several years, I held postdocs and one-year teaching appointments, during which time I awaited the appearance of my first book and worked on a second. Finally, the postdocs ran out, and I took a job in academic administration. My book was available in January 2001. Ironically, my second monograph was completed at the same time.

That experience left me wondering about what makes a good university press. Not only did I not get a job; by the time my book appeared, it was three years old and somewhat out-of-date and, at about $50, very expensive. If the main purpose of publishing that first monograph is, for most young scholars, getting a job, and if a press's prestige is insufficient to conquer the job market, what real value does it add to the process of scholarly communication?

That was not an idle question: I had to decide what to do with the second book. I could have followed the same strategy I had pursued with my first monograph. That did not recommend itself, particularly since I was working in administration. And then it dawned on me: If I was not going to use the book to leverage my academic career, the "good" university presses -- those that offered prestige -- had little to offer me.

I was thinking the unthinkable: I would publish my own book. As any academic author knows, "self-published" is a nasty word. The common wisdom has it that so-called vanity presses publish amateurish authors, while "good" presses publish professionals. And here, exactly, was the paradox: What was a professional author to do when the "good" presses were not good anymore? I decided to use my second book to test a hypothesis about scholarly publishing in the humanities: that scholars are better suited to publish monographs than university presses, at least as those presses currently operate. To do that, I turned to electronic technology and set about creating an electronic text.

The first step was to make sure the book met professional standards. "Good" presses do that by sending manuscripts to experts. As my experience suggests, such a system is hampered by the fact that reviewers have little incentive to recommend rejection (and, in small fields, they know they probably will not remain anonymous). So I sent the book to scholars whom I trusted to tell me the truth. They did, and I revised the book accordingly.

The second step was to make sure that the book was well edited. "Good" presses are supposed to have professional editors to help authors accomplish that. Increasingly, however, they do not: Editors cost a lot of money, and, in many cases, authors are required to submit camera-ready copy. Luckily, I had produced camera-ready copy for a press before and knew I could edit the book myself. So I checked the manuscript line by line, then imposed on several friends to look it over. After two weeks or so, I was satisfied that the text was reasonably clean. Since the book was in electronic form, it could be easily corrected later.

The third step was to "make" the book. "Good" presses have book designers to do that. I began by formatting the electronic text like a standard book. I added an unpretentious electronic cover, broke the book into chapters, added running headers, produced an index, and so on. After several hours, the manuscript had been made into a e-book. It still looked and behaved, however, like a document in a word-processing program.

But anyone who has ever worked with a desktop-publishing program knows what to do next. I selected Adobe Acrobat to make a composite of my book. The process took an hour, and the result was remarkable: The fonts were clean; each page had the proper margins, running headers, and footnotes; and the graphs were displayed in vivid color. But it was better than a printed book: It could be reproduced and transmitted with incredible ease; it could be "navigated" using imbedded hyperlinks; and it could be searched by word or phrase.

Then, I needed to publish the book. "Good" presses often have marketing specialists to identify and notify a "target audience." But I knew who my audience would be -- scholars interested in early Russian history. It was easy to advertise the book to them, for almost all (220) were on an e-mail discussion list called the "Early Slavic Studies List." I simply posted a message announcing my book and inviting people to download it from a site on the World Wide Web.

My book was published, but two things remained to be done. I wanted it reviewed. That proved simple. Using an Internet search engine, I compiled the e-mail addresses of about 25 prominent history journals and, under a brief cover letter, sent them the book as an e-mail attachment. Not all of them responded, but some did and promised the book would be reviewed. I also wanted to arrange for permanent public access. That was more difficult. Most self-published e-books are ephemeral because they are not systematically preserved by publishers and libraries. Once the author/publisher loses interest (or expires), the e-book goes "out of print." And since it is not available from a publisher or in a library, it is, for all intents and purposes, unavailable to those who do not already have it.

The solution was suggested by preservation librarians here at Harvard, who recommended two courses of action. I could send the book in electronic form to large research libraries like Harvard -- if librarians wanted to add it to their collections, they could create a universal catalog record (so the book could always be found) and store the electronic copy on their server (so it would always be available). Or, if I was interested in making a profit, I could contact a provider of "publishing services" like Xlibris to make the book widely available for sale. For a small price, such companies will register, format, archive, publicize, sell, distribute, and pay royalties on books. Once they make the book available on the Web, acquisitions librarians can purchase it and arrange for it to be stored (digitally and in hard copy), cataloged, and made accessible. I opted to send the book directly to libraries.

So, what is the balance sheet? Was my hypothesis confirmed or rejected? The book I published with a university press took more than three years to produce, is available only on paper, and costs almost $50; my e-book took about three months to produce, is available to everyone, and costs nothing. Hypothesis confirmed?

Certainly not everyone would agree. I was able to opt for the efficiency of self-publication over the prestige of the university-press production. Faculty members do not have that luxury. No junior scholar would, or could, self-publish a manuscript on the Web instead of sending it to a university press. Even senior scholars with nothing to lose in terms of advancement would not venture down that path. The professional and psychic costs of going against the publishing grain and the academic culture are too high for most scholars to bear.

But the old, inefficient means of scholarly communication is slowly dying. More and more books are available online, most of them from university presses themselves. That should come as no surprise: The "good" publishers realize that their business is unsustainable and that their primary asset is prestige, and they are wisely using it to enter the market in humanities e-books. While most historians would not publish an e-book on their own, they might be more likely to if it were published by a "good" publisher. So forward-looking university presses are in the process of trying to persuade humanists to "go electronic" under their flag. If they are successful, then significant economies of Web publishing and print-on-demand will be realized, and "good" publishers will become good publishers again.

Marshall Poe is an Allston Burr senior tutor and a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University. He is the author of A People Born to Slavery: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476-1748 (Cornell University Press, 2000) and The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century: A Quantitative Analysis of the "Duma Ranks," 1613-1713 (available to download in PDF format at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/ mpoe).