The academic book of the future

Lyons, Rebecca E.

Rayner, Samantha J.

2016

Palgrave Macmillan

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Part of the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, this book interrogates current and emerging contexts of academic books from the perspectives of thirteen expert voices from the connected communities of publishing, academia, libraries, and bookselling.

Culture -- Study and teaching

Motion pictures and television

Books -- History

English

978-1-137-59577-5

978-1-137-59576-8

The Academic Book of the Future

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0001

Other Palgrave Pivot titles
Ben Clements: Surveying Christian Beliefs and Religious Debates in Post-War Britain
Robert A. Stebbins: Leisure and the Motive to Volunteer: Theories of Serious, Casual, and
Project-Based Leisure
Dietrich Orlow: Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster: Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies
in Film
Catherine A. Lugg: US Public Schools and the Politics of Queer Erasure
Olli Pyyhtinen: More-than-Human Sociology: A New Sociological Imagination
Jane Hemsley-Brown and Izhar Oplatka: Higher Education Consumer Choice
Arthur Asa Berger: Gizmos or: The Electronic Imperative: How Digital Devices have
Transformed American Character and Culture
Antoine Vauchez: Democratizing Europe
Cassie Smith-Christmas: Family Language Policy: Maintaining an Endangered Language
in the Home
Liam Magee: Interwoven Cities
Alan Bainbridge: On Becoming an Education Professional: A Psychosocial Exploration of
Developing an Education Professional Practice
Bruce Moghtader: Foucault and Educational Ethics
Carol Rittner and John K. Roth: Teaching about Rape in War and Genocide
Robert H. Blank: Cognitive Enhancement: Social and Public Policy Issues
Cathy Hannabach: Blood Cultures: Medicine, Media, and Militarisms
Adam Bennett, G. Russell Kincaid, Peter Sanfey, and Max Watson: Economic and Policy
Foundations for Growth in South East Europe: Remaking the Balkan Economy
Shaun May: Rethinking Practice as Research and the Cognitive Turn
Eoin Price: ‘Public’ and ‘Private’ Playhouses in Renaissance England: The Politics of
Publication
David Elliott: Green Energy Futures: A Big Change for the Good

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0001

The Academic Book
of the Future
Edited by

Rebecca E. Lyons
Research Associate, University College London, UK
and

Samantha J. Rayner
Senior Lecturer in Publishing, University College
London, UK

Except where otherwise noted, this work is
licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution
4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit
https://creativecommons.org/version4
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0001

THE ACADEMIC BOOK OF THE FUTURe
Selection, Introduction and editorial matter copyright © Rebecca E. Lyons and
Samantha J. Rayner, 2016.
Individual chapters copyright © the contributors, 2016.
‘ˆ–…‘˜‡””‡’”‹–‘ˆ–Š‡Šƒ”†…‘˜‡”͝•–‡†‹–‹‘ͥͣͤ͜͢͞͝Ǧ͝Ǧͣ͟͝Ǧͥͣ͢͡͡Ǧͤ
All rights reserved.
Open access:
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4.0 International License. The images or other third party
material in this article are included in the work’s Creative Commons license,
unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included
under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from
the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license,
visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of Nature America, Inc.,
One New York Plaza, Suite 4500 New York, NY 10004–1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN: 978-1-349-88797-2
E-PDF ISBN: 978-1-137-59577-5
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775
Names: Lyons, Rebecca E., 1986- editor. | Rayner, Samantha J., editor.
Title: The academic book of the future / [selected and edited by] Rebecca E.
Lyons, Research Associate, University College London, UK ; Samantha J. Rayner,
Senior Lecturer in Publishing, University College London, UK.
Description: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037749 | ISBN 9781137595768 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Scholarly publishing. | Academic writing. | Open access
publishing. | Textbooks—Authorship.
Classification: LCC Z286.S37 A35 2015 | DDC 070.5/94—dc23 LC record available
at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037749
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents
Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction: The Academic Book of
the Future
Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner
Part I

Academics

1 The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded
Media Artefact
Tom Mole
2 Wearable Books
Michael Pidd

11
18

3 The Impossible Constellation: Practice as
Research as a Viable Alternative
Sarah Barrow
Part II

1

24

Publishers

4 The Academic Book of the Future and
the Need to Break Boundaries
Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite

32

5 The Academic ‘Book’ of the Future and Its
Function
Frances Pinter

39

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v

vi

Contents

6 The University Press and the Academic Book of
the Future
Anthony Cond
Part III
7

Librarians

National Libraries and Academic Books of the Future
Maja Maricevic

8 Strategic Engagement and Librarians
Neil Smyth

74

Booksellers

10

Selling Words: An Economic History of Bookselling
Jaki Hawker

11

The Future of the Academic Book: The Role of
Booksellers
Peter Lake

12

57
66

9 Academic Libraries and Academic Books: Vessels
of Cultural Continuity, Agents of Cultural Change
Kate Price
Part IV

46

Back to the Future: The Role of the Campus Bookshop
Craig Dadds

84

92
98

Bibliography

104

Further Reading

114

Index

118

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Acknowledgements
This book would not exist without the incredible hard
work, dedication and enthusiasm of all 13 contributors. First
and foremost, credit must be given to them. They worked
to some fairly improbable deadlines, yet each delivered
everything punctually and – equally as importantly – with
grace, good humour, and a sympathetic understanding of
the book and its aims, as well as the wider Project. Their
chapters are honest, thought-provoking, and important –
resounding with experience and expertise. For this, and
for so much else, we thank them.
Palgrave Macmillan must be thanked next. This Palgrave
Pivot was their idea, and a risk, but the whole team there
has been completely supportive throughout the entire
process. Their willingness to experiment, and dedication
to participating in the conversation has enabled this book
to happen, and has made for a professional end result –
just as an academic book should be. No stage in the rigorous reviewing process has been skipped, and people have
committed to working round the clock to get the book
ready for Academic Book Week. We would especially like
to thank Jen McCall, who has been a marvel! Also Lauren
Pettifer for the marketing, April James and Tomas René for
the editorial support, and Philippa Grand, Caitlin Cornish
and Katharine Nelson for the first conversation with the
Project team where the initial idea for ‘a book in a week’
was suggested!
We’d also like to acknowledge the support we had for
printing the first copies of the book, and for taking on
distribution: to David Taylor, Andrew Bromley and all at
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vii

viii

Acknowledgements

Ingram Lightning Source – we are hugely grateful for your vital input
into this project!
Finally, I would like to thank the person who does, perhaps, more
than any of the rest of us involved in this volume, represent the academic
book of the future: our Research Associate, Rebecca Lyons. She has
project-managed the stages of the book to submission of the manuscript,
communicated with speed and efficiency (and unflagging good temper)
to all involved, edited with tact and skill, and shown exceptional multitasking talents in juggling this with all the other Project activity. With a
background in publishing, but now in the final stages of writing her own
PhD, Rebecca shows what the academic of the future will be like, and it
is very impressive: thank you, Bex, for everything!
We have been incredibly lucky to work with people who have given
so generously of their time and shared their experienced perspectives:
despite the cynicism that surrounds many of the contexts the wider
Project is investigating, we are finding a huge amount of work out there
that is positive, collaborative and innovative. So we are incredibly proud
and excited to be a part of the conversation around the academic book of
the future, and to have played a part in the publication of this book.
Samantha Rayner
September 2015

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Notes on Contributors
Sarah Barrow, Head, School of Film and Media,
University of Lincoln: As a media and film scholar who
has published in the more traditional ‘book’ format,
Sarah has always enjoyed the opportunities afforded by
working with and championing film-maker, performance
and artist colleagues and students. The perspective in her
chapter draws also on experiences of cinema production,
film education and festival programming. Since 2011, she
has been part of the team that brings Frequency Festival
of Digital Cultures to Lincoln, and in 2014 she jointly
co-ordinated the Practice as Research festival/symposium
The Impossible Constellation at Lincoln.
Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications Manager,
Palgrave Macmillan: Amy works in the communications
team for Palgrave Macmillan and Nature Publishing
Group, both part of newly formed company Springer
Nature, a major new force in scientific, scholarly, professional and educational publishing. Amy has been involved
in Palgrave Macmillan’s Open Access monograph
programme from its inception in 2013, and is fascinated
by how Open Access book models are evolving in a challenging market, and how academics’ perceptions of Open
Access are changing over time.
Anthony Cond, Managing Director, Liverpool University
Press: Anthony is the Managing Director of Liverpool
University Press, the IPG Frankfurt Book Fair Academic
and Professional Publisher of the Year 2015, and the
Bookseller Independent Academic, Educational and
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ix

x

Notes on Contributors

Professional Publisher of the Year 2015. He is a Director of the Association
of Learned and Professional Society Publishers and an Honorary Fellow
in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool.
Craig Dadds, University Bookshop Manager, Canterbury Christ Church
University: Craig has worked in academic bookselling at Canterbury
Christ Church University since 1998, and prior to that from 1989
managed a branch of Albion Bookshop, a small chain of independent
booksellers in South East England.
Jaki Hawker, Academic Manager, Blackwell’s Edinburgh: Jaki’s years of
involvement in web-based digital text development, academic bookselling and managing textbook sales in the second largest academic
bookshop in the UK have provided her with a broad perspective on
text, publishing and bookselling. In a challenging retail environment, a
successful academic bookshop has to be proactive and knowledgeable
about their customers and their market, identifying trends and supporting learning.
Peter Lake, Group Business Development Director, JS Group: Peter
has worked in publishing and bookselling for the past 30 years. As a
publisher, he worked for Pearson, Reed Elsevier and Thomson Reuters
where he was CEO of the leading legal publisher Sweet & Maxwell.
During his time at Sweet & Maxwell, the business transitioned from
being a print publisher to an online database and services provider.
As well as running publishing businesses in the UK, he has also run
businesses in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. For the past four years
he has worked at the JS Group. The JS Group has two principal areas
of activity: on campus, bookselling under the John Smith’s brand and
providing solutions for governments and universities to distribute financial and other support to students with the Aspire range of services. JS
Group is also working very closely on the development and deployment
of the Kortext eBook platform.
Maja Maricevic, Head of Higher Education, The British Library: Maja is
responsible for the British Library’s strategic relationships and developments with the higher education sector. In this role she is responsible
for the Library’s collaboration with the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s
new national institute for data sciences, which has its headquarters at
The British Library. She is leading on the development of The British
Library’s relations with FutureLearn, the UK’s largest MOOC provider,
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Notes on Contributors

xi

and has worked over a number of years to broaden the Library’s postgraduate programme. She leads The British Library’s collaborative work
with the AHRC that has led to The Academic Book of the Future Project.
She is actively involved with the Project as a member of the Advisory
and Strategy Boards. She is also a member of the Universities UK Open
Access Implementation Group, and a member of the RCUK Advisory
Group, which is currently working to develop the RCUK Concordat on
Open Research Data.
Jenny McCall, Global Head of Humanities, Palgrave Macmillan: Jen
manages Palgrave Macmillan’s humanities editorial team, and has overall
responsibility for Palgrave’s publishing portfolio of monographs, edited
collections, handbooks and Palgrave Pivots covering literature, history,
philosophy, theatre and performance studies, culture and media studies, and film studies. Latterly she has been working to develop Palgrave’s
Campaign for the Humanities: http://www.palgrave.com/page/humanitiescampaign/
Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre for
the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh: Tom is the author
or editor of four academic books, including Byron’s Romantic Celebrity
(2007) and the Broadview Reader in Book History (2014). The Centre for
the History of the Book, which he leads, was founded in 1995 to support
advanced research into all aspects of the production, circulation and
reception of books. In particular, he focuses on how understanding the
history of the book in relation to past moments of media change can
inform current debates about the future of the book.
Michael Pidd, Digital Director, HRI Digital, University of Sheffield:
Michael has more than 20 years of experience in developing, managing
and delivering collaborative research projects in the digital humanities.
He believes that we are in a period of transformation, as all traditional
aspects of academic book production and consumption are being challenged. In his view, understanding what the future of the academic book
might be like is critical to understanding what the future of academic
discourse might be like.
Frances Pinter, CEO, Manchester University Press and Founder,
Knowledge Unlatched: Frances has been a publisher of scholarly books
for several decades – publishing thousands of monographs over the
years. She worked for the Open Society Foundation and saw first-hand
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Notes on Contributors

the thirst for access to scholarly books around the world. She is the
founder of Knowledge Unlatched.
Kate Price, Associate Director (Collections & Research Support), King’s
College London: Kate is responsible for strategic leadership across a
diverse range of activities, including the provision of support for the
research community in moving towards Open Access publication and
the effective management of research data; the timely and cost effective
procurement and cataloguing of library materials in all formats; and
the management of the nationally significant Special Collections and
Archives housed at King’s. She is currently Chair of UKSG, an organisation that exists to connect the knowledge community and encourage
the exchange of ideas on scholarly communication. Along with Virginia
Havergal, she co-edited E-books in Libraries: A Practical Guide, published
by Facet in February 2011.
Neil Smyth, Senior Librarian, Faculty of Arts, University of Nottingham:
Before taking up his current post, Neil was the Arts Faculty Team Leader.
Based in the Hallward Library, he is responsible for working with senior
representatives in the Arts Faculty to shape the strategic direction of
library services. His perspectives on the academic book come from
working in a university library, where he is surrounded by academic
books and, perhaps more importantly, current and future authors of
books.

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OPEN

Introduction: The Academic
Book of the Future
Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004





Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner

In early 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
partnered with The British Library to launch a call for teams to run The
Academic Book of the Future Project. The Project brief was ‘to explore
the future of the academic book in the context of Open Access publishing
and the digital revolution’.1 Our team2 successfully pitched to facilitate a
two-pronged approach. We are using the expert services of the Research
Information Network and Dr Michael Jubb to undertake a wide-ranging
series of focus groups, gathering responses to our research questions,3
whilst the core Project team are consulting with the communities of
practice connected to academic books to evoke responses via more
detailed pieces of commissioned research, symposia, workshops and
conferences. The mid-point of the Project, Academic Book Week (9–16
November, 2015),4 will highlight a week-long showcase of this activity,
plus other special events from our partners, including the launch of the
volume you are now reading.
Books matter. They contain knowledge, and knowledge, as the saying
goes, is power. Over the centuries, control of the production of texts has
been (and in some places still is) manipulated by governments, by religious groups and by those who fought (and those who are still fighting)
for their wider, more openly accessible distribution. Books are matter:
they are containers, crucibles, confrontations. They can teach, guide,
inspire, soothe, and agitate. They can exist physically or digitally. Trying
to define what a book is, or could be, is a challenging task: it exists in so
many different guises, and is always finding new ways to reinvent itself.
Our Project seeks rather to try and curate a map of these many guises,
underlining the strength in the diversity of choice available to the author,
whilst highlighting the challenges of production, distribution, use and
preservation that these choices bring.
Academic books, at least in the UK, have a currency as part of the
Research Excellence Framework (REF), which measures the quality
of academic research. There is, therefore, a pressure to understand
the map of academic publishing in its entirety. Given that scholarly
communication operates on a global stage, with different countries
having different (or no) national assessment systems, and that books
(physical or digital) circulate in ways that are difficult to track, the
Project team acknowledges that as cartographers, the most impact
they can have on that map is to log and analyse some key landscape
features. Engaging with so many different agents in the academic
book circuit has enabled us to appreciate their widespread willingness
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Introduction



to collaborate and their curiosity to learn from what others have done
or experienced.
The small volume that you hold in your hands or are reading on a
screen therefore represents a mighty amount of energy and commitment
to the academic book – to all academic books, in their past, present and
future states. The contributors have worked together with the teams at
Palgrave and the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future
Project to produce a witness to the extraordinary – and relevant – set
of talents and experiences, ideas and reflections that connect people
who inhabit the communities of practice that form the contexts of the
academic book.

This publication
An initial conversation with Palgrave Macmillan in March 2015 resulted
in the challenge to create a Palgrave Pivot for Academic Book Week. The
original suggestion – to create a book in a week – was modified to an
attempt to go from commissioning to production to distribution in a
rapid time frame: a Palgrave Pivot.5 Contributors were shortlisted from
across the Project’s four main stakeholder areas: publishing, libraries,
academia and bookselling. A proposal was submitted by the Project team
to Palgrave, and was sent off for review. The authors were approached
and chapters commissioned in late July 2015. The proposal reviews
came back just before first chapter drafts were due to be submitted, and
in late August 2015 all of the authors submitted their chapters. Review
and editing were undertaken by Rebecca Lyons, Samantha Rayner and
Palgrave’s Jen McCall, and with a turnaround of roughly one week, the
chapters were back with their authors for amendments. The existence of
this book owes a great deal to the unfailing dedication of each of the 13
contributors, who worked to extremely tight deadlines to expedite the
crucial commissioning, editing and review stages.
It is fitting that this volume begins with the perspective of a book
historian: no foray into the future should ignore the contexts of the past.
Dr Tom Mole, Reader in English Literature and Director of the Centre
for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, suggests
that whatever shapes or formats books might take in the future, their
most important role will continue to be their ‘transformative contributions to knowledge’ (p. 16). Whilst digital technology affords new
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

Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner

possibilities in terms of research and dissemination, it might also have
drawbacks in terms of readers’ engagement with, and comprehension
of, the text. Mole reminds us of the usefulness of the printed codex,
and the ‘need to ensure that the most valuable qualities of the academic
book as printed codex migrate to the new media environment without
being devalued’ (p. 16).
The next chapter moves from the past into an imagined future. In his
satirical dystopia, Michael Pidd, Digital Director for HRI Digital at the
University of Sheffield, describes a future in which books are wearable:
smart lenses that project data onto the back of our eyelids, networked
chips embedded into our hands to ‘summon sheets of interactive v-paper’,
and Data Projection Gloves (p. 19). In this iteration of the future, the
academic book has reached optimum levels of media-embedded, holistic, user-friendly interactivity. But the biggest innovation of all is the
concept of ‘Linked Ideas’. Books, articles and other research outputs have
lost all their old distinction, because ideas on a topic can automatically
be ‘located, retrieved and assembled’ from amongst ‘all written discourse’
(p. 10). ‘Like’ and ‘dislike’ indicators and a ‘comment’ facility are used for
the peer-review process, and the need to submit books for assessment is
obsolete. But does this vision of the future satisfy?
Dr Sarah Barrow, Head of the School of Film and Media at the
University of Lincoln, moves the academic section towards an examination of the challenging issues of Practice as Research, and considers the
academic book of the future in terms of research that does not conform
to purely textual outputs. Barrow argues against the prioritisation or
fetishisation of text over other forms of research output, and seeks to
eliminate the walls between theory and practice, pointing to the video
essay as a potential format that enables such work. There is a need, she
argues, to ‘trust in alternative ways of doing and presenting research’ –
the academic book of the future should be allowed to be ‘other’ (p. 25).
But, she goes on to highlight, changes in policy and evaluation exercises
will be required to enable and facilitate such otherness.
The needs of academics have shifted, but publishing and its processes
and products have also changed. Developments such as print on demand –
as well as huge shifts in digital affordances – have offered publishers
new freedoms, such as in the format and platforms for ebooks and other
digital content, and the ability to publish titles in smaller print runs for
lower costs. This has coincided with changes in the way that academics
research and write their books. In their chapter, Jenny McCall, Global
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Introduction



Head of Humanities, and Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications
Manager, at Palgrave Macmillan discuss the Palgrave Pivot format, and
the motivation behind its development within these contexts.
The function of the academic book will be just as important as its
form, argues Dr Frances Pinter, CEO of Manchester University Press
and Founder of Knowledge Unlatched. The ‘scaffolding’ (p. 40) around
academic books, including business models, supply chains, metadata
and digital tools, will require special attention. In the evolution of the
academic book, it will be ‘knowledge infrastructures’ (p. 40) that are
key: the ‘ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material
objects and their relationships within each discipline’.6 Interdisciplinarity
will increase as digital affordances not only provide answers to old
questions, but also encourage new questions to be asked. Delivery and
discovery systems for ebooks will have to improve. And publishers, she
says, will have to move with the times.
Anthony Cond, the Managing Director of Liverpool University Press,
highlights the inextricable links between the university press (UP)
and academia. A UP reports to its university library, senior university
managers or quasi-university committees: it is ‘a mirror to the budgetary, utility and reputational concerns of the subjects and institution it
serves’ (p. 47). But Cond is fairly confident about the place of UPs in
new and emerging landscapes and contexts. Open Access and digital
materials seem an inevitable part of the academic book of the future, but
Cond holds that the ‘esteem of the university press brand and the rigour
of university press peer review’ (p. 50) will be crucial – perhaps more
so than ever. The academic book may have several possible futures, but,
Cond says, the need for ‘credentialisation’ (p. 43) will remain a constant.
The close relationship between national libraries, researchers and
academic books has not altered in its essence despite huge contextual
changes, such as digital developments, says Maja Maricevic, Head of
Higher Education at The British Library. However, researchers’ ‘reading
and information seeking behaviours’ (p. 59) have shifted, with Google
becoming the most-used research channel. In such contexts, national
libraries will be pivotal for their preservation role, with researcher access
being provided through other channels. National libraries will also
become increasingly useful for their role in preserving digital collections
outside of scholarly publishing: non-academic ebooks, online newspapers, growing audio and video collections, web archives and digitised
heritage collections. Going forward, Maricevic suggests, a stronger
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

Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner

relationship between funders, policy-makers and other national libraries
will be a key aspect of The British Library’s role, as well as a willingness to
experiment with new ways of working – this Project being a key example
of this kind of initiative.
Neil Smyth, Senior Librarian of the Faculty of Arts at the University
of Nottingham, also considers the possible strategic issues and opportunities surrounding the academic book of the future – with regard to
university libraries. The expansion in book format options from physical to digital; the changing roles of academics and librarians, and the
consequently shifting relationships between the two groups; and the
importance of academic books to the REF and university funding all
have massive implications for the role of university libraries. How, asks
Smyth, will academic books be organised and accessed in the future, if
they are not in libraries? What conversations should take place between
academics and librarians around academic books? What is the place of
libraries in processes such as the REF? And finally, how can libraries best
support the academic authors of the future: the students?
Kate Price, Associate Director (Collections & Research Support) at
King’s College London, broadens the focus to consider the academic
book beyond the academy. As agents of cultural change, the reach of
academic books is wide, transforming knowledge and perceptions
(consider Darwin, for example), and influencing cultural attitudes as
their content and ideas disseminate. Price considers the social and technological barriers to accessing academic books; the potential volatility
of digital content (issues with archiving social media, for instance),
and the role that libraries might play in these issues in the future. Price
calls libraries agents of cultural continuity, providing access to current
and past thought, as well as the threads of reasoning linking the two,
and examines the implications in an Open Access future where the
academic book is entirely ‘de-coupled from the concept of the library
collection’ (p. 78).
Jaki Hawker, Academic Manager of Blackwell’s Edinburgh, views the
future of the academic book in terms of demand and supply. ‘For me,’
Hawker states, ‘the bottom line in considering the academic book of
the future is not “What does it look like?” but “Does it sell?”’ (p. 89).
The consumer will shape the academic book of the future, which will
be ‘inclusive, collaborative, available across multiple platforms and in
a number of formats’ (p. 90). Given innovations such as Open Access,
print on demand and learning platform development, it seems that the
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Introduction



academic book of the future has infinite possibilities. And maybe it does.
But Hawker argues that they will be ‘created, enabled and shaped by the
market’ (p. 90).
Peter Lake, Group Business Development Director of the John Smith
Group, focuses on a particular type of academic book: the undergraduate
textbook. Traditionally the staple for academic publishers, this type of
academic book is in decline in the face of major sea-changes in the ways
that universities deliver their courses, and the ways in which publishers
are catering for them. Universities often now create their own materials –
materials that increasingly replace textbooks – including Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs), online lectures and other digital resources.
Publishers are creating new solutions too, blending ‘traditional textbook
content with adaptive learning technologies, embedded testing and
assessment features, integrated assignment functionality, personal study
wallets and records, and collaborative learning tools’ (p. 94). ‘So,’ Lake
asks, ‘if the university bookseller is going to be selling fewer textbooks,
what will its role be in the future?’ (p. 94). The bookseller of the future
may very well assist in the discovery of resources ‘from multiple providers and in multiple formats’ (p. 95); create and maintain digital content
platforms; and take an active part in analytics and evaluation services.
Craig Dadds, the University Bookshop Manager at Canterbury Christ
Church University, considers the campus bookshop and its relationship with the people and contexts in which academic books are written and used. For Dadds, the campus bookshop is key to the cultural
life of the university, the student and staff experience, and the options
and opportunities available to those within the university system. He
is supported by a survey, undertaken at Canterbury Christ Church
University (CCCU), of one hundred academics. When asked ‘What are
the benefits of an academic bookshop on campus?’, responses cited the
importance of the academic bookshop as a bridge between academia
and the wider public, with open talks, book signings and other events
playing a key role. CCCU’s academics named the bookshop as a pivotal
location for locating niche and specialist information with the support
of knowledgeable staff. The bookshop is also an important symbol of
‘academic rigour and learning’ (p. 100) to those embedded within its
contexts, as well as those without. In this chapter the bookshop emerges
as a key player in the world of academic books, aiding not just in their
dissemination, but assisting in their creation and reach into the wider
world beyond academia.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004



Rebecca E. Lyons and Samantha J. Rayner

A launch pad for further conversations
The practice-based research process of creating this Palgrave Pivot has
not only resulted in an output with an integrity that the uncompromised
review procedures protected, but it has innovated in several different
ways: the spread of authors across very different areas; the speed with
which they composed and submitted their chapters; the work flows; and
even the cover – which was chosen by a public vote. But the greatest
innovation of this publication – what really makes it unique – is the
conversations that have been and will be created around it. Read them
individually, and the chapters in this volume are interesting, thoughtprovoking, insightful. Put them together, and suddenly new angles
emerge: contexts shift, horizons broaden.
This volume serves as a launch pad for future conversations to take
place. These will help to generate responses that will feed into and shape
the second half of the Project’s life, and they will also help to shape the
wider conversations taking place around the academic book in broader
areas, such as policy and government.
Professor Geoffrey Crossick ended his report Monographs and Open
Access by remarking how impressed he had been by the willingness of the
arts, humanities, and social science communities to engage with him, and
urging: ‘It is important that this engagement continues, because there is
much to be gained by working with the grain, and much to be lost by
not doing so.’7 This Palgrave Pivot provides tangible proof (in hard copy
and Open Access formats, and in the paratexts that have been created
and collected around its production) that engagement is continuing via
the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, and
beyond. The future of the academic book is collaboration. The future of
the academic book is in your hands.

Notes
 See http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/funding/opportunities/current/
academicbookofthefuture/ (accessed 6 September 2015).
 The Project team consists of Dr Samantha Rayner (Principal Investigator,
Centre for Publishing, UCL), Nick Canty (Co-Investigator, Centre for
Publishing, UCL), Professor Marilyn Deegan (Co-Investigator, Department of
Digital Humanities, King’s College, London), Simon Tanner (Co-Investigator,

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004

Introduction









Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College, London) and Rebecca
Lyons (Research Associate, UCL).
See http://academicbookfuture.org/about-the-project/ (accessed 6 September
2015).
See http://acbookweek.com/ (accessed 6 September 2015).
See Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite, ‘The Academic Book of the Future
and the Need to Break Boundaries’, Chapter 4 in this volume.
Christine Borgman (2015) Big Data, Little Data, No Data (Boston: MIT Press),
p. 33.
G. Crossick (2014) Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE,
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/
Monographs,and,open,access/2014_monographs.pdf, accessed 20 August 2015,
p. 70.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0004

Part I
Academics

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0005

OPEN

1

The Academic Book as
Socially-Embedded
Media Artefact
Tom Mole
Abstract: For as long as it has existed in its modern form,
the academic book has operated in what Jerome McGann
calls ‘a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes
[…] and the bibliographical codes’. It unites a particular
discursive genre with a particular material format. But now
the double helix is starting to unravel as new, genetically
modified digital formats force us to rethink what the academic
book can be. This moment of media change meshes with shifts
in the funding and assessment of research, developments in
researchers’ intellectual agendas and the challenges of Open
Access. As disciplinary boundaries become more porous and
scholarly outputs more varied, these changes will affect every
stage in the life-cycle of the academic book.
Keywords: academic book of the future; academic codex;
assessment; book history; format; funding monograph;
hiring; PhD thesis; promotion; research output;
socially-embedded media artifact; the academy
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006





Tom Mole

For as long as it has existed in its modern form as a printed codex, the
academic book has operated in what Jerome McGann calls ‘a double helix
of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes [ ... ] and the bibliographical
codes’.1 It unites a particular discursive genre with a particular material
format. But now the double helix is starting to unravel as new, genetically
modified digital formats force us to rethink what the academic book can
be. This moment of media change meshes with shifts in the funding and
assessment of research, developments in researchers’ intellectual agendas
and the challenges of Open Access. As disciplinary boundaries become
more porous and scholarly outputs more varied, these changes will
affect every stage in the life-cycle of the academic book, from research,
collaboration and writing through publication, marketing, reading and
preservation, whether it is a monograph, a scholarly edition, a collection
of essays or a record of creative endeavour. Addressing the challenges
the academic book of the future poses requires academics, librarians, publishers, funding councils, creative technologists, and research
consumers to collaborate.
Intellectual work is starting to take on a variety of new forms, both as a
result of scholars rethinking the best format in which to share their ideas,
and as a result of external demands for transparent, measurable outputs.
These shifts mandate a moment of self-reflection about the academic book.
We can’t afford to draw battle lines between the boosters of new technologies and the naysayers who cling to things as they were. Instead, we need
a debate that is both historically informed and technologically literate. It
should examine what new kinds of intellectual work the academic book
of the future will make possible. But it should also consider what current
features of the academic book are essential to excellent research and
scholarship and should be preserved in the future. As we consider how
field-changing work of lasting and transformative value in the humanities will be written, funded, rewarded, disseminated and preserved in
a new media environment, we need to understand the affordances and
limitations of the printed codex as an artefact of intellectual life. As the
field that studies the production, circulation and reception of books as
material artefacts in historical perspective, book history brings a distinctive approach to such debates. This short essay reflects this perspective by
situating the academic book materially, institutionally and historically in
order to understand what’s at stake in its current transformation.
The current form of the academic book as a printed codex constrains
arts and humanities researchers in various specific ways: scholars of
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The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact



screen media cannot include clips from films, TV programmes or
computer games; cultural geographers cannot include dynamic interactive maps; art historians and scholars of visual culture cannot typically
include large numbers of colour images; musicologists cannot include
audio; researchers working with large data-sets cannot typically publish
the data on which their arguments depend; textual editors cannot include
all the documentary evidence they have assembled; scholars engaged in
creative and performing arts research cannot always document their
practice adequately. The processes of assessment and production are
slow and post-publication revision is difficult. It should be possible to
overcome some of these constraints when the academic book no longer
(only) takes the form of a printed codex. This means that the academic
book of the future must do more than remediate the printed codex,
replicating the experience of paper books in digital formats as current
e-readers typically do.
Even as the constraints of the printed codex become harder to ignore,
systemic factors combine to pressure scholars to write more of them.
Many North American universities that would not have required a
monograph for tenure in humanities disciplines a decade ago now
routinely look for one, while some that have always expected a monograph for tenure now expect to see significant progress towards a second
book. In the UK, Research Excellence Framework (REF) panels tend to
value monographs highly (and arguably to undervalue edited collections
and scholarly editions). Monographs feature prominently in hiring and
promotion decisions, increasing the pressure on scholars at all career
stages to think of their work in terms of monograph publication.2 At the
same time, many academic presses are publishing fewer monographs –
especially in certain disciplines such as modern languages – and are
printing fewer copies of the monographs they do publish. Libraries
buy fewer monographs, largely because they spend increasing fractions
of their shrinking acquisitions budgets on bundled scientific journals published for profit. In these conditions we have to ask what the
academic book is for.
Despite its limitations, the monograph has become a gold standard in
many humanities disciplines for good reasons. The academic book’s rise
to the centre of our intellectual lives has its own long history. The codex
and the architecture of the page have been built into the fabric of the
academy and the careers of those who work there ever since the university system developed in the twelfth century.3 The advent of printing
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006



Tom Mole

helped produce the Renaissance’s flowering of humanistic scholarship
and the transformation of the academy it entailed.4 With the massive
proliferation of printed books at the end of the eighteenth century the
modern research university took shape, as Chad Wellmon has argued, as
an institution to control the production, dissemination, organisation and
storage of books.5 As the modern disciplinary organisation of knowledge
emerged in the nineteenth century and then the higher education sector
expanded in Europe and North America in the twentieth, the monograph
became the most valued form of research output and, eventually, the
signal achievement allowing access to senior positions in the profession.
In these contexts, the monograph aimed to be the definitive statement of
an author’s work on a well-defined topic, reflecting a relatively ambitious
research programme, typically carried out over several years, informed
by a comprehensive grasp of existing work in the field, which reflected
sustained intellectual effort at the highest level and aspired to produce a
lasting contribution to knowledge.
Understanding the history of the academic monograph shows us
that the printed academic codex is a socially-embedded media artefact,
whose significance lies as much in the institutional and professional
structures it helps to produce as in the technology of print itself.6 The
academic book has fostered assessment practices that assure quality, such
as peer review, and add value, such as publishers’ editing, design, layout,
indexing and so on. These structures ensure that the prestige of the
academic book is justified and they must be replicated or revised in the
digital environment. The academic book has given rise to professional
protocols that inform credentialing, hiring, promotion and reward decisions. While a PhD thesis differs in important ways from a published
book, the shape of the doctorate mirrors the form of the monograph:
a doctorate is in large part a course of training in how to write a book.
The monograph has been connected to a marketing and dissemination
apparatus that allows it to reach its audience effectively. It benefits from
institutional structures and communities of practice, such as libraries
within and beyond universities, that ensure its long-term preservation
and accessibility. The academic book is and will remain embedded in
social, professional and institutional structures that make it an effective
research output. Changing the form of the academic book will mean
changing those structures in order for them to remain fit for purpose.
If our current moment of media change is to enrich and empower
humanistic scholarship rather than cheapening it, then, we need to think
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006

The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact



about how new forms of output will force us to revise our institutional
structures, our forms of training and credentialing, our narratives of
professional development, our models of research practice, our understandings of collaboration, and our forms of knowledge production,
circulation and archiving.
Not all of the academic book’s future users will be human. As machinereading, text-mining, online ‘social annotation’ and related approaches
come of age, the academic book will need to be optimised for new
reading techniques. This creates particular challenges where the book
includes non-textual content. As humanities researchers increasingly
want to zoom in and out between ‘distant’ and ‘close’ reading protocols,
the academic book will need to facilitate scaleable reading.7 We must
ensure that academic books are designed today in such a way that they
will be findable, citeable and readable in the long term, using as yet undeveloped tools. Scholars in the future will want not only to write different
kinds of books, but also to discover, study and interrogate books in new
ways. The academic book of the future will need to be future-proof.
We can read printed books that are 600 years old. The academic book
of the future may not remain useable for so long. The printed codex
marries hardware (the paper and ink) and software (the words and
ideas). This makes it one of the most durable data-storage technologies ever devised. This is not the case for electronic formats, where the
‘content’ needs to be readable on new devices powered by upgraded
software. Most printed books exist relatively well in regimes of benign
neglect. With reasonably constant temperature and humidity levels,
and without overexposure to light or moisture, they remain readable
for centuries.8 The same is not true of electronic formats, which often
become irrecoverable after only a few years due to obsolescent hardware
and software. We therefore need to consider who will bear the ongoing
responsibility and cost of maintaining long-term access and usability of
academic books created in digital formats, and the datasets associated
with them. This means remixing the division of labour that currently
exists among faculty, publishers, and librarians.
As the academic book of the future takes shape, we will also need to
engage seriously with the concerns raised in many quarters that digital
media make sustained intellectual work more difficult, even while they
facilitate research in some respects. Drawing on the neuroscience of
reading, some commentators have asked whether the kind of long-form
linear argumentation that has been the gold standard of humanistic
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

Tom Mole

scholarship will be sustainable in digital formats or will find readers
among digital natives.9 There is some evidence that reading on the screen
produces lower levels of comprehension and retention compared with
reading on the page, at least among the current generation of university
students.10 The kind of sustained absorptive reading the humanities value
and academic monographs demand may simply be harder on screen,
especially on internet-enabled devices with their endless potential for
distraction.
Finally, there is a politics of the academic book. Those of us employed
in the academy, especially in the UK, are increasingly asked to work
faster, to submit to greater scrutiny, to be more responsive to agendas we
didn’t set, and to undertake research that will produce immediate, direct
and measurable impacts beyond the academy. The academic monograph
as a form, with its long gestation, its in-built reflection on its own working assumptions, its resistance to quick reading or easy summary and
its aspiration to long-term significance, offers some resistance to these
demands. The academic book of the future might allow us to work faster
and more responsively thanks to the affordances of digital media. We
must learn to benefit from these advantages, without accepting uncritically the managerialist insistence on accelerated production, the demand
to be responsive and ‘relevant’, or the wider culture of endless distraction,
soundbites and clickbait.
Scholars in the arts and humanities have already begun to reflect on
how shifts in the media ecology will transform their work.11 We now
face the challenge of imagining how the academic book of the future
will continue to make transformative contributions to knowledge. As
new formats for the long-form output emerge, they have the potential
to transform not only the way we disseminate our research but also the
ways in which we conceive and produce it. Innovations from within arts
and humanities scholarship and pressures from outside are combining to
produce a shift in the forms of scholarly communication that may come
to seem as significant as the introduction of print itself. Many people
have a stake in the academic book of the future. If the UK can innovate
in this area it will compete internationally for research talent, student
recruitment and intellectual leadership. At the same time, we need to
ensure that the most valuable qualities of the academic book as printed
codex migrate to the new media environment without being devalued.
If we get it right, new understandings of what a book can be will enable
academic work that at present remains unwritten, indeed unthought.
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The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact



Notes
 Jerome McGann (1991) The Textual Condition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press), p. 77.
 See the report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly
Publishing: http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/issues_scholarly_pub/
repview_future_pub, date accessed 10 September 2015.
 Bonnie Mak (2011) How the Page Matters (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press).
 Elizabeth Eisenstein (1980) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
 Chad Wellmon (2015) Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the
Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press).
 Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1976) The Coming of the Book: The
Impact of Printing, 1450–1850, trans. D. Gerard (New York: Verso); Adrian
Johns (2000) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
 See, e.g., Franco Moretti (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a
Literary History (New York: Verso) and (2013) Distant Reading (New York:
Verso).
 An exception, of course, is books printed on acidic paper, which becomes
brittle over time.
 Nicholas Carr (2011) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
(New York: Norton); Maryanne Wolf (2008) Proust and the Squid: The Story
and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: HarperCollins).
 Naomi Baron (2015) Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World
(Oxford: Oxford University Press).
 Among many examples, see Andrew Piper (2012) Book Was There: Reading
in Electronic Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); Matthew
Kirschenbaum (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination
(Boston: MIT Press); and Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (2009)
Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print (London:
Ashgate).

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0006

OPEN

2

Wearable Books
Michael Pidd
Abstract: This chapter explores a dystopian world in which
technology has become pervasive throughout academic
discourse, controlling the way in which books are authored,
read, cited, and assessed. However, this is also a parody of the
present: our obsession with data and metrics; our suspicion of
consumer technology; and our unspoken feeling that there are
perhaps too many academic books in the world. Above all else,
this chapter seeks to reinforce the importance of books as the
carriers of ideas.
Keywords: digital humanities; ebooks; humanities; ideas;
Linked Data; peer review; printed books; technology
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0007.



DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0007

Wearable Books



The Research Impact Framework of 2038 (RIF2038) was no more
remarkable than previous RIFs in many respects. As a self-imposed
audit of the impact of academic research by UK universities, it had been
exhausting, expensive, hair-splitting, and largely ignored by the public
for whom the Pub Enjoyment Index of 2031 remained a greater influence
on undergraduate admissions. However, the RIF had become a bastion
of the academic book in its wearable form. For those who pondered the
future of academic books and, no less, the future of academic discourse
itself, it was clear that unless the RIF changed its rules as to what constituted an acceptable submission (in other words, an acceptable catalyst
of impact), Wearable Books were here to stay. RIF performance underpinned all promotions during each year’s academic transfer window, so
most scholars continued to spin Wearable Books without much questioning. Of course the fact that the RIF’s rules were determined by the
academics themselves, as they had been for time immemorial, tended to
be forgotten by its critics.
However, dissenters of the Wearable Book did exist. It was not the
specifically wearable aspect of the book that these people were unhappy
with. There were plenty of media for accessing academic content, such as
smart lenses that projected data onto the reverse of your eyelids, smart
spectacles for the squeamish, and the electro-latex Data Projection
Glove (reminiscent of surgical gloves) that pre-dated Apple’s famous
iGlove. Some people even accessed academic content on their television
(unwearable books; because in those days the TV was connected to the
Internet). Of course now we can easily summon sheets of interactive
v-paper to appear thanks to the networked chip embedded in our hands.
No, it was not the media that made Wearable Books alarming to some
academics. It was the ‘Linked Ideas’ that underpin their content and the
way in which these ideas were assessed.
It is perhaps difficult for many of us to recall that in the mid-2020s the
use of Linked Ideas had emerged as the primary technical method for
structuring academic discourse. It evolved from the earlier Linked Data
concepts pioneered by Tim Berners-Lee, whereby structured information
could be identified by computers, retrieved, and combined with other
structured information in ways that were more meaningful for users. In
other words, computers could appear to understand information. Initially
Linked Ideas simply referred to a general set of technical methods for
combining Linked Data, but the term gradually became associated with
what happens when lots of information becomes dynamically linked
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

Michael Pidd

together: ideas form. Eventually academics began authoring not only
research data (in the sense of information) but also concepts, theories,
beliefs, and opinions using Linked Ideas methods.
The result was a new type of book. Books were no longer lengthy
discourses from the perspective of a single individual. Books became
narratives that located, retrieved, and assembled ideas from all written discourse based on the topic at hand. For example, when reading
Bracknell Lives, Snaghen and Bootmender’s book about crime and poverty
in late twentieth-century Bracknell, their ideas concerning the influence
of human agency on Bracknell Forest Council’s evolving social policy
would be interweaved with the counter-arguments from Numen, Steer,
and James, respectively. However, Numen’s view that only call-centre
staff exhibited agency in Bracknell would be counter-argued by Howie’s
reference to a data visualisation of TV-licence dodgers in Winkfield. The
book would also give helpful tips where appropriate, such as ‘people who
agree with Snaghen also think this ...’. Readers would be led through a
narrative that presented the tradition of argument and counter-argument.
Readers were free to move on to the author’s next idea once sufficiently
illuminated or dulled by the present discourse.
Linked Ideas meant that the old distinction between articles, monographs, and co-authored books disappeared. Text was text. It was just a
question of the length of an academic debate around an idea; the value of
what was being said rather than how long it took for you to say it. Linked
Ideas also enabled academic discourse and research data (the evidence
on which academic ideas were founded) to be combined, enabling better
scrutiny of one’s interpretation of the evidence by others. During the
early twenty-first century many academics had been peculiarly resistant
to the idea of academic books moving into the same digital domains as
their research data. Even ebooks were viewed with distrust. However, the
rise of open content, the RIF, and the demise of academic print publishers1 accelerated this change due to the citation effect that was created by
the principle of ‘if it ain’t free then I ain’t reading it’.
The beauty of Linked Ideas was that deliberately engineered academic
algorithms were able to automatically identify, retrieve, and combine
relevant aspects of other people’s written discourse. Further, the algorithms would re-write the text in the process of assembling it, giving the
illusion of a single-authored book without the discordance of different
writing styles. Undertaking tedious literature reviews became a thing of
the past, whilst those academics who failed to structure their books using
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0007

Wearable Books



Linked Ideas methods would consign themselves to oblivion. Naturally,
deliberately engineered academic tools had to be created that would
assist with the process of authorship. These labour-saving tools would
constantly scan an author’s transcript and make suggestions as to where
one idea began and ended, so that it could be tagged and identified as
such. These helpful prompts were critical for ensuring that an academic’s
book was correctly tagged. You could switch them off if they proved too
irritating, but that would be consigning yourself to oblivion. University
libraries, who were the curators of Wearable Books, would never accept
a treatise of unlinked ideas.
Linked Ideas enabled a revolution in peer review and assessment,
subsequently adopted by the RIF. Academic peers were able to comment
on a colleague’s work instantly using the very same Linked Ideas methods and deliberately engineered academic tools. However, all responses
had to be accompanied by a ‘like’ or a ‘dislike’ indicator for RIF counting
purposes (‘likometrics’) because it was no longer considered practicable
to actually read books for assessment. In the USA where academic books
were driven by the tenure system, it was generally accepted that 1,200
‘likes’ were needed to secure a tenure, although these could be spread
across multiple ideas, whilst 800 ‘likes’ for an individual idea would
promote it to the status of a fact and eligible for inclusion in Wikipedia.
Since every ‘like’ had to be accompanied by a full, critical response to
the academic’s idea, and this in turn could be liked or disliked by other
peers, computer science departments had been required to debate the
minutiae of counting algorithms at length in published works that
nobody ever read. Further, any ideas that received too many ‘dislikes’
would be relegated automatically by the algorithms. In other words, it
was unlikely that a disliked idea would be incorporated into the discourse
of a Wearable Book.
Wearable Books and Linked Ideas had originated in the sciences
where lengthy discourse was not of interest, and had been developed
in response to what had already been happening with popular fiction.
Printed books were antique, the subject of book historians, and new
books were only ever printed in paper or ebook formats as novelty gifts
for Christmas and Father’s Day. All useful printed books had been digitised and ingested into the universe of Linked Ideas long ago.
However, it was in the humanities that dissenting voices began to
be heard, culminating in the RIF2038 when a university somewhere
in Yorkshire included a printed monograph by the historian Professor
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

Michael Pidd

Audrey Chad as part of its submission. The subject of the book was
unmemorable. It was unclear to the RIF panellists whether the book
should be accepted or disqualified; whether they should count it or read
it. Chad was asked if she would digitise the object and re-submit, but she
declined to do so. Not even as an ebook.
As she would later say, ‘It can be stultifying to be required to work
within the constraints of the Wearable Book format, deafened by the
constant noise of competing academic discourses that are the stock-intrade for Linked Ideas, always reminding you that your own ideas are
not an island’.2
In Chad’s opinion there was sometimes a value in reading a lengthy,
reflective work on a particular topic without the intrusion of other
people’s views; hearing a single voice articulating one person’s ideas, irrespective of whether the ideas are transformative or not. This, she argued,
was the genius of the old monograph in its printed form. Further, Chad
argued that footnotes and a passing reference to primary sources could
sometimes suffice, rather than blurring one person’s discourse with the
immediacy of evidence. ‘Leave it in the repository! #StopTheData’ she
famously twerped.
Chad’s book did little to influence the RIF, but it did give rise to Print
Humanities and new ways of communicating research. It showed that
non-digital methodologies can enable you to answer existing research
questions from new perspectives, as well as explore new types of research
questions that would be inconceivable using digital techniques. For
example, writing slowly and at length could become a tool for thinking.
Crucially, Print Humanities enabled academics to begin disempowering
the class that sociologists now dub ‘the knowledge elite’: the people who
understand how the technology of knowledge works, such as programmers, designers and engineers, as opposed to the consumers who simply
use technology for access to knowledge, such as academics and others.
Technology companies had been in the vanguard of this shift towards
a knowledge elite in the early twenty-first century, but eventually even
humanities scholars had need of a technologist in order to undertake
research and publish their findings. Gradually – beginning with the
transformation of the ebook into an unnecessarily over-complicated
hypertext ‘journey’ – technologists dictated the shape of discourse.
Print Humanities is now emerging as a serious and respected body of
methods within humanities research and communication. Practitioners
have their own Manifesto. Barely a week goes by without a new Chair
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Wearable Books



in Print Humanities being advertised, and the next RIF is expected to
explicitly permit printed monographs, which will go a long way towards
making printed books an acceptable part of the discourse ecosystem.
The printed book’s future is likely to be disruptive, with some academics declaring that it is here to stay and others believing that it will be
a short-lived fad. Some colleagues even argue that Print Humanities
should be treated as a new discipline. What is certain is that the future of
the Wearable Book and Linked Ideas is no longer guaranteed. As such,
a consortium of key stakeholders – academics, librarians, technologists
and opticians – is now needed to explore what academic books might be
like in the future.
Likes: 1,198. Dislikes: 7.

Notes
 Most publishers merged with super-media companies to cash in on the trend
for VR Fiction and the ‘new novel’ phenomenon.
 Audrey Chad (2039) `Towards a Manifesto for Print Humanities’. In Tap and
Spile (eds). Proceedings of the Northern Powerhouse. Yorkshire. Available for
download in lens, spectacles, iGlove and TV formats. Click here.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0007

OPEN

3

The Impossible Constellation:
Practice as Research as
a Viable Alternative1
Sarah Barrow
Abstract: This chapter draws attention to the features,
values and debates of Practice as Research, arguing for
its approaches, methods and outputs to be considered as
equivalent to those used by more traditional humanities
scholars, i.e. the ‘academic book’. Indeed, it asks us to
rethink our fetishisation of the physical book artefact as the
pre-eminent model of publication in academic terms, and
suggests we explore and support the development of other
forms that might be more relevant to the digital age, and that
attempt to break down the walls between theory and practice.
It ends with a focus on the video essay form, which has the
potential to reshape the subjects of Media and Film Studies in
particular.
Keywords: fetishisation of text; non-textual research
outputs; Practice as Research; theory and practice;
video essay
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0008.


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The Impossible Constellation: Practice as Research



The difficulty with the term ‘academic book’ for those working in creative
arts subjects, whether critical studies or creative production, or a fruitful
combination of both these areas, is that the very word ‘book’ conjures
up almost exclusively the image of a physical set of written, printed,
illustrated sheets, made of ink, paper, parchment, or other materials,
and fastened together at one side. And yet in an age of technical innovation, when we are encouraged by funders, institutions, our students
and our own imaginations to think and work more creatively and to
explore across traditional disciplinary boundaries, it is time to normalise
alternative ways to publish and circulate ideas. This statement is not an
attempt to undermine the enormous value of the physical ‘book’ or the
rigour and review that goes with its publication; rather it is to do with
seeking acknowledgement for and trust in alternative ways of doing and
presenting research, valorising interdisciplinary and collaborative effort,
and accepting that high-quality academic endeavour might result in
something ‘other’.
This brief essay highlights an approach to research and publication
that has become increasingly important within the creative arts, and yet
which still seems to be treated with scepticism by those more comfortable with traditional formats. This approach, most commonly known
as ‘Practice as Research’ [PaR] has been much debated and scrutinised
over the last two decades in particular, with a burgeoning literature,
specialist subject networks, funded investigations in the UK and
elsewhere, and a host of events that have attempted to gather together
so-called traditional scholars with practitioner researchers to test the
boundaries of acceptable research approaches and publication formats.2
Since this approach emerged as a result of the establishment of positions, programmes, departments, and even universities of and for the
arts when previously artist-scholars and art schools were regarded as
separate entities, it has become necessary and desirable for distinctions
to be identified between ‘Practice as Research’ and professional practice
(whether from artistic or industry contexts) where the research element
is not so vital. For Denis Nelson, for example, ‘PaR involves a research
project in which practice is a key method of inquiry and where, in
respect of the arts, a practice (creative writing, dance, musical score/
performance, theatre/performance, visual exhibition, film, or other
cultural practice) is submitted as substantial evidence of a research
inquiry’.3 It is a kind of ‘practical knowing-in-doing’, where insight,
methodological rigour and originality are key, and might be shared
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Sarah Barrow

with and learn from other practice-based disciplines such as education
and ethnography.
This issue for media subjects in particular in terms of the pre-eminent
privileging of ‘the book’ was brought to the fore yet again in the most
recent Research Excellence Framework 2014, when the sub-panel for
Unit of Assessment 36 (Communication, Cultural and Media Studies,
Library and Information Management)4 failed to include a single
practitioner-researcher.5 This led to understandable anxiety amongst
some academics (or their institutions) when it came to making the key
decisions about which of their outputs to propose for submission. Many
decided to play it safe and stick with the traditional output formats even
when some of their most complex, rigorous and original work – with
the most impact potential – had been produced in a media format:
video, script, installation, sonic art, multimedia platform, for example.
It is not just academic institutions that have been hesitant to support
the Practice as Research approach, despite the possibility of embracing
a more inclusive agenda in so doing. Within the media subjects, many
professional practitioners-turned-academics from a more emphatically industrial background tend to resist the need to make explicit
the specific research elements of their creative endeavour, viewing it
as ‘an unwarranted imposition from beyond their culture’.6 Meanwhile,
more established scholars in media with backgrounds in the humanities/social sciences have struggled to appreciate Practice as Research
as a viable approach for subject areas that are still fighting to be taken
seriously by the academy as disciplines in themselves. And yet, with
increasing economic pressures, the need for practitioners, as Sullivan
has put it, ‘to consider their responsibilities as researchers as well as
teachers’ has become impossible to ignore and in fact has the potential
to force institutional structures to open up ‘in response to a new mood
of innovation and change’.7
One PaR approach to enquiry and output that has long been familiar
within the world of experimental media, and seems to be making a
resurgence as a serious player on the research and publication agenda
is the video essay/essay film. The term was used as far back as the 1940s
by abstract Dadaist German film-maker Hans Richter, as a form that
‘allows the film-maker to transgress the rules and parameters of the
traditional documentary practice, granting the imagination with all its
artistic potentiality free reign’.8 During the period of the French New
Wave (1959–68), philosopher film-makers such as Jean-Luc Godard,
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The Impossible Constellation: Practice as Research



Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais distinguished themselves with their
‘interrogations of a world of images – and [ ... ] the power of the moving
image itself – characteristically set to literate voiceovers of wilful indeterminacy’.9 The format continued to gain momentum and distinction
amongst philosopher film-makers such as Chris Marker whose meditations on time, humanity and memory in La Jetée (1962) and Sans soleil
(1982) are considered by academics and critics to be some of the greatest
film essays (or, more accurately given their meditation on the nature of
film itself, essay films) of all time. Indeed, the potential for cinema to
become a vehicle for ideas about art and imagery, and about the world
itself, has been acknowledged since at least as far back as the uber-film
theorist André Bazin of the 1940s whose ontological approach to the
image was part of an even older quest to ‘secure the autonomy of film
as both medium and art’ that extends back almost as far as the birth of
cinema itself.10
So, what is a video essay and how does it work as example of Practice
as Research in terms of approach, genre and output that might be
regarded as a viable alternative to the academic book? A substantial
video essay, through both its content and its formal qualities, should of
course provide new insights, whether into specific films or sets or films
and/or into the aesthetic, socio-economic, political and/or cultural
contexts within which those exist. The best of these might also break
new ground in demonstrating how the emerging form of the video essay,
often articulated as experimental documentary, without voice-over or
subtitling, might help us to view the world from a fresh perspective. They
should also, as Erlend Lavik argues, demonstrate ‘the ability to not just
engage with complex thought, but to pull it into focus, and to articulate
and communicate those ideas clearly’.11 Above all, the video essay should
serve as ‘a springboard to launch into a vital investigation of knowledge,
art and culture in the 21st century, including the question of what role
cinema itself might play in this critical project: articulating discontent
with its own place in the world’.12 The video essay format, which can
vary considerably in length, has experienced a noticeable renaissance
thanks to the work of respected theorist-practitioner-activists such as
Catherine Grant and Michael Chanan, amongst others, who not only
develop and distribute – mainly through peer-reviewed Open Access
platforms – their own new insights through video-essay collections, but
also champion the work of others in the field.13 Indeed, for Grant,14 the
potential of the video essay is that it ‘can inspire compelling work not
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Sarah Barrow

only because, with its possibilities for direct audiovisual quotation, it
can enhance the kinds of explanatory research that have always been
carried out on films, but also precisely because of its potential for more
“poetic”, creative and performative critical approaches to moving image
research’.
Of course there will continue to be arguments put forward about the
difficulties for the storage, conservation, referencing and archiving of
such practice-led research outputs, as well as about equivalence with
traditional outputs. The ephemerality and instability of such work,
especially when dealing with performance or time-based multi-media
installation, for example, ‘pose particular challenges to the notion of a
fixed, measurable and recordable knowledge’.15 Nevertheless, the challenge must be taken on if we are to embrace the creative and epistemological potential of twenty-first-century technology; for, ‘[i]n the age of
the digital, there is [surely] no need to stop, or even start, at the printed
word any more’.16 Let’s hope that the main networks supporting the
media subjects in the UK, MECCSA and BAFTSS will show leadership
in this regard and support initiatives and opportunities for innovative
routes to publication.17

Notes
 Practice as Research is also known as Practice-led research and/or as Artistic
research. These terms are not exactly interchangeable but are perhaps joined
in that they share the overarching mission of the ‘production of knowledge
or philosophy in action’. See E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds) (2007) Practice as
Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I.B. Tauris), p. 5, where
creative practice is situated within broader theoretical and research paradigms.
 For useful bibliographies on this topic, see the references section in the
edited collections by Nelson and Barret and Bolt. Most of the texts focus on
performance and fine arts, and while many of the concepts, problems and
approaches are transferable to media, I would argue that there is more work to
be done on understanding the role of media industry professional practice in
the academic research agenda.
 R. Nelson (ed.) (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols,
Pedagogies, Resistances (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 8.
 HEFCE (2015) ‘Expert Panels’, http://www.ref.ac.uk/panels/, accessed
4 August 2015.

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The Impossible Constellation: Practice as Research

























The chair of the main panel D, Professor Bruce Brown, is an inspirational
proponent for PaR. However, sub-panel 36 included only traditional media
theorists, archivists, librarians, former journalists, specialists in applied
theory such as digital economy, creative industries and cultural tourism,
and interdisciplinary work between arts, technology and the social
sciences; no one engaged in the articulation and production of Practice as
Research.
Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts, p. 4.
G. Sullivan (2009) Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts, 2nd edn
(London: Sage), p. xx.
H. Richter (1992) ‘The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film’, in
Christa Blümlinger and Constatin Wuldd (eds), Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte
zum essayistischen Film (Wien: Sonderzahl), pp. 195–98. Translation by Richard
Langston.
K. B. Lee (2014) ‘Video Essay: The Essay Film – Some Thoughts of
Discontent’, Sight and Sound, http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sightsound-magazine/features/deep-focus/video-essay-essay-film-some-thoughts,
accessed 15 August 2015.
A. Tracy et al. (2013) ‘The Essay Film’, Sight and Sound, http://www.bfi.org.
uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/essay-film,
accessed 15 August 2015.
E. Lavik (2012) ‘The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and
Television Criticism?’ Frames #1 http://framescinemajournal.com/article/
the-video-essay-the-future/, accessed 17 August 2015.
Lee, ‘Video Essay’.
Catherine Grant, for example, curates AUDIOVISUALCY: Videographic
Film and Moving Image Studies, an online forum for video essays about
films and moving image texts, film and moving image studies, and film
theory: https://vimeo.com/groups/audiovisualcy. Another of Grant’s projects
is The Audiovisual Essay: Practice and Theory in Videographic Film and
Moving Image Studies, intended to encourage further discussion and
practice of this form.
C. Grant (2013) ‘Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual
Film Studies’, Mediascape (Winter), http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/
Winter2013_DejaViewing.html, accessed 21 August 2015.
Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts, p. 17.
J. Bresland (2010) ‘On the Origin of the Video Essay’, TriQuarterly 9(1),
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2013/07/the-video-essaycelebrating-an-exciting-new-literary-form.html#sthash.BpuwQbrG.dpuf,
accessed 15 August 2015.
The MeCCSA Practice Network champions practice within the Media
Communications and Cultural Studies Association, ensuring that those that

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

Sarah Barrow

teach and research practice have a strong voice within the subject association
and beyond. BAFTSS (the British Association for Film, TV and Screen
Studies) has just launched the first Practice Research Award, reflecting the
growing ‘performative’ tendency of film and moving-image research taking
place in/through/around practice-based outputs.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0008

Part II
Publishers

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OPEN

4

The Academic Book of
the Future and the Need
to Break Boundaries
Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite
Abstract: Market research demonstrates that scholars’
attitudes towards monographs are changing, and that there
is appetite for a shorter monograph form. The introduction
of mid-length research format Palgrave Pivot in 2012 has
proved that such a venture can be successful, and that more
flexibility and speed may hold the key to the academic book
of the future in humanities and social science research. In this
chapter Jenny McCall, Global Head of Humanities at Palgrave
Macmillan, and Amy Bourke-Waite, Senior Communications
Manager at Palgrave Macmillan, consider the demand
for Palgrave Pivot and similar mid-length offerings from
academic publishers, the reception they have received from the
academic community, and where we might go from here.
Keywords: academic publishers; market research;
mid-length offering; Palgrave Pivot; print on demand;
publishing speed; shorter monograph form
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0010.


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The Need to Break Boundaries



Traditional methods of publishing academic research, for scholars working in the humanities, business or social sciences, have been to choose
to publish either one or more journal articles, or a monograph. Both
follow standard formats which were originally dictated by the limits
of printing presses. Most scholarly journal articles are between 7,000
and 8,000 words, and most scholarly print books are between 70,000
and 110,000 words in length, with little flexibility for any word count
in between. Scholars whose research findings naturally falls in between
those word counts have, for hundreds of years, either separated their
long research into a number of journal articles (which requires a huge
time commitment) or have expanded their word counts unnecessarily to
fit the requirements of a monograph.
Reform of the status quo has been possible for a while. As sales of
print monographs decline, digital publishing has been slowly on the
increase. Journal publishing has embraced digital since the early 1990s,
and sales of ebooks are growing, albeit slowly (according to analysts
Simba,1 they still only represent 6 per cent of sales). Meanwhile, printon-demand technology has enabled publishers to run smaller print
runs at increasingly lower cost and higher quality, further freeing
content from the restraints of physical printing. In 2010, an article
in The Economist claimed that ‘About 10 of Cambridge University
Press’s sales of academic and professional titles are generated by books
printed on demand – compared with 3 five years ago. Before POD, if
sales of one of the publisher’s books dropped below 50 copies a year,
it was taken out of print. Now a publisher can keep titles available
forever.’2
Emboldened by ad hoc conversations between Palgrave Macmillan
editors and their authors, who seemed frustrated by having to adhere
to what many saw as arbitrary boundaries set by the limits of traditional
publishing and printing, in 2011 Palgrave carried out a programme of
quantitative and qualitative research to understand how we might
improve the academic publishing landscape.
The Palgrave Macmillan Research Panel was established in October
2011, and was formed of 1,268 researchers recruited from a wide range
of disciplines and geographic locations across the humanities and social
sciences (HSS). The in-house team devised and circulated a survey to
comprehensively investigate the panel’s views on the process of HSS
publishing and specifically on the length of publishing formats. Of
the responders, 93 per cent had published one or more peer-reviewed
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Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite

research article in the last five years, while 54 per cent had published a
peer-reviewed monograph in the last five years.3
Two-thirds (64 per cent of the 870 who responded to the survey)
felt that the length of journal articles was about right, while for
monographs this figure was 50 per cent. The results demonstrated that
a number of authors (36 per cent journal article authors and 50 per
cent monograph authors) were not satisfied with the formats available
to them. Almost all those who felt that the length was not right said
that the length was too long. The results showed that only 16 per cent
believed that current outputs (journal articles and monographs) were
sufficient. Of those who felt that a mid-form was a good idea, or who
were neutral, 84 per cent indicated that they would be likely to publish
in this format.4
The survey responses confirmed the suspicion of the Palgrave
Macmillan editors that for some members of the academic community,
a lack of mid-length publication options and slow production times
represented a real problem. A mid-length format for original research
which published faster would represent a solution to that problem.
However, the editorial standards our authors expected could not be
compromised.
At this time, the mid-length research that was available consisted of
condensed summaries of existing research. Springer, one of the bigger
academic publishers, announced SpringerBriefs in November 2010.
SpringerBriefs are concise summaries of cutting-edge research and
practical applications across a wide spectrum of fields, usually between
50 and 125 pages in length. Springer produce versions in print, ebook,
and MyCopy for readers to access 24 hours a day, and boast a quick
turnaround for production.*
Similarly, Princeton Shorts were launched in 2011, an initiative by
Princeton University Press. These were brief selections taken from
previously published influential Princeton University Press books and
produced exclusively in ebook format.5
Based on the market research we had undertaken, we believed that
there was demand for high-quality, original, peer-reviewed content
produced quickly. Consistently, participants expressed extreme dissatisfaction with the length of time it takes to produce a typical monograph. Many wanted to be able to publish research reacting to current
affairs more quickly, especially in response to the Research Excellence
Framework’s request for academics to prove their works’ impact.
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The Need to Break Boundaries



The then Managing Director of Palgrave Macmillan Sam Burridge
summed it up effectively when she told the London Review of Books
blog: ‘Original, cutting-edge research is the fire that fuels knowledge and
education. Without the dissemination of new thought, new ideas, and
challenges to current thinking, textbooks don’t change, we don’t learn
from the past, and society doesn’t advance. What we publish today will
impact what our children study tomorrow, our social policy, and how
businesses are run’.6
She added: ‘Our role as a publisher now goes beyond the selection and
dissemination of content. It’s about ensuring the impact of research is at
least equal to its importance. The humanities and social sciences find it
much harder to be heard than the science subjects, as there is less funding and fewer tools available to support our academics. But we see our
role as working to change this, breaking down boundaries, and in doing
so, helping research to improve our world.’
Palgrave Pivots are a digital-first, peer-reviewed, original research format
of around 30,000–50,000 words, with a commitment to publish the books
within 12 weeks of acceptance. All elements of the Palgrave Macmillan
publishing process were interrogated to allow for the mid-length format
and enable faster publication. Authors are asked to answer any questions
from copy-editors and typesetters very rapidly, and a wide range of attractive template cover designs are used instead of bespoke designs. In an
interview with the Vulpes Libris blog, Ben Doyle, Commissioning Editor
for Literature at Palgrave Macmillan, reinforced the integrity of the process. He said: ‘All [Palgrave Pivots] are copy-edited and typeset by us and
we certainly wouldn’t expect authors to present camera-ready copy. Part
of the service that we provide as a publisher is the layout/typesetting and
editing ... and we wouldn’t dream of compromising on this to cut costs or
to simply speed things up.’7
Print copies are available on demand. In order to ensure that the
publication format would be used by academics in practice, Palgrave
Macmillan liaised closely with stakeholders including librarians and
booksellers to ensure that they would be promptly announced and
correctly classified. The Higher Education Funding Council for England
(HEFCE) confirmed that research outputs published with Palgrave Pivot
are eligible for the UK’s 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) –
subject to all other criteria being met.8
October 2015 will be the third anniversary of the launch of Palgrave
Pivot. In that time, we will have published over 550 books, which have
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Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite

taken an average of ten weeks to publish from acceptance. The shortest time to publication was Kath Woodward’s Sporting Times, which was
published in five weeks. The average page length is 132 pages, and the
shortest 78 pages.
Palgrave Pivot titles are published by authors based at institutions all
around the world, and they are already making an impact. For example,
the Palgrave Pivot Adoption: A Brief Social and Cultural History by Peter
Conn was published in January 2013 and cited in an Amicus Brief to
the United States Supreme Court in opposition to Proposition 8, which
would have restricted the recognition of marriage to same-sex couples.
Conn would not have been published in time to influence the legislation if he had not chosen publish through Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Pivot
has been useful in accelerating academics’ careers too. Sue Ellen Henry,
author of Children’s Bodies in Schools, wrote to her editor in August 2015
on the positive impact having written a Palgrave Pivot had on her tenure
application. She said: ‘I did get promoted (effective August) and while the
committee doesn’t give precise details about the review, I have to believe
that having a book was a major supporting feature of my dossier. Indeed,
I believe that one of my external reviewers learned of my book through
the review process and then invited me to speak in a grad course via
Skype on the topic.’
Ben Doyle described how Palgrave Pivot has changed the way he
commissions: ‘In terms of the kind of material that we’ve seen submitted for the format, the variety really has been surprising. I’ve published
slightly more focused studies that require more room than a journal
article affords but that couldn’t be usefully padded out to monograph
length. That said, I’ve also found the Pivot model to be a good length
for particular types of work – work written in a more essayistic style,
for instance, or work that adopts a more polemical tone. Many of the
academics that I’ve discussed the format with have viewed it as an excellent length at which to make an initial intervention into an emergent
area upon which other academics can then build.’9
Attitudes often change slowly in academia, and Palgrave Macmillan
was prepared for adoption of the mid-length format to take some time.
As Leonard Cassuto notes in his 2013 article for The Chronicle of Higher
Education: ‘The new, midsized kid on the block has a future, but […] it’s
not yet clear how long it will take to gain full welcome on the playground.
Academe is conservative (with a small “c”). Such conservatism may
guard against fads, but it may also slow change that can be necessary.’
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The Need to Break Boundaries



Cassuto quoted one English professor at a state university who said:
‘My sense would be that established scholars will have to give these new
kinds of venues credibility first before more vulnerable younger ones
can risk counting on them ... That’s just pragmatism speaking.’ A dean
interviewed by Cassuto speculated that tenure committees, deans and
provosts would be ‘more flexible than most might assume’ but that ‘the
real conservatism on these questions comes from faculty who are afraid
of looking too different from their peers’.10
However, Sam Burridge was amazed to see how academics reacted to
the launch of Palgrave Pivot. She said: ‘Authors have responded incredibly
positively. In the 18 years I’ve been in publishing I’ve never been involved
in a product with such a positive response ... I don’t normally get authors
emailing me directly, praising us as a publisher.’ The hundreds of books
published since then attests to that.11
Recently, Goldsmiths University Press was launched in tandem with
an invitation for academics to submit proposals for short or mid-length
monographs, as well as short book and pamphlet series. Press director
Sarah Kember told The Bookseller that the Press sought ‘thought-inaction, provisional or process-capturing work’ such as briefs, scripts,
blogs, storyboards, notebooks, essays, clips, and previews.12 It is also
interested in non-standard modes and forms of communication, such as
an article in the form of a comic or graphic novel.
Indeed, the market for mid-length research seems to be going from
strength to strength. There are also now Stanford Briefs, an imprint from
Stanford University Press, running at 20,000 to 40,000 words in length.
They publish bite-sized original research in essay format, but aimed at a
wider, more popular audience (as are Sage Swifts and Policy Press Shorts).
In 2013, Palgrave Pivot introduced an Open Access option for authors
who wish for their work to be freely accessible and shareable at point of
publication. Much has been made, in the last few decades, of the potential
‘death of the monograph’,13 but despite print sales declining recently, the
slow but inexorable rise of digital and the influx of innovations such as
mid-format research shows that the monograph still has life.

Notes
*As part of Macmillan Science and Education, in 2015 Palgrave Macmillan merged
with Springer.

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Jenny McCall and Amy Bourke-Waite

 E. Newman (2014) Simba Information Global Social Science and Humanities
Publishing 2013–14, http://www.simbainformation.com/Global-SocialScience-7935107/, accessed 8 October 2015, p. 26.
 The Economist (25 February 2010) ‘Just Press Print’, http://www.economist.
com/node/15580856, accessed 10 September 2015.
 H. Newton (March 2013) ‘Breaking Boundaries in Academic Publishing:
Launching a New Format for Scholarly Research’, Insights 26(1): 70–76.
 Newton, ‘Breaking Boundaries in Academic Publishing’.
 Princeton University Press website, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9803.html,
accessed 21 August 2015.
 S. Burridge (2013) ‘5 Minutes with Sam Burridge: “Palgrave Pivot is
Liberating Scholarship from the Straitjacket of traditional Print-Based
Formats and Business Models” ’, LSE Review of Books, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/
lsereviewofbooks/2013/10/28/palgrave-pivot-100-hours/, accessed 10 September
2015.
 Vulpes Libris (2015) ‘Palgrave Pivot: Mopping Up the Mid-Length
Manuscripts’, Vulpes Libres blog, https://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2015/04/29/
palgrave-pivot-mopping-up-the-mid-length-manuscripts/, accessed 20 August
2015.
 Newton, ‘Breaking Boundaries in Academic Publishing’.
 Vulpes Libris, ‘Palgrave Pivot’.
 L. Cassuto (12 August 2013) ‘The Rise of the Mini-Monograph’, The Chronicle
of Higher Education, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-the-MiniMonograph/141007/, accessed 20 August 2015.
 S. Burridge (2013) ‘5 Minutes with Sam Burridge’.
 B. Page (30 July 2015) ‘Goldsmiths to Launch “Inventive” University Press’,
The Bookseller, http://www.thebookseller.com/news/goldsmiths-launchinventive-university-press-308334, accessed 20 August 2015.
 J. Wolf Thomson (2002) ‘The Death of the Scholarly Monograph in the
Humanities? Citation Patterns in Literary Scholarship’, Libri 52: 121–36.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

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5

The Academic ‘Book’ of the
Future and Its Function
Frances Pinter
Abstract: Ripping off the physical covers of the ‘book’ and
moving swiftly into the digital realm immediately raises a
number of issues around form, substance, supply chains,
delivery platforms, discoverability and business models.
Heated ideological, philosophical, pedagogical, and political
debates leave people either exhilarated or exhausted. The
meaning of the word ‘book’ itself will never again be confined
to that of a physical object to be held, admired, loved,
subject to spilt coffee, or burning by dictators. The ‘book’ will
be defined more around its function than any of its other
characteristics. This chapter discusses some of the factors that
need to be understood when pondering the new function of
the ‘book’.
Keywords: book delivery devices; book intermediaries;
book of the future; book supply chain; future of the book;
knowledge infrastructures; monographs; publishing;
scholarly academic books
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0011.

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Frances Pinter

Any thoughts about this topic must first rip off the physical covers of the
‘book’ and move swiftly into the digital realm. This thinking immediately
raises a number of issues around form, substance, supply chains, delivery
platforms, and discoverability. Questions then spring up around business models. Thereafter, heated ideological, philosophical, pedagogical
and political debates leave people either exhilarated or exhausted. One
thing is clear though. The meaning of the word ‘book’ itself will change
forever and will never again be confined to that of a physical object to
be held, admired, loved, subject to spilt coffee or burning by dictators.
The ‘book’ will be defined more around its function than any of its other
characteristics.
Books have evolved alongside academic practices, which form an
increasingly complex interdisciplinary web. These academic practices
and realities have the potential to change with exponential speed,
courtesy of digital technologies and knowledge infrastructures that are
rushing (some would say struggling) to catch up.
The concept of ‘knowledge infrastructures’ is a useful lens through
which to focus on this topic. Christine Borgman defines knowledge
infrastructures as the ‘ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects and their relationships within each discipline’.1
Publishers are part of this ecology. How are these infrastructures
being transformed by the new digital affordances? What impact are
these changes having on scholarly communications? And, what are the
implications for the academic ‘book’? Its function will be determined by
where it finds itself located within these new infrastructures.
Whatever the new functions of the ‘book’ are to be, they will be influenced by the existing scaffolding around scholarly communications – as
built up by publishers, libraries, intermediaries, funder requirements,
tenure committees, and so on. The transition we are experiencing is
taking place within a charged environment of conflicting and competing forces. Many are excited about these new digital affordances. But in
reality, there are sunken investments in existing scaffolding within the
ecology, entrenched interests in the status quo, and very real concerns
about the varying speed at which good people who care about scholarship are able to adapt (or not) to the new world.
At a workshop convened by the Sloan Foundation,2 participants agreed
that some of the most salient features of the new knowledge infrastructures are that: ‘(1) borders of tacit knowledge and common ground are
shifting; (2) complexities of sharing data across disciplines and domains
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are challenging but increasingly exciting, and (3) new norms for what
counts as knowledge are being generated more quickly than ever.’ These
features, along with the opportunities opened up by computational
interrogation of big data, are intertwined and contribute to defining the
boundaries around the ecosystem of any subject area. This has profound
implications for publishing.
‘Scaffolding’ may not appear at first glance to be the right term to
describe the support role that publishers provide in a very fluid ecology.
However, given the rigidity of the legacy systems of supply and delivery,
it may not be a bad metaphor. Physical books that have sustained us so
well for centuries were (and are still) served by a host of intermediaries
including bookshops, library suppliers, and aggregators. In other words
a vast, established supply chain exists that is no longer best suited to
deliver the new ‘book’. We are now experiencing a whole host of pressures that will require the dismantling and reconstruction of some kind
of scaffolding. We are somewhere inside a fundamental transformation –
in a ‘pupal’ stage of development. What will emerge is as yet unknown.
Wherever and however we end up will be in response to changes to the
way that academics conduct their work, how knowledge problems will
be solved, and how traditional career paths might change.
What does all this mean for the ‘book’ of the future? Some of the
challenges include: newly shaped ecologies of knowledge infrastructures
demanding shared data; new forms of publication; interdisciplinarity;
facilitated collaborative work; and fast turnaround. Features that are
likely to remain are long-form publications, shorter narrative structures
within a coherent whole that can stand alone (e.g. edited chapters) as
well as collectively (edited volumes), alongside more sophisticated ways
of presenting interpretation of data or sources in light of theory. Features
of the ‘book’ that are likely to be less prevalent are the physical object
(which may not be printed unless requested) and therefore ‘writing’ will
become more influenced by the use and the embeddedness of multimedia. The rigidity of single disciplines will wane – though to what extent is
still unknown. Digital affordances not only provide new answers to old
questions – they encourage new questions to be asked.
For years, there has been tension between subject depth vs subject
breadth. Interdisciplinarity too has always been controversial. Now, with
new digital affordances, we no longer have silos of discipline-limited
knowledge infrastructures. Nevertheless, the publishing industry (admittedly of necessity) has lagged behind, following an age-old inclination
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Frances Pinter

towards an obvious choice of bookshelf in an imagined bricks and
mortar bookshop.
Publishers want their output to be more relevant to a wider market
because there are now easier ways to reach readers via social media and
digital marketing. However, to achieve this they need to create better
metadata, think more carefully about what ‘list building’ means and
work more collaboratively with authors as ‘co-creators’ of information
about the ‘book’ as well as the content of the ‘book’. The challenges in
our new world for getting the provenance, metadata and ontologies
right (essential to improving discoverability) is impacting on the new
boundaries around the knowledge infrastructures.
We have not yet fully faced the implications of the basic infrastructural problem of metadata creation and maintenance, both from a
technical and an ontological perspective. Nor have we fully grasped the
huge benefits of metadata travelling with and within the ‘book’ rather
than residing in an unattached catalogue. We don’t have the metadata to
facilitate building the bridges to create true interdisciplinarity. As categorisations in the digital world were built up from a single-discipline basis
we don’t yet have the standards demanded of our multi-faceted world.
For instance, only now has a new universal and interdisciplinary coding
structure called Thema come onto the market, transcending BISAC and
BIC. Less and less fits into the traditional subject-based classifications of
knowledge.
The challenge for publishers is to find ways of enabling these exciting
developments to flourish. After that has been achieved, some kind of
sense of the future ‘book’ will emerge. The ‘book’, depending on its function, will take its place within the ecology and support it. Its objective
will still be to present complex arguments as well as synthesise existing
and new knowledge in a form that is digestible to other academics and
beyond.
Here is an attempt to identify just a few of the driving forces that will
change what the ‘book’ will look like and its place in the world’s knowledge infrastructure.
The monograph, long considered the gold standard, has a number of
functions. First, it remains a rite of passage. Scholars who are looking for
permanent appointments at universities need to publish a book (at least
in the humanities and social sciences). This requirement may change in
future – but not immediately. However, there are fewer permanent posts
available even though universities are expanding.
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A new career track is emerging sometimes referred to as ‘Alt AC’
(Alternative Academic Career) where researchers move from one shortterm contract to another rather than joining an institution for the long
haul. ‘AltACers’ may need to publish monographs for credentialing, but
in many fields it may be that other forms of publication will suffice to
launch their careers and demonstrate impact. They will have a plethora
of formats and platforms available to them with which to disseminate
their findings. The impact of their research will be measured by more
than just citations. For recognition purposes the choice of medium will
be important. This could result in fewer traditional monographs being
published.
The ‘cross-over book’, for which publishers have always had high
hopes, has its origins in the monograph. This well-written academic
book that appeals to a slightly wider market – and most importantly
crosses over into the book trade, stocked by upmarket bookshops and
even reviewed in the national media – are few and far between. In reality those monographs that make it into paperback are usually bought
by just a few hundred academics for whom the price is now acceptable
for individual purchase (in either print or ebook format). There is scope
for expansion here for as long as people still want their ‘own’ copy.
Sometimes there is still a surprise success when a potential ‘cross-over’
book becomes a bestseller, as Harvard University Press experienced with
Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century.
It was in the seventies that American publishers recognised that there
was money to be made from translating academic ideas into popular but
serious books. Literary agents especially played a key role in coaching
authors, explaining how to write for the general audience, how to build
an ‘arc’ into the narrative, and so on. Some authors (and their agents
and publishers) made a lot of money from this type of publication.
Popular books in science and other subjects such as history are likely to
persist so long as some people still turn to handy print introductions and
overviews.
The ‘enhanced ebook’ is where attention is directed at the moment. But
what is it exactly? A succinct definition comes from eBook Architects.
‘enhanced ebooks’ use enhancements that provide ‘extras that make an
ebook more interesting, informative, or interactive. They are also a way
to add new content or functionality that would not be possible in the
printed book.’3 The term is used less now to denote simple links and
covers a very broad spectrum, including audio-visual content.
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Frances Pinter

It may actually be a website that contains long-form content that is not
considered to be a book, but would be so in another context. The blend
of text with other media offers limitless possibilities. However, it will be
a long time before norms and standards are developed that make the
‘enhanced ebook’ into a recognisable commodity.
How knowledge infrastructures evolve will influence how enhancement facilities are used, and vice versa. Individual national requirements
such as those of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK
play a part in determining the kinds of outputs selected by researchers.
The scaffolding needed to support dissemination should develop in
tandem, but in reality is likely to move ahead in fits and starts.
Critically for different types of enhanced ebooks there will need to be
better delivery systems and improved means of reaching the scholarly
community. Peter Costanzo in a 2014 Digital Book World blog says: ‘The
main problem is that the market as it currently exists does not allow
publishers to deliver the same enhanced product across all current digital
platforms, whether it be Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes &
Noble’s Nook, and Kobo’s Arc. And when you stop and think about it,
no other content creator is faced with this conundrum.’4 Delivery and
delivery devices are still on the baby slopes.
The intermediaries that bridge publishers and libraries probably have
a role to play in the new world, but their own business models need to
adapt. As they consolidate through mergers there is the hope that this
will lead to more investment in transitioning, facilitating experimentation and the shouldering of mistakes. On the other hand, there is
understandable anxiety in the community that consolidation will lead to
higher prices for libraries, squeezed margins for publishers and business
models plagued with rigor mortis.
Discovery tools are improving, but have a long way to go. Another
factor in this period of change is the open/tolled access divide: differences in who pays what, when and how have inevitably added a level of
complexity to the next decade or so.
To conclude, much more is being demanded of the scaffolding than
ever before. New business models, changes in the supply chain, improved
metadata, and developments in better digital tools to help discovery
and dissemination will all play a part in how the publishing community
positions itself to serve scholarly communications. A definition of the
academic ‘book’ of the future will be clearer after a further period of
experimentation (length unknown) with what is possible. To date there
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

are a number of initiatives coming out of university-based publishing,
such as at Greenwich University. Some of these originated from libraries,
such as UCL Press, while others have been spearheaded by the drive of
single individuals (e.g. Open Book Publishers). New organisations such
as Knowledge Unlatched are emerging to try new business models. All
new approaches, however, struggle with legacy elements in the ecology.
There is no single disrupter. Whether the functions of the ‘book’ will be
executed by the most optimal and cost-effective publishing solutions
remains an open question.

Notes
 Christine Borgman (2015) Big Data, Little Data, No Data (Boston: MIT Press),
p. 33.
 Knowledge Infrastructures: Intellectual Frameworks and Research Challenges
Report and Workshop, http://knowledgeinfrastructures.org/, accessed
15 August 2015.
 Ebook Architects website, http://ebookarchitects.com/learn-about-ebooks/
enhanced-ebooks/, accessed 15 August 2015.
 Peter Costanzo (23 May 2014) ‘The Real Reason Enhanced Ebooks Haven’t
Taken Off (Or, Evan Schnittman Was Right ... for the Most Part)’, Digital Book
World, http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/the-real-reason-enhancedebooks-havent-taken-off-or-evan-schnittman-was-right-for-the-most-part/,
accessed 15 August 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0011

OPEN

6

The University Press and the
Academic Book of the Future
Anthony Cond
Abstract: Long perceived as a bastion of the academic book,
the university press now finds itself operating under a range
of business models, in an increasing number of possible
locations on campus, and with the measurement of ‘success’
markedly different across host institutions. Yet this study of
the underpinning rationale for a growth in university press
publishing in the UK, and of the award of major grants to
several US presses, highlights that the university press remains
a barometer for proposed structural changes to knowledge
dissemination and debates around the future of the book in
the academy.
Keywords: digital publishing; humanities; monograph;
Open Access; university press
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0012.



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The University Press



Much like the humanities field it so often serves, the university press has
endured many decades of self-diagnosed crisis and introspective selfreflection. A report from the University of Chicago Press’s Director in
1927 noted editorial and authorial concerns over such familiar issues as
‘excessive specialization’, and an inability to publish important scholarly
work with small audiences.1 This long-standing hand-wringing emerged,
not least because of debates around the relative value – in library budget
terms, among others – of humanities research, the outputs of which
have frequently been that cornerstone of the university press publishing
programme: the monograph. Thus the university press enjoys a peculiar
position: a publishing island atop a sea of academia, its insecurities a
mirror to the budgetary, utility and reputational concerns of the subjects
and institution it serves.
One in six university presses now reports to a library.2 Presses
otherwise report to senior university managers or university or quasiuniversity committees; their editorial boards are drawn from faculty,
yet more faculty are engaged as series editors, authors and reviewers,
and more still in the inevitable exchange of ideas that happens when an
academic department and a scholarly publisher active in its discipline
are in close proximity. The university press is, thus, a touch point – above
and beyond the author/purchaser/reader relationship with commercial
publishers – between the academy’s hopes and fears and the realities of
the scholarly communication system, all the more so in recent years as
savvy press directors have become more engaged in wider institutional
politics in order to navigate institutional reorganisation. In thinking
about the medium-term future of the academic book, changes in the
university press landscape provide a tantalising glimpse of how a much
written about soup of Open Access, digital scholarship, funding policies, authorial conservatism, challenging library budgets, publishing
consolidation, internationalisation and new business models may be
consumed.
In particular, a reading of the most recent round of grants from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation gives an idea of how a future
of the academic book is perceived by that great engine of scholarly
book production, the membership of the Association of American
University Presses (AAUP), who, according to the Association’s
website, collectively publish almost 15,000 books each year.3 Whilst
the 2015 annual conference of the AAUP provocatively included the
panel ‘When Publishers Aren’t Getting It Done’, the Mellon grants
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Anthony Cond



have provided much-needed capital for university presses to plan
for the future. As Donald J Waters, Senior Programme Officer at the
Foundation, has put it: ‘University presses are seeking to retool their
operations to take advantage of digital media and digital workflows to
bring new works of scholarship to the broadest possible audiences at
the lowest possible cost.’4
In May 2014, the Mellon Foundation sent university press directors a
request for proposals for long-form digital publishing for the humanities.
Noting the growth of digital scholarship, the Foundation recognised an
‘urgent and compelling’ need for university presses to publish and make
digital work available to readers. It also recognised that it was challenging
to find the resources that are needed to do so. The Foundation therefore
asked university presses to submit collaborative bids to test new longform digital publishing business models, or tackle its component parts,
such as (1) editing; (2) clearing rights to images and multimedia content;
(3) the interaction of the publication on the Web with primary sources
and other related materials; (4) production; (5) pre- and post-publication
peer review; (6) marketing; (7) distribution; and (8) maintenance and
preservation of digital content.5
Projects that received funding from Mellon in response to this call,
and in related funding immediately before and after it as ‘part of Mellon’s
overall initiative in academic publishing’, can be grouped into three broad
categories: digital book platforms, Open Access tools and distribution
channels, and platforms for enriching the user experience of books both
before and after publication:6




The University of North Carolina Press received $998,000 to
develop a collaborative services platform for university presses,
which will be used to facilitate cost efficiencies on a broad range of
digital publishing activities, including copy-editing, composition,
production, operations, and marketing services as part of the
development of digital monographs.
New York University Press, publisher of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s
seminal Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future
of the Academy, a book that has clearly influenced much of the
thinking around the grant programme, received $786,000 to
develop an infrastructure for enhanced networked monographs to
support the editing, production, dissemination, and discovery of
long-form digital publications in the humanities.
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The University Press
















University of Minnesota Press will work with CUNY’s GC Digital
Scholarship Lab to develop ‘Manifold Scholarship’, a project
that will ‘develop, alongside the print edition of a book, an
alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, on
an interactive open-source platform’.7 Ebook editions will allow
authors to link to or incorporate rich media content, primary
sources and datasets. Reader feedback – separate from peer
review – will be incorporated via social media channels.
The University of Michigan Press and partners at Indiana,
Minnesota, Northwestern and Penn State, received grant money
to build a hosted platform for managing monographic source
materials and born digital publications. In practice, this means
that an existing repository infrastructure will be ‘extended to
accommodate the interactive presentation of digital materials
linked to humanities monographs through stable URLs and Digital
Object Identifiers (DOIs) printed in paper versions and additional
clickable links in electronic formats’.8
The University of California Press and the California Digital
Library will develop a web-based open-source content management
system to support the publication of Open Access monographs in
the humanities and social sciences. When complete, the system
will be made available to other university presses and library
publishers.9
Johns Hopkins University Press received support from Mellon
for the further development of that most successful example of
University Press collaboration, Project Muse. MUSE Open will see
Open Access monographs distributed globally and ‘made visible
and usable through discoverability and accessibility tools normally
reserved for paid content’ under the banner of one of the most
trusted intermediaries.
Stanford University Press has channelled its grant into establishing
a robust peer review process for interactive scholarly research
projects, including a system and framework for publishing and
distributing digital-born scholarship.
Yale University Press will establish a new electronic portal on which
customisable art and architectural history content, drawn from
Yale’s backlist, will be made available to consumers and institutions.
Although not strictly university press awards, the programme
also gave $1.3million to Brown University10 to support capacities

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Anthony Cond

at universities and presses for the development, publication, and
preservation of born-digital interactive scholarly works, including
a focus on the legitimisation of digital scholarship to ensure that
digital and traditional scholarship are given equal credit in tenure
and promotion; and $1million to West Virginia University for the
development of Vega,11 an online open sources academic publishing
system that will support the peer review, copy-editing, and
publication of multimedia-rich scholarship.
Is this, then, the direction of travel for the academic book of the future?
In some cases certainly: it will be digital, it will be iterative, the cost
of making it available in Open Access form (if so desired) will reduce
through a shared infrastructure, it will be rich in supporting data, and
the esteem of the university press brand and the rigour of university
press peer review will be brought to bear on all of this. But it has been a
mistake of a great many publishing commentators to pronounce on the
future of the academic book when there is in fact no one future for it.
Indeed, perhaps the sole common future of all kinds of academic book
will be the process of credentialisation as being ‘academic’.
According to a 2014 survey of 2231 academics undertaken by JISC,12 83
per cent of humanities scholars use electronic scholarly books but 87 per
cent used a print copy for the last text they read. While percentages are
no doubt in flux they point to an audience regularly imbibing scholarly
research in more than one format, rather than an exclusively digital
one. It is unlikely that the audience for print will disappear entirely.
Intriguingly, of the 98 per cent of respondents who felt that reading the
monograph was important or very important for career purposes only 10
per cent of respondents felt that it was difficult or very difficult to access
monographs, which suggests that any significant growth in readership
for the academic book in whatever form it takes will come from outside
its conventional audience, regardless of new distribution strategies.
The practice of iterative publication, of utilising networked technologies and online communities, offers the potential for a deeper and more
varied engagement from readers at different stages of the publication
process. Research undertaken by Palgrave in 201413 showed that over
two-thirds of the authors they surveyed thought publishers should be
experimenting with alternative peer review methods: ‘Responses indicated that rather than this interest being driven by dissatisfaction with
existing peer review methods, it was inspired by curiosity in what new

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

approaches might offer.’ However, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes, ‘even
the most ingenious new structures for publishing a text online will not
automatically get any randomly selected group talking. Technologies
like these can, however, facilitate discussions among those who are both
motivated and prepared to have them.’14 The process will require careful
curation to solicit engagement, requiring either a financial investment
by publishers or one of time by authors, who, like their potential readers/
reviewers already face the demands of teaching, research, ‘knowledge
exchange’, conferences, writing and reviews of traditional scholarship,
and so on.
The cost of long-form Open Access publishing will inevitably decrease
through the welcome establishment of a robust, shared infrastructure,
but it is still unlikely that processing charges associated with gold Open
Access will drop to a level that is readily obtainable for the majority of
academics, libraries and university departments without external funding. Much rides on the scalability of high-profile Open Access book
initiatives such as Knowledge Unlatched, which piloted with a predominantly university press roster of publishers, and the nascent, Mellonfunded Open Library of the Humanities, which has mooted a books
programme with a small group of university presses. The most rigorous
assessment of Open Access business models to date, the Monographs and
Open Access report led by Professor Geoffrey Crossick concluded: ‘There
is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting OpenAccess publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist
for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as
dominant.’15
Open Access monographs, then, will be an addition to, rather than
substitution of, existing practice, and will be published under a range
of models, but another thread of Open Access book publishing is also
beginning to gain traction on both sides of the Atlantic: the textbook. In
an age when the ‘student experience’ is king, with an increasingly diverse
and international student body, and with teaching income the largest
source of revenue for many institutions, the opportunity to develop
bespoke Open Access e-textbooks, as is happening at the University of
Liverpool – in a partnership between press and library – provides a real
institutional benefit. Whilst this turn inwards in a future that is global
may seem counter-intuitive, it is worth noting that the first fruits of the
project will replace a textbook from a commercial publisher that costs
£56 and has been a compulsory purchase for 900 students on campus
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Anthony Cond

each year. Indeed, JISC’s wider project, The Institution as E-Textbook
Publisher project seeks to ascertain whether the institution as e-textbook
creator can ‘help students by providing a more affordable higher education, and promote a better, more sustainable information environment
for libraries, students and faculty’.16
UCL Press, another participant in the JISC project, is one of a raft of
new UK university presses that have emerged in the last few years17 unencumbered with legacy and with a forward-looking strategy. University
College London, one of the largest and wealthiest UK higher education
institutions, has been a public supporter of Open Access. Its new press
is funded from the university’s research budget, underpinned by a belief,
following Kathleen Fitzpatrick, that universities should reassert their role
in the scholarly dissemination workflow and outputs. Dissemination is
UCL Press’s goal and its measures of success are based on that idea, with
the benefits of visibility for institutional research, wider use by policy
makers and the hope of attracting academics and students to the institution as additional perceived benefits.18
In a similar vein, institutions from Goldsmiths to Cardiff, Westminster
to Amherst College in the US have announced new university presses
embracing Open Access, digital technology and a mixture of ‘standard’
and ‘non-standard’ forms of publication. Just as some universities were
prompted by developments in digital printing to experiment with
university press publishing, so Open Access and digital publishing has
created a willingness in some institutions to invest not just in ownership
of conventional publications but to create new kinds of publication that
sit outside conventional silos.
It is worth reiterating that these new ventures, and the Mellon grants,
are not the strategies and aspirations of publishers in isolation. By the
nature of the university press, at some level there will have been input
or approval or both from scholars, and often senior university managers
and librarians. They show us that it is in the mix of publishing practicality
and scholarly satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the current system that
the future of the book lies. Where once hardback and paperback sufficed,
a variety of formats developed in a variety of ways must be offered to
continue the university press mission of supporting the dissemination
of scholarship, for, as Joseph Esposito has observed, ‘It’s not what the
presses preserve that is important but the work that they have yet to do.
Universities invent the future, presses communicate those inventions to
the world.’19
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The University Press



The signs so far are of a slow evolutionary branching rather than a
radical revolution of the academic book. Its future is, above all, one of
choice for author and reader alike. While the Mellon Foundation has
hinted at further interventions, including possible pump-priming for
an institutional sponsorship model, the academic book sits within a
complex global web with many stakeholders and overnight change is
unlikely. In preparing for a diverse future of the book, university presses
would do well to heed the words of Rick Anderson: ‘Libraries and
patrons don’t care if a publisher’s strategy is innovative. Don’t bet your
future on innovation. Focus on increasing relevance.’20

Notes
 Bean cited in A. Abbot (27 June 2008) ‘Publication and the Future of
Knowledge’, Presentation to the Association of American University
Presses, http://home.uchicago.edu/~aabbott/Papers/aaup.pdf, accessed
20 August 2015.
 J. Howard (24 June 2013) ‘For University Presses, a Time of Fixing Bridges,
and Building New Ones’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://chronicle.
com/article/For-University-Presses-a-Time/139983/, accessed 20 August
2015.
 See ‘About the AAUP’, AAUP, http://www.aaupnet.org/index.php, accessed
20 August 2015.
 G. Mahalek (8 January 2015) ‘The University of North Carolina Press Receives
Major Grant from Mellon Foundation’, Publisher’s Weekly, http://www.
publishersweekly.com/binary-data/NEWS_BRIEFS/attachment/000/000/6–1.
pdf, accessed 20 August 2015.
 Cited in C. Straumsheim (25 February 2015) ‘Piecing Together Publishing’,
Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/25/
researchers-university-press-directors-emboldened-mellon-foundationinterest, accessed 20 August 2015.
 For more detail on the main awards use the links on the AAUP website: http://
www.aaupnet.org/aaup-members/news-from-the-membership/collaborativepublishing-initiatives, accessed 20 August 2015.
 University of Minnesota Press (20 April 2015) ‘The University of Minnesota
Press partners with CUNY’s GC Digital Scholarship Lab to launch Manifold
Scholarship – a platform for iterative, networked monographs – with
grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’, University of Minnesota
Press website, https://www.upress.umn.edu/press/press-releases/manifoldscholarship, accessed 20 August 2015.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0012



Anthony Cond

 Michigan Publishing (April 2015) ‘Building a Hosted Platform for Managing
Monographic Source Materials and Born Digital Publications through
Library/Press Collaboration’, Michigan Publishing website, http://www.
publishing.umich.edu/files/2015/04/Hydra_Fedora_Mellon_Proposal_
Summary.pdf, accessed 20 August 2015.
 R. Poynder (8 March 2015) ‘The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director,
University of California Press’, Open and Shut? (blog), http://poynder.
blogspot.com/2015/03/the-oa-interviews-alison-mudditt.html, accessed
20 August 2015.
 C. Coelho (12 January 2015) ‘Mellon Grant to Fund Digital Scholarship
Initiative’, Brown University website, https://news.brown.edu/
articles/2015/01/digital, accessed 20 August 2015.
 C. Ball (7 October 2014) ‘Proposal to The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’,
Dr. Cheryl E. Ball, An Academic Portfolio, http://ceball.com/wp-content/
uploads/2015/01/PORTFOLIO-COPY-WEB.pdf, accessed 20 August 2015.
 OAPEN-UK (2012) ‘Survey of Use of Monographs by Academics – as
Authors and Readers’, OAPEN-UK, http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/
files/2012/02/OAPEN-UK-researcher-survey-final.pdf, accessed 20 August
2015.
 H. Newton (28 February 2014) ‘Experiment in Open Peer Review for
Books Suggests Increased Fairness and Transparency in Feedback Process’,
LSE Impact Blog, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/02/28/
palgrave-macmillan-open-peer-review-for-book-proposals/, accessed 20
August 2015.
 K. Fitzpatrick (2011) Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the
Future of the Academy (New York: New York University Press).
 G. Crossick (2014) Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE,
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/pubs/indirreports/2015/
Monographs,and,open,access/2014_monographs.pdf, accessed 20 August
2015.
 Jisc, `Institution as e-textbook Publisher’, Jisc Collections website, https://
www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Institution-as-E-textbook-Publisher/, accessed
20 August 2015.
 A. Cond (18 August 2015) ‘The University Press Is Back in Vogue’, The
Bookseller (blog), http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/anthony-cond-309360,
accessed 20 August 2015.
 P. Ayris, E. McLaren, M. Moyle, C. Sharp and L. Speicher (2014) ‘Open
Access in UCL: A New Paradigm for London’s Global University in Research
Support’, Australian Academic & Research Libraries 45(4): 282–95.
 J. Esposito (7 March 2011) ‘The New Economics of the University Press – A
Report from the AAUP’, Scholarly Kitchen (blog), http://scholarlykitchen.
sspnet.org/2011/03/07/the-new-economics-of-the-university-press-a-reportfrom-the-aaup/, accessed 20 August 2015.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0012

The University Press



 AAUP (2014) ‘Library-Press Connections at the Charleston Conference’,
AAUP website, http://www.aaupnet.org/news-a-publications/aauppublications/the-exchange/current-issue/1265-charleston-2014, accessed
20 August 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0012

Part III
Librarians

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OPEN

7

National Libraries and
Academic Books of the Future
Maja Maricevic
Abstract: In the near future, national libraries could adopt
new roles within the national research infrastructure,
such as policy co-ordination, development of national and
international interoperability standards, and improving the
discovery of academic books, in addition to their traditional
roles in ensuring long-term access and preservation. Equally,
the complexity and resource-intensive nature of these changes,
combined with the rising budgetary pressures faced by libraries,
will mean that the future role of national libraries in scholarly
ecosystems will depend on their capability to innovate and to
transform their relationships with researchers, universities and
research funders. This chapter considers some generic trends
that might influence how national libraries engage with a
growing debate about the future of academic books.
Keywords: academic book; British Library; librarianship;
monograph; national libraries; Open Access;
preservation; research policy; scholarly communications
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014

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

Maja Maricevic

National libraries provide essential research infrastructure for arts and
humanities and social science researchers; they are national centres for
academic books. Their traditional role of providing a systemic collection
of national publications, in most cases supported by legal deposit (which
in some instances has been in operation for centuries), creates comprehensive repositories of academic books past and present.
For many disciplines, national libraries offer an additional advantage
of providing unique primary research sources, and significant international collections complementing a continuum of national academic
publications. In such an immersive research environment, arts and
humanities academic researchers in particular tend to become more
than readers, and often develop a deep interest in, and understanding
of, how national libraries acquire, provide access to and preserve their
collections. In many cases national libraries’ collections are seen as a
resource integral to the future of their research. Some researchers spend
many years investigating specific, often unique collections, while others
expect national libraries to provide comprehensive resources for their
discipline.1
Digital changes to date have not altered the essence of this close relationship between national libraries, researchers, and academic books.
However, if academic books are changing, will this well-established relationship change in the process? Will national libraries become vast digital
platforms, where the researchers of tomorrow can remotely manipulate
text, data, and multimedia, producing new knowledge through digitally
enabled collaborations? Or maybe such digital platforms will be created
outside national libraries, emulating model of disciplinary repositories
in sciences?2
It is difficult to tell if such integrated digital platforms will be appropriate to support arts and humanities research in the future. However, some
present developments can help us to examine how national libraries,
researchers, and academic books may relate to each other in the future.
Discussions about whether Open Access will be made mandatory for
academic books by research funders are a useful starting point in examining how academic books might develop.3 It is often in this context that
we see most clearly that academic books are changing. Open Access
debate has reinvigorated scholarly examination of research information
policy and publication models in the arts and humanities.4 The growing interest in Open Access has also led to experimentation with new
acquisition, publication and dissemination models for academic books
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

through pioneering projects such as OAPEN,5 Knowledge Unlatched6
and the emerging Open Library of Humanities.7
This does not mean that all changes in the academic book environment should be attributed to Open Access. A great deal of change is
arising due to changes in researchers’ reading and information-seeking
behaviours as they take advantage of the pervasive convenience, immediacy, and speed of digital information environment.
In 2012 The British Library and Jisc completed a three-year longitudinal study of doctoral students, which followed a large cohort of
3,000 doctoral students and offered many insights into their research
behaviours. For example, young researchers in the arts and humanities
perceived ejournals as slightly more important than academic books,
with nearly 30 per cent using Google as their main channel to find all
resources they need.8
Another driver of change comes from the nature of academic books as
a research output, alongside journal articles and data, which means that
in order to remain relevant, academic books will most likely need to be
‘rewired’ to fit the same or similar research assessment environments,
and to achieve wider and measurable impact through digital channels.
While we want to hold onto the distinctiveness of research communications in the arts and humanities, and especially acknowledge the
unique role of monographs and other long-form publications,9 we also
need to acknowledge that some of the change drivers for academic books
are similar to what we have already seen in the science, technical and
medical (STM) publication environment. It makes sense therefore that
we take a hard look at the changes that have taken place in STM and find
out what can be learnt by all interested in academic books, including
national libraries.
Looking at a recent report published by STM, the leading global trade
association for academic and professional publishers, we see that technological innovation related to final publications is modest – it is usually
a PDF of an article. However, there are significant levels of business
process change – new aggregation models, new Open Access publication
models, even new models of peer review. Another striking feature of
STM publishing is the centrality of funders’ mandates.10 In this context,
national libraries are acknowledged for their preservation role, and are
placed alongside commercial preservation solutions such as CLOCSS/
LOCKSS and PORTICO.11 Significantly for this discussion, the report
concludes that there is ‘a growing focus on the researcher (as opposed
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Maja Maricevic

to the library), driven partly by the redefining of the customer in the OA
model, but also by a focus on research assessment and metrics’.12
From the perspective of the national libraries, if academic books in
the arts and humanities become more like ejournals, this would mean
shifts in the expectations of arts and humanities researchers, including
an expectation of universal remote paywall-free access for academic
books.
The majority of academic books find their way into national libraries
via legal deposit. In a digital environment, legal deposit for non-print
works still makes this possible and it provides a long-term preservation
solution for academic books, but it does not satisfy the researchers’
growing need for immediate, remote access to digital resources.13 Such
access has to be provided through different mechanisms.
Typically, the access options can be extended by purchasing relevant
subscriptions or through linking to Open Access resources, but both of
these options require national libraries to find additional resources at the
time of ongoing budget cuts for libraries in many countries. As funding
becomes more constrained, it becomes harder for national libraries to
make a case for required investments in scholarly publications, while
also developing their capability to manage the multitude of other digital
publications – non-academic ebooks, online newspapers, growing
audio and video collections, web archives, and digitised heritage collections. For many of these collections national libraries may be the only
home, while the higher education sector has a well-developed library
infrastructure and possibly a greater incentive to invest in academic
digital resources. In today’s resource-constrained environment, it could
be argued that arts and humanities research would be better served by
national libraries if they focused more on digital collections outside
scholarly publishing, which are also essential in arts and humanities
research.
Following and adjusting to the complexity of changes in research
environments is an expensive and resource-demanding undertaking.
Changes in scholarly communications are usually bespoke and follow
the rules of research process as much as that of digital publication.
Understanding this changing environment means constantly maintaining and growing the capacity to understand academic research,
which requires appropriate funding and expertise. National libraries
aiming to remain a relevant home for academic books in the future
need to consider both their appetite and readiness to meet the changes
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National Libraries



taking place in arts and humanities research and academic books
publication.
We should not be surprised if, under these conditions, a legitimate
outcome for national libraries becomes less of a focus on academic
books. Inevitably this will mean that the role of the national library as an
integrated arts and humanities research ecosystem could be altered and
reduced, which is why it is much more likely that national libraries will
want to continue their long involvement with academic books – including both their preservation and improving access for researchers. This
will be even more likely if it is clear that this continues to be important
to researchers in arts and humanities.
The British Library holds 14.7 million monographs, and in 2013/14
alone added 107,554 through legal deposit.14 For this collection to grow
and to remain relevant in the future, it is essential for the British Library
to understand and anticipate the changes in the academic publishing
environment and to work closely with others to meet the challenges of
rising costs and the increasing complexity of digital processes.
On this journey it will be essential for national libraries to strengthen
relationships with the parts of government that have responsibility
for research policy and research funding. Again, looking at the Open
Access developments to date,15 it is noticeable that national libraries play
a more prominent role in the Open Access implementation in those
countries where there are strong links between research funders and
national libraries. A description of such a relationship in Sweden paints
a picture of a national library as ‘a catalyst for a closer cooperation
between the main bodies of research and research libraries in advancing
an open access agenda and developing a digital research information
infrastructure’.16
This points to another key set of relationships that needs to be in
place, with academic libraries more generally. In the UK a key document
describing the need for closer collaboration of policy-makers, academic
libraries, and national libraries is A National Monograph Strategy published
in 2014. It is interesting that this document recognises the need for
collaboration in the digital environment, but it also highlights the need
for collaborating in improving management of existing physical collections, which is important if the future arts and humanities publication
landscape is to retain physical books.17
One of the most significant alliances with academic libraries should
be around the common understanding of the importance of digital
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Maja Maricevic

preservation. For instance, recent research undertaken in academic
libraries and repositories shows the difficulties that they face in
maintaining, preserving, and providing long-term access to ebook
collections.18 It is an additional reason why preservation of academic
books should remain at the centre of future considerations in national
libraries.
The British Library worked with the Research Councils UK and the
Global Research Council in April 2015 to examine the current status
of policy and practice in Open Access communications. This forum
reported the following in relation to preservation:
Libraries can play a key role here: the current system of legal deposit libraries
is effective in picking up most research to be curated and preserved for the
long-term. This is a mix of physical and digital at the moment, but is moving
towards predominantly digital deposit. However, as the legal deposit system
only picks up published material in each national domain that has such
provision, we need to think about new models of long-term archiving and
preservation for OA materials that are being made available outside traditional publishing.19

While the national libraries’ eye on future preservation issues is essential, it is also important that they experiment with emerging possibilities
for access and use of digital scholarly content. If the academic book of
the future becomes a flexible, engaging digital object, this may enable
national libraries to provide new services not only to academic researchers, but also to their public and business audiences. The most effective
way of finding what these future uses might look like is by allowing room
for experimentation.
One such experiment is the recent BL Lab20 project, which digitally
‘cut out’ one million images from nineteenth-century books, mostly
monographs, and placed them on Flickr. To date these images have been
viewed 271 million times and the public has added 422,000 tags to these
images. In the process, the British Library learned a lot about crowdsourcing and about the potential for re-use of book images and illustrations.21
Another such activity was producing the British Library’s first MOOC
in collaboration with the University of Nottingham – Propaganda and
Ideology in Everyday Life. This digital course contains a series of videos,
texts, collection show-and-tells, and interactive discussions. Would the
academic book of the future be doing something similar? Will it become
a collection of different digital elements combined to expound a longform academic argument?
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014

National Libraries



We do not know yet. However, a national library that is open
to exploring these new formats will be in a better place to consider
changing formats of publication in the future. The British Library’s
collaboration with the AHRC to develop the research call for The
Academic Book of the Future project, and its subsequent work with
the project research team and other stakeholders encapsulates what
might be needed right now: a research funder and a national library
collaborating to find new insights from research communities, and in
the process engaging with wider researcher communities, libraries,
and publishers to discuss issues that we have hitherto been considering
separately from each other.
The present moment offers an exciting environment for experimentation, for building new and deepening existing relationships, which
in turn may lead to a common understanding of what we want the
academic books of the future to do – if we want them to be different, in
which ways, and to what purpose.

Notes
 In December 2011 The British Library surveyed nearly 3,000 academic
researchers of whom 43.8 per cent said that they would have not achieved
all their research aims without The British Library’s collections. These
researchers rated highly The British Library’s capability to provide both the
breadth and depth of content that supports their research across a wide range
of disciplines. The survey data has not been published. Few respondents’
views (Shelagh Rowan-Legg, Diana Newall and Alex Hall) were recorded for
the Made with the British Library campaign: http://www.bl.uk/made-with-thebritish-library, accessed 5 September 2015.
 PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed and Europe PubMed Central
https://europepmc.org – disciplinary repositories and discovery platforms
that bring together biomedical literature including life science journals and
online books, accessed 5 September 2015.
 The majority of public research funders in Europe and around the world,
as well as an increasing number of independent and charity research
funders, now mandate that the outputs of research that they fund should
be made available free of charge to end users, with the cost being met
elsewhere in the publication process. The majority of such mandates
focus on journals and do not include academic books, but this remains a
developing agenda. The future mandate for Open Access might include
academic books. For example, a recommendation to consider an Open
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014
























Maja Maricevic

Access mandate for scholarly monographs is given in a report produced by
Sir Bob Burgess for the Research Councils UK – Review of the Implementation
of the RCUK Policy on Open Access (2015): http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/
openaccess/2014review/, accessed 10 September 2015.
Prominent UK examples include G. Crossick (2014) Monographs and Open
Access: A Report to HEFCE, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/hefce/content/
pubs/indirreports/2015/Monographs,and,open,access/2014_monographs.pdf,
accessed 20 August 2015, and a collection of essays edited by Nigel Vincent
and Chris Wickham (2013) Debating Open Access (London: British Academy).
See http://www.oapen.org/home, accessed 5 September 2015.
See http://www.knowledgeunlatched.org, accessed 5 September 2015.
See https://www.openlibhums.org, accessed 5 September 2015.
Researchers of Tomorrow: The Research Behaviour of Generation Y Doctoral
Students (2012) (London, British Library and Jisc).
Crossick, Monographs and Open Access.
M. Ware and M. Mabe (2015) The STM Report – An Overview of Scientific
and Scholarly Journal Publishing, 4th edn (STM, International Association of
Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers).
Ware and Mabe, The STM Report, p. 31.
Ware and Mabe, The STM Report, p. 159.
In the UK the legal deposit of non-print works allows legal deposit libraries
to receive digital publications from the UK for preservation, with some
exceptions. They can provide access to this material only in their buildings,
and only for one reader at the time. For detail see ‘The Legal Deposit
Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations’ (2013) http://www.legislation.gov.
uk/uksi/2013/777/pdfs/uksi_20130777_en.pdf, accessed 5 September 2015.
‘British Library Annual Report and Accounts 2013–14’, http://www.bl.uk/
aboutus/annrep/2013to2014/annual-report2013–14.pdf, accessed 10 September
2015.
Open Access policies tend to be developed incrementally in order to
maintain stability of scholarly communication, control costs and ensure
flexibility to adapt to new digital developments. These developments typically
include consultative processes with different stakeholders such as research
funders, publishers, universities and libraries, including national libraries. In
the UK, Universities UK are currently managing such a stakeholder group,
monitoring implementation of Open Access policies.
J. Hagerlid (2011) ‘The Role of the National Library as a Catalyst for an Open
Access Agenda: The Experience of Sweden’, Interlending and Document Supply,
39(2): 115–18
B. Showers (2014) A National Monograph Strategy, http://monographs.
jiscinvolve.org/wp/, accessed 10 September 2015.

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National Libraries



 E. Collins and G. Stone (2014) ‘Open Access Monographs and the Role of the
Library’, Insights – OA Monograph Supplement, 11–16.
 RCUK (2015) ‘Unlocking the Future: Open Access Communication in a
Global Research Environment’, RCUK website, http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/
announcements/150527/, accessed 10 September 2015.
 See http://labs.bl.uk, accessed 5 September 2015.
 This British Library blog describes how these images have been used by the
Burning Man festival: http://www.bl.uk/events/crossroads-of-curiosity-thebritish-library-meets-burning-man, accessed 5 September 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0014

OPEN

8

Strategic Engagement
and Librarians
Neil Smyth
Abstract: The future of the academic book is a strategic
engagement issue for librarians. Books might not be stored in
or purchased for university libraries; they might not even exist
in a physical form. How will academic books be organised
and accessed in the future, if they are not in libraries? How
will librarians at universities engage academic researchers
in strategic conversations about the future of their academic
books? This chapter argues that conversations between
librarians and academic book authors about the future are
more important than ever. It puts the current challenges in
context, using data from the Research Excellence Framework
and the University of Nottingham library catalogue,
identifying the strategic role of librarians in shaping the future
of the academic book through strategic engagement.
Keywords: ebooks; JSTOR; library data; Open Access;
relationship management; Research Excellence Framework
(REF); strategic engagement; UK Research Reserve
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0015.



DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0015

Strategic Engagement and Librarians



Academic books are those books used by academics in their research,
and those books written as a result of academic research. While academics write books and prepare reading strategies for students, librarians
develop systems, services and infrastructure for organising knowledge.
But how do librarians engage academics in conversations about the future
of academic books? This chapter examines the relationship between
librarians and academic authors. It puts the current challenges into
context, using data from the recent Research Excellence Framework
(REF) and the University of Nottingham library catalogue, and identifies
the role of librarians in shaping the future of the academic book through
strategic engagement.
Challenges with the academic book have existed for a long time. While
Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham, Colin Campbell spoke
about the future of scholarly communication. He described the library
as his ‘laboratory’, but also highlighted some important issues: greater
numbers of books are being published; student demands are increasing;
academics increasingly require specialist material – to name but a few.
Through all of these challenges ‘the library is emotionally important to
academics and vital to the well-being of any University’.1 Open Access
promised reductions in the cost of subscriptions, but fees are adding to
the ‘total cost of publication’ for journals.2 It is obvious that if libraries
are spending more money on expensive journal subscriptions, there is
less money available for books. This puts further pressure on funds that
could otherwise be invested in academic books.
Academic publishing has been described as a Wild West,3 but it is
undeniable that long-form publications are important.4 Some monographs have been described as literary5 or ‘semi-popular’.6 During early
conversations about the SOFT (Sprinting to the Open FuTure) project
at Nottingham, which is part of the wider Academic Book of the Future
project, literary outputs were identified as important. The REF is a key
factor, as there may be a correlation between monographs and a four-star
rating, creating a strategic university interest in some academic books. If
academic books continue to be important to the REF and funding, it is
more important than ever before to consider the place of libraries in this
process.
Perhaps the most sensitive issue in the relationship between academic
and librarian is the removal of books and other research materials from
the library space. There are high expectations for many academics with
regard to library holdings, and an even higher expectation that their
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Neil Smyth

own authored books will be in the university library. Although printed
books are being removed from libraries – to create new research reading
spaces, for example – they will undoubtedly continue to be in university
libraries for a long time. A review of the arts and humanities Authored
Books submitted to the REF by the University of Nottingham in 2014
showed that 92 per cent were purchased by the university library, and
over 90 per cent were purchased in printed format.
Consider the removal of journals from libraries. JSTOR has been
publicly available since 1997.7 In 2012 the University of Nottingham
removed most of the arts and humanities printed journals in libraries
that were available through JSTOR. There were no objections from
academic staff because of conversations over many years and the high
level of confidence and trust in JSTOR. Many universities, however,
continue to have printed journals on shelves when there is a trusted
electronic alternative. The UK Research Reserve (UKRR) was created
to de-duplicate journals and release shelf space but it may be extended
to monographs.8 A focus on the UKRR out of scope materials, such as
superseded editions of teaching materials, popular fiction, indexes and
newspapers, will allow more time for conversations about the more
contentious academic books. For many librarians the academic book of
the future will be managed as part of wider, national and international
‘conscious coordination’.9 There is a need for conversations about longterm planning and this will involve challenges, but it is arguably the
ongoing conversation that is important.
There is growing investment in ebooks to improve student access,
particularly through new publishing initiatives such as Demand Driven
Acquisition and Evidenced Based Acquisition, or by providing free core
readings in e-textbook form to first year undergraduate students.10 Of the
Authored Books submitted to the REF at the University of Nottingham,
however, 40 per cent were bought as ebooks and 21 per cent as both print
and ebooks, with just 3 per cent as electronic only. These ebooks still
tend to look like familiar printed books, but there will be new forms of
digital academic book that are not skeuomorphic.11 It seems that for now
and in the short term, only a small number of academic books will be
available exclusively as ebooks.
Perhaps ebooks do not fit with all research and reading needs.
They have been described as one more example of ‘content that never
contents’.12 Some academics report negative experiences using ebooks,
terming them as ‘nerve-wrecking’ and ‘an absolute pain’. They have
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claimed that ‘no one wants to read the d****d things’ and lamented, ‘it
depresses me more than I can say that we can buy electronic resources
seemingly without end but not books’.13 Librarians have an important
role in bridging the digital divide.14 Some university libraries are now
providing combined 3D printing and 3D scanning services.15 If there are
preferences for reading print, new print services may emerge. Libraries
may offer services based on printing whole academic books that are
available online, flipping the traditional library-service development:
instead of print to digital, digital to print. More than ever it is essential
for librarians to talk with academics about their own research reading,
and reading expectations for students, as well as with publishers about
the ongoing development of new platforms and new formats for different forms of academic book.
There is an increasing need to put academic authors at the heart of
libraries and to consider students as future academic book authors.16
If our students, the authors of the future, are to write sustained arguments over 80,000–100,000 words, they will need to read arguments
of this length. The library is academic-led and library-administered. It
is driven by what academics read and write, and by research and publication strategies – so it is important that they are involved with their
university library. The arts and humanities collection in the Hallward
Library at the University of Nottingham, for example, has more than
one book by an academic author who works within half a mile of the
library on almost every shelf. Yet there are some authors who never
visit the library, even when they live in close proximity. How can this
be addressed? One idea is using shelf-end signs with images of book
covers or the photographs of authors as Aestheticodes,17 linking to films
of academic authors talking about their books. In this scenario, authors
appear when you browse the shelves, reading from the book or talking
about the book. Making the physical library connect with the digital
library might be one way to inspire students to write the academic
books of the future.
Librarians are moving towards new forms of scholarly relationship
management.18 Bains has described the change to a functional structure
with separate research and academic engagement teams in one university library.19 Working in this changing environment is about keeping
an agile mind open to many possible alternative futures, and adapting
to thrive in whatever new conditions arise.20 Kenny has articulated the
challenge:
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Neil Smyth

Can library liaisons play a key role in revitalizing human-to-human interactions by engaging individuals collectively in problem solving, creativity, and
the production of new knowledge and awareness? Can the library become
the center for engagement on campus, with liaisons providing critical human
support and analysis that cuts across technology, disciplines, hierarchies,
social norms, and institutional and cultural contexts?21

For many librarians in recent years, Open Access has been the basis for
strategic engagement. Librarians have been ‘leading change’ in scholarly
communication as ‘positional leaders’ and have been ‘an active part of the
academic life on campus’.22 Some have developed strategies for ‘relational
communications’23 and Scholarly Conversations24 or used Open Access
ACCESS week ‘to provide leadership on campuses concerning scholarly communications’.25 Changes and adjustments to policies26 provide
further opportunities for conversations. There is likely to be a high level
of compliance with the HEFCE policy for Open Access journals and
conference proceedings. Although no submitted Authored Books were
available in Nottingham ePrints at the last REF, Nottingham authored
monographs are becoming available through Open Access,27 and it is
likely that many more will be deposited in UK institutional repositories
before REF 2026. One of the challenges for libraries will be integrating
Open Access outputs with the indexed content in discovery systems.
There is an opportunity for senior academic engagement librarians to
focus on strategic and influential faculty conversations, including: the
future of the academic book; changing publisher policies; licensing and
third-party copyright; and new forms – from Open Access monographs
to nanopublications and research data connected to books.
Working with academic authors is not always smooth, straightforward
or easy. There is a need for collaboration.28 Silver, for example, described
how the Authors@UF programme enabled librarians to exercise this
new role of outreach and engagement by working directly with faculty
scholars to present his or her research, making the library the heart of
interaction and strategic engagement.29 However, librarians need support.
Posner identified some of the common challenges and complexity facing
librarians collaborating and engaging with academics.30
Librarians have a key role in shaping the future of the academic book
through strategic engagement with the academic community. More
importantly, though, this involves placing academic authors at the heart
of libraries and considering students as the authors of the future. We
need to better understand how strategic conversations can be effective in
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shaping digital scholarship and the future of scholarly communication.
The AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, and
this volume of essays, generated by some of those conversations, show
how complex and rewarding such collaborations can be.

Notes
 C. Campbell (J1990) `The Future of Scholarly Communication’, in K.
Brookfield (ed.) Scholarly Communication and Serials Prices: Proceedings of a
Conference Sponsored by The Standing Conference of National and University
Libraries and The British Library Research and Development Department
(London: Bowker-Saur), pp. 11–13
 S. Pinfield, J. Salter, P. A. Peter and A. Bath (2015) ‘The “Total Cost of
Publication” in a Hybrid Open-Access Environment: Institutional Approaches
to Funding Journal Article-Processing Charges in Combination with
Subscriptions’, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.23446/epdf, accessed 25 August
2015.
 C. Lambert (2015) ‘The “Wild West” of Academic Publishing: The Troubled
Present and Promising Future of Scholarly Communication’, Harvard Magazine,
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/the-wild-west-of-academic-publishing,
accessed 25 August 2015.
 G. Mock (2013) ‘Surprising Bright Future for Academic Books’, Duke Today,
https://today.duke.edu/2013/12/dukepress, accessed 25 August 2015.
 The University of Nottingham’s REF submission included two novels by Jon
McGregor: Even the Dogs (2010) and This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to
Someone Like You (2013). There was also a collection of poetry by by Matthew
Welton: We needed coffee but ... (2009).
 The Analysis of Research Excellence Framework Submitted Outputs for the
Arts and Humanities at the University of Nottingham highlighted examples of
academic books that were not submitted to the REF. For instance, in addition
to four publications for the Research Excellence Framework, Professor Stephen
Mumford, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham,
published two very short introductions to causation and metaphysics with
Oxford University Press and a book about sport: Watching Sport: Aesthetics,
Ethics and Emotion.
 R. C. Schonfeld (2003) JSTOR: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press), p. xvi.
 D. Yang (2013) ‘UK Research Reserve: A Sustainable Model from Print to E?’,
Library Management, 34(4/5): 309–23.

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 B. Lavoie and C. Malpas (2015) Stewardship of the Evolving Scholarly Record:
From the Invisible Hand to Conscious Coordination (Dublin, Ohio: OCLC
Research), http://www.oclc.org/content/dam/research/publications/2015/
oclcresearch-esr-stewardship-2015.pdf, accessed 25 August 2015.
 T. Dickinson (2015) ‘Free Core E-Textbooks: A Practical Way to Support
Students’, http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/blog/free-core-e-textbooks-practicalway-support-students, accessed 25 August 2015.
 T. Abba (2013) ‘The Future of the Book Shouldn’t Be Skeuomorphic’, New
Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/02/future-bookshouldnt-be-skeuomorphic, accessed 25 August 2015.
 K. Webb (17 July 2015) ‘The Content that Never Contents’, Times Literary
Supplement, p. 19.
 Examples taken from recent correspondence with academic book authors at
the University of Nottingham.
 A. Seyed Vahid and M. Alireza Isfandyari (2008) ‘Bridging the Digital
Divide: The Role of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Third
Millennium’, The Electronic Library, 26(2): 226–37.
 There are many examples, such as the Radcliffe Science Library: http://www.
bodleian.ox.ac.uk/science/use/3d-printing, accessed 25 August 2015.
 Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (June 2011) Higher Education:
Students at the Heart of the System, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/
system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11–944-higher-educationstudents-at-heart-of-system.pdf, accessed 10 September 2015.
 Aestheticodes: http://aestheticodes.com/. Aestheticodes offer the interactivity
of QR codes but in a more visually engaging experience.
 T. Brabazon (2014) ‘The Disintermediated Librarian and a Reintermediated
Future’, The Australian Library Journal, 63(3): 191–205.
 S. Bains (2013) ‘Teaching “Old” Librarians New Tricks’, SCONUL Focus, 58.
 B. Mathews (2014) ‘Librarian as Futurist: Changing the Way Libraries Think
About the Future’, Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 14(3): 453–62.
 A. R. Kenney (2015) ‘From Engaging Liaison Librarians to Engaging
Communities’, College & Research Libraries, 76(3): 386–91.
 K. J. Malenfant (2010) ‘Leading Change in the System of Scholarly
Communication: A Case Study of Engaging Liaison Librarians for Outreach
to Faculty’, College and Research Libraries, 71(1): 63–76.
 M. Vandegrift and G. Colvin (2012) ‘Relational Communications:
Developing Key Connections’, College & Research Libraries News, 73(7):
386–9.
 A. M. Wright (2012) ‘Starting Scholarly Conversations: A Scholarly
Communication Outreach Program’, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly
Communication, 2(1): 1–9.

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 P. C. Johnson (2014) ‘International Open Access Week at Small to Medium
U.S. Academic Libraries: The First Five Years’, The Journal of Academic
Librarianship, 40(6): 626–31.
 Higher Education Funding Council for England (2015) Open Access in the
Next Research Excellence Framework: Policy Adjustments and Qualifications,
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/media/HEFCE,2014/Content/Pubs/2015/CL202015/
Print-friendly20version.pdf, accessed 25 August 2015.
 The book Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece by Alan H. Sommerstein and
Isabelle C. Torrance was published by De Gruyter. It is available through
Knowledge Unlatched and The OAPEN Library.
 S. Abram and J. Cromity (2013) ‘Collaboration: The Strategic Core of 21
Century Library Strategies’, New Review of Information Networking, 18(1):
40–50.
 I. Silver (2014) ‘Authors@UF Campus Conversation Series: A Case Study’,
Public Services Quarterly, 10(4): 263–82.
 M. Posner (2013) ‘No Half Measures: Overcoming Common Challenges to
Doing Digital Humanities in the Library’, Journal of Library Administration,
53: 43–52.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

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9

Academic Libraries and
Academic Books: Vessels
of Cultural Continuity,
Agents of Cultural Change
Kate Price
Abstract: Academic books can deeply affect the ways that
human beings perceive the world and interact with one
another, playing an important role in cultural change.
Academic libraries help to ensure that their contents are
available to inform the thinking of future generations,
playing an important role in cultural continuity.
This chapter argues that the academic book may evolve
into something very different in the future, but that the
passion of librarians for ensuring that books in whatever
form are made freely available will continue to drive
forward innovation and collaboration, even in the face of
major social and technological changes.
Keywords: culture; digital preservation; ebooks; ethics;
librarianship
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0016.


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This chapter examines the role that academic books play in culture
beyond the academy, and the ways in which academic libraries and
librarians can support and challenge that role as books move into the
next stage of their evolution.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines culture as ‘the distinctive ideas,
customs, social behaviour, products, or way of life of a particular nation,
society, people, or period’.1 Whether an academic book appears as a
traditionally published print-on-paper textbook, scholarly monograph
or reference work, or as a more fluid digitally-produced work with interactive, collaborative or social media elements, it exists to encapsulate
knowledge in some depth, and distribute it to all those who wish to learn
from it, in the process becoming a powerful vector for the transmission
of culture. However, the evolution of the academic book poses some
major questions about the future role of both books and libraries in
society.

Academic books as agents of cultural change
The fundamental quality of an academic book, in contrast to other forms
of academic discourse such as the journal article or conference paper, is
that it embodies a sustained and in-depth examination of a particular
topic. Books are more suited to non-expert readership, as they allow
the author space for full explanations which can move from the basic to
the sophisticated within the course of a single work. This makes them
particularly important as transmitters of new ideas within wider society
as well as within the purely academic environment.
When an academic book is doing its job well, the author synthesises new and existing data and ideas into a cogent piece of work. The
reader ingests these facts and concepts, and then a process of cognition
takes place. The facts and concepts become transformed into wider
knowledge, and a change occurs in the world as a consequence. The
results may be quickly recognised at the individual level: the author
may experience an increase in their academic reputation and gain a
promotion; a student may be able to explain an idea that is new to
them to a seminar group; a medical doctor may find the details of a
new drug combination and use it to treat a patient; a member of the
public may be inspired to pursue a topic further by visiting a historic
site, and so on.
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Kate Price

However, the effects of academic books can be much more profound,
producing transformative changes at the cultural level. To give a very
brief and partial selection of examples, Newton’s Principia Mathematica,
Darwin’s Origin of Species, Marx’s Das Kapital, Greer’s The Female Eunuch,
and Carson’s Silent Spring profoundly changed our perception of the
mechanics of the physical universe, the genesis of humanity, the effects
of capitalist economics on society, the way that the sexes relate to one
another, and the human effect on the environment.
It is important to remember that texts such as these have never stood
alone. Each author was able to draw upon centuries of existing intellectual discourse in written form, whilst also being able to debate their ideas
with contemporaries. Readers continued to add to the debate long after
publication, in both academic and public forums. Each text has become
a node in a network of knowledge extending backwards and forwards in
time, and crossing social and geographical boundaries. Over time (and
with the help of academic libraries which continued to make them available), such texts have weathered controversy and strong opposition to
become the foundation stones for today’s cultural attitudes.
In the digital world, academic texts are potentially more available to
the public than ever before, with a corresponding potential for more
immediate and wider effects on cultures and societies. It is now possible
to publish and disseminate texts through a number of different channels, including Open Access formats that require no payment from the
reader. It is also possible to access a book review or citation in one digital
publication, or to be alerted to the existence of a book by a social media
network, and then immediately download the full text of the work onto
a mobile device, or order a print version online for delivery within a few
hours. Online forums allow readers and authors to engage in debate
surrounding the content, bringing it very swiftly to the attention of an
expanding audience.
Although wider access to books is facilitated by digital advancements,
it can also be restrictive. The cultural influence of the academic book
is not lost on governments and political groups that seek to control the
perceptions and behaviours of populations. The banning and deliberate
destruction of books and purging of libraries has occurred in different
cultural contexts throughout the ages, as a means of imposing religious
or political orthodoxies. In the digital arena, where there are no physical
copies to purge, governments are able to restrict access to digital book
content simply by preventing public internet access altogether, as in
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North Korea,2 or by filtering internet content using blacklisted terms, as
with the ‘Great Firewall of China’.3
Deliberate denial of access to academic books for political reasons
is extreme, but there are many other challenges that lie in the way of
public engagement with academic texts in the digital arena. Individual
poverty, local or national lack of investment in digital infrastructure,
lack of digital book content available in local languages, lack of userfriendliness in ebook interfaces, volatility of formats and business
models, impermanence of content, lack of interlinking between digital
texts, and differences in intellectual property rights law between nations
all throw up practical barriers to accessing academic books in new
media.
In the meantime, social factors such as lack of familiarity with the
use of digital media amongst demographic groups such as the elderly,4
a trend towards shallower engagement with online texts exemplified
by the ‘skimming’ and ‘bouncing’ behaviours observed during the
British Library’s Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the
Future project,5 and a tendency towards accessing the online ‘snippets’
of visual and audio based content eloquently described by Nicholas
Carr in his book The Shallows,6 may lead to the inability of readers
to make the most of the rich textual content to which they do have
access.
Thus readers with less money, who live in poorly developed areas of
the world, who are non-English speakers, who are less adept with online
media, or who have less contact with long-form works in their previous
experience are potentially even less likely to engage with academic books
in the future than they are at present.
The issue of trust and quality also arises – readers may lack trust in
content that does not bear a familiar brand, or conversely may be inclined
to place too much trust in content that has been produced by pressure
groups to reinforce the existing prejudices or exploit the vulnerabilities
of their target audiences.
In the future, major challenges may also arise from the diversity and
ephemerality of some of the discourse surrounding academic books.
If it is important to be able to reconstruct the pathway of an argument
by reading the original quotation in context, or correctly attribute the
genesis of an idea, how might we access and cite these in the future when
the content of social media is changing, and potentially disappearing, at
an accelerating rate?
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Kate Price

Academic libraries as vessels of cultural continuity
In common with academic books, academic libraries have encountered
both huge opportunities and huge challenges as a consequence of the
internet revolution and the social changes that this has brought about.
Libraries (including national, university and college, learned society,
and museum libraries) have played a critical role in the systematic collection and preservation of academic works for over two thousand years,
and as such have been agents of cultural continuity, complementing the
role that academic books play as agents of cultural change.
Academic libraries have also been pioneers, being amongst the first
large organisations to harness the power of networked information
dissemination, notably through the provision of online public access
catalogues and online abstracting and indexing services such as IBSS
(International Bibliography of the Social Sciences), which was produced
by the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London
School of Economics between 1989 and 2010. However, over the last 20
years, the central role of libraries in the provision of academic information has been called into question by fast-developing internet services
such Google, Wikipedia and Mendeley, which provide user-friendly
conduits to academic texts without recourse to the library catalogue.
These services, together with novel business models such as Open
Access, have raised the possibility that the academic book of the future
could be entirely de-coupled from the concept of the library collection.
If this is the case, what are the implications for cultural continuity?
One of the defining characteristics of the academic library is that it
curates a structured and quality-controlled collection of books suited to
the needs of its specific audiences through cycles of selection, cataloguing and classification, physical or virtual arrangement, stock review, and
relegation. In other words, curation is the process of deciding what to
keep and how best to make it visible.
In the highly networked world of the academic book of the future,
curation may appear to be irrelevant, as the physical location of a volume
becomes unimportant and readers can find and use books directly
from the authors’ or publishers’ websites. However, effective curation
is hugely important when considering issues of cultural continuity,
since born-digital information is at risk of loss almost as soon as it has
been created, particularly if it includes social media elements, or if the
technology upon which it is accessed becomes obsolete (consider, for
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Academic Libraries



instance, CD-ROMs). Also, the indiscriminate preservation of every
single iteration of a fluid, digital text may render the core meaning of
that text impossible to reconstruct at a later date.
To guarantee the long-term continuation of access to the fundamental message and meaning of the academic book of the future and its
surrounding discourse, curatorial decisions need to be made on what
elements should be retained at the time that the content is created,
and arrangements need to be made for placing the content in a trusted
repository. At present, there is no obvious way to do this systematically
for all newly created digital works (particularly those which do not come
to fruition via established publishing routes), to guarantee that this
content will be discoverable in the future, or to ensure that such new
works become situated in their academic and cultural context through
backwards and forwards links.
Some publishers may place content into dark archiving services such
as Portico and CLOCKSS to enable long-term preservation, as well as
depositing the text with a national library. The Internet Archive and
Hathi Trust also preserve digital books. The Directory of Open Access
Books (DOAB) signposts peer-reviewed academic books published in
Open Access formats, and thereby offers an element of quality control.
CrossRef provides a clearing-house for links between works published
online. Virtual distributed collections such as the European Library and
the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) showcase the outcomes of
digitisation projects which may be preserved at individual institutions.
OCLC’s WorldCat service aims to provide a comprehensive global library
catalogue. There is overlap or interplay between several of these services,
which gives the sense of a patchwork of approaches to an evolving curatorial problem, without providing an overarching solution. However, the
organisations that oversee and develop these services do provide possible models of governance, independent of individual author, institution
or publisher interests, which could be built upon to provide systematic
curatorial decision-making services for the future.
What is notable about the initiatives mentioned above is that although
they do not bear the names of individual academic libraries, they have
often been implemented as a result of issues highlighted by academic
librarians, and continue to develop through the collaboration of librarians with other professional groups, across institutional and sectoral
boundaries. The ethics and values of librarianship as a profession are
instrumental in this approach. For example, the CILIP (Chartered
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Kate Price

Institute of Library and Information Professionals) Ethical Principles
emphasises ‘concern for the public good ... including respect for diversity
within society, and the promoting of equal opportunities and human
rights’,7 and as Professor Robert Darnton, up until recently Harvard’s
University Librarian, says of the DPLA, ‘What could be more utopian
than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all
humans?’8
Such professional values have driven much of what has already been
achieved in making academic books available online to ever wider
audiences, and have moved some librarians to take strong positions on
areas of concern ranging from Open Access and technical restrictions
on the use of published text, to the provision of accessible versions of
texts for disabled readers, many of which can be challenging for both
authors and publishers. These professional values are the product of a
particular culture (one of openness and inclusivity), and aim to continue
it by providing a voice for current and future readers.
The emphasis on equitable access to information extends to the provision of facilities and support for the use of new forms of information.
For example, King’s College London makes available almost 200 laptop
computers across six library sites to borrow free of charge to ensure that
individuals are not disadvantaged if they cannot afford to purchase their
own digital device,9 and Manchester University Library’s ‘My Learning
Essentials’ programme10 provides self-directed learning materials to
assist students and researchers in assessing books’ quality and relevance.
In these and many other ways, libraries help readers to make full use
of academic-book content, and thereby play a part in ensuring that the
knowledge and understanding that books can provide continue to be
part of our wider culture.

Conclusion
Academic books and academic libraries play important roles in the
creation, transformation, and continuation of cultures and societies,
informing the ways in which human beings perceive and interact with
the world and one another. Although new means of communication,
information provision and cultural expression may seriously challenge
the position of books and libraries, it is likely that both will continue to
evolve to meet those challenges.
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

Librarians will be essential partners with the authors and publishers of
the academic book of the future during this process of evolution: by raising their awareness of issues of fundamental cultural importance, and by
working with them to ensure that the network of knowledge linking the
past to the present and onwards into the future remains intact to inform
the thinking of future generations, librarians will continue to be custodians of our intellectual, cultural, and creative heritage. In summary,
because of the passion of librarians for ensuring that books in whatever
form are made freely available to everyone, along with the means to
make good use of them, there is reason to believe that academic libraries
will continue to be vessels of cultural continuity well into the future.

Notes
 Oxford English Dictionary (2015) ‘Culture, n.’ in OED Online [database] (Oxford:
Oxford University Press), accessed 22 August 2015.
 M. Sparkes (23 December 2014) ‘Internet in North Korea: Everything You Need
to Know’, Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11309882/
Internet-in-North-Korea-everything-you-need-to-know.html, accessed 4
September 2015.
 O. August (2007) ‘The Great Firewall: China’s Misguided – and Futile –
Attempt to Control what Happens Online’, Wired Magazine, 15(11), http://
archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15–11/ff_chinafirewall, accessed
4 September 2015.
 For example, a recent study found that ‘44 of Americans aged 65 and older
do not use the internet, and these older Americans make up almost half
(49) of non-internet users overall’. K. Zichuhr (2013), Who’s Not Online and
Why (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center), http://www.pewinternet.
org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-why/, accessed 4 September 2014.
 I. Rowlands, D. Nicholas, P. Williams, et al. (2008) ‘The Google Generation:
The Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’, Aslib Proceedings,
60(4): 290–310.
 N. G. Carr (2010) The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Read,
Think and Remember (London: Atlantic Books).
 CILIP (2004) ‘Ethical Principles’, CILIP website, http://www.cilip.org.uk/cilip/
about/ethics/ethical-principles, accessed 22 August 2015.
 R. Darnton (2013) ‘The National Digital Public Library Is Launched!’ The New
York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/25/
national-digital-public-library-launched, accessed 22 August 2015.

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Kate Price

 Library Services, King’s College London (2015) ‘Laptop Loans for Students’,
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/library/using/loans/laptops.aspx, accessed 22 August 2015.
 University of Manchester Library (2015) My Learning Essentials, http://www.
library.manchester.ac.uk/services-and-support/students/support-for-yourstudies/my-learning-essentials, accessed 4 September 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0016

Part IV
Booksellers

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OPEN

10

Selling Words: An Economic
History of Bookselling
Jaki Hawker
Abstract: A summary of the fiscal relationship between text,
readers, publishers, bookshops, and legislation, this chapter
argues that it is the economics of the consumer market that
will shape the academic book of the future. Suggesting that
demand for text intersects across a global marketplace, this
chapter predicts a future in which the distinctions between
physical and digital text, and Open Access and commercial
publication, are so blurred as to be indistinguishable. Case
studies from past, current, and future fiscal strategy illuminate
the economics of reading, publishing and bookselling online
and on the high street, and are used to consider a future
where a marketplace governed by personal choice rather than
publisher provision will determine textual form.
Keywords: accessibility; bookselling; choice; consumer;
demand; digital text; ebook; economics; innovation;
market; Open Access; physical book; publishing; reading
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0018.



DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0018

An Economic History of Bookselling



I make my living from words. Language is the primary currency of
communication, and although my fiscal relationship with text may be
a little more direct than yours (even if I am not, unlike Dickens, paid
by the word but rather by the book) we all have an undeniable personal
investment in the commerce of trafficking text. It is this relationship
between markets, customers, and equations of supply and demand that
I’m going to discuss in this chapter.
Academic texts, and platforms for disseminating academic texts,
have changed faster and more fundamentally than any other sector
of the bookselling market. Academic texts today encompass printed
paper books and online digital learning; Open Access journals and
peer-reviewed blog posts; text that is fixed and text that is infinitely
flexible. Some academic resources may not be delivered in words at all;
text to speech transcripts; image; sound or video. Equally, the exchange
of currency that makes academic publication possible has evolved in
tandem with publication methods. Publication is as likely today to be
financed at the source as part of a research proposal, by a host institution, or by the author, as it is to be funded by post-publication purchase.
Whatever the text and however it is funded and curated, for a bookseller the primary factor in determining the success or failure of any
project is success in the market, whether that success is measured in
sales or in read counts. Arguably, it is that market, the textual consumer,
the reader – of commercial or Open Access text – and their economic
demands that will shape the future of academic text.
Pressure to publish (‘publish or perish’) accompanies most academic
careers.1 With tenure linked to publication, writing and re-writing papers
for journals has become an end in itself, and publication citations are
a necessary footnote to any academic profile. Even commissioned text
may be unfunded or unpaid. While the volume of articles and papers
submitted for publication increases yearly, librarians, spending on average 70 per cent of their materials budget on journals (thus accounting for
the vast majority of journal sales2), are under immense pressure to cut
costs. Journal publishers were quick to move to digital copy, but library
purchasing of digital text has revealed an uneven demand, with some
articles in constant circulation and others never accessed.3 In conversation, when discussing digital publishing with academic librarians, two
issues dominated: journal bundling and double dipping – attempts by
traditional publishers to maximise a marketplace where digital data has
revealed consumer choice and user-directed purchasing has become the
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Jaki Hawker

selection criteria for purchase. Journal sales to libraries have inevitably
decreased. As a result, while the pressure to publish will not diminish,
the economic capacity of traditional publishers to support academic
publication in either digital or physical form will continue to erode.
Given this combination of bloated product, decreasing market, and
continued pressure to publish, it’s not surprising that Open Access
publishing was pioneered in the journal marketplace. In 1996, 24 per cent
of papers published were made available through online Open Access
sources. In 2014, that figure, supported by European legislation and both
government and industry funding, was 50 per cent.4 Free access promotes
scholarship (The Hague Declaration5), and it would be easy to assume that
the online journal publishing marketplace supported by new publishing
houses is infinite. But it is not. Just as traditional journal publishing
requires a market to be sustainable, so too does online publishing. The
metrics may be different, with income deriving from pre-publication
payments and library subscriptions, where financial success is measured
by clicks rather than direct sales, but it is still a marketplace, and one
affected inevitably by the mechanisms of demand and supply. At this
point in time, in a rapidly developing online market, editors are hungry
for content and contributors. As the market matures, financial viability
and investment accountability will become the measure of publication,
and as learning moves further online, as more students and academics
access single articles rather than full journals, authors will be judged
not only by peer review but by the actions of readers across the globe.
Demand will inevitably govern content, and it’s possible to conceive of
text being judged not by peer review, but by the swipe-and-like judgement of a dating site model. No clicks, no sales or return on expenditure,
no publishing contract. In this challenging environment, I’d argue that a
critical examination of the impetus to publish is long overdue.
Traditional book publishers have been posing the same questions –
why publish? – for years. The answer is that, despite the availability of
both legitimate Open Access text and torrent downloads, readers still
buy books. And for booksellers, academic books, lengthy explorations
of a particular theme or concept, intended to instruct and elucidate a
reader or a student, however broad the definition of student, are the
heart of our trade.
Every year, I contact academic teaching staff and discuss their
undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists. I plan launches for local
publications and delve into publisher catalogues. I’ve watched lecturers
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An Economic History of Bookselling



develop the ways in which they use text for teaching across subject areas
and platforms, spoken to editors and developers, explored digital learning and social media, and discussed text with students. I’ve seen initiatives succeed and fail in a market that changes every year. In these days
of immediate student feedback and rapid technological development,
change is both increasingly easy to quantify, with sales figures and read
counts freely available, and more difficult to predict. Feedback does not
always predict consumer choices, and publisher innovation is not always
the best fit for a reader.
Student feedback has suggested that students want easy-to-access text
cheaper, and preferably free.6 With universities in England and Wales
funding undergraduate tuition via student fees, this feedback has fuelled
a move to university-funded ebooks and Open Access textbooks and
journals. Publishers have responded with dedicated learning platforms
and interactive text. Yet at the same time, student usage has suggested a
very different picture. John Kelly of Oxford University Press reports that
in 2014 only 6 per cent of students provided with an ebook and physical
book bundle accessed the ebook; 35 per cent of students provided with
an ebook and additional digital resources accessed both.7 Ironically, that
35 per cent is exactly the proportion of students I would have expected
to purchase a physical textbook if no digital text was provided. Even in
courses where use of digital material is mandatory, 4 per cent of students
never view those resources. Here in Edinburgh, two major courses
moved to Open Access text following student feedback. Yet in 2013 and
2014, 25 per cent of those same students willingly purchased physical
copies of a textbook they could read and use, free to them, online.8
The last ten years have seen many traditional publishers and start-ups
develop new models of financing, structuring and using text. In the
American market, where textbook prices leverage far higher publisher
returns and corresponding student costs than in the UK (see Kirtsaeng
v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.9), just as in journal publishing, financial
constraints have led to a corresponding rise in the Open Access text
market. At first glance, Open Access offers a perfect solution to students.
Text is freely available to both lecturer and student, fully accessible
within the limitations of the platform chosen, and exclusive of copyright
restraints. And yet. ‘I don’t like the text,’ one lecturer confided to me.
‘My students want free material, but this isn’t the level I want to be
teaching.’ Open Access publisher Flat World lasted five years on start-up
capital of $26.5 million before introducing charges for student access
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

Jaki Hawker

to text in 2012. It was already charging for lecturer access.10 Bookboon,
using material gathered from non-copyrighted text across the web to
compile textbooks, kindly promises ‘less than 15 advertising’.11 I asked
author and publisher David Diez of OpenIntro how he financed the
print edition of his Open Access textbook. He laughed. ‘Lots of volunteer
labour,’ he said. And I’ve raised a sardonic eyebrow at some Open Access
textbooks priced, in their print versions, at well over the market rate for
traditional textbooks. Don’t forget the 25 per cent of students, educated
through digital learning platforms throughout their school careers, who
still use printed text, or the 80 per cent of teenagers purchasing print
books in preference to ebooks.12
Studying the market for textbooks, in my experience the most
successful innovations of the last five years have been paper and ebook
bundles, where the same text is available in different formats but in a
single purchase, and course-specific custom publications. Sales of these
publications can outstrip traditional books by factors of up to 200 per
cent. Paper and ebook bundles offer students choice, flexibility, portability and a competitive price, particularly useful for those universities
folding textbook provision into student tuition fees. Custom textbooks
are equally useful for a lecturer, offering dedicated text, although are far
less popular with students tied to a unique purchase point. Both options
may or may not come with dedicated course resources, although the
relevance of those resources to the course being taught may vary.13
One innovation I’ve seen gaining ground this year is the custom textbook produced, not by the publisher or the lecturer, but as a collaborative enterprise involving both teaching staff and students on a particular
course. These curated texts can be both physically and digitally available,
tend to involve both interactive media and fixed text, and have often
been constructed to respond rapidly to new research and findings in that
particular study area.
The factors common to all these success stories is that they are
mixed media creations, available on at least two platforms, containing text that includes a high degree of personalised content. They are
structured towards active rather than passive reading, with students
interacting with both text and lecturer through learning platforms,
social media, and in class. Obviously, these are factors that do not
necessarily translate to every academic book, but I do expect to see
innovations undertaken for the lucrative student market spread to
general academic publishing.
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An Economic History of Bookselling



For me, the bottom line in considering the academic book of the
future is not ‘What does it look like?’ but ‘Does it sell?’ If you’d asked me
five years ago, I would not have predicted that in 2015 I’d still be working in an academic bookshop whose primary source of income remains
physical textbook sales, supplemented but not replaced by digital sales.
Now, I’m beginning to wonder if in 2020, students and academics will
still prefer paper to pixels. It may look as though I’m arguing for the
traditional print book, but what I’m actually saying is that it’s very easy
to be seduced by the bright lights of technological innovation without
considering what readers want. And what readers want is choice, both in
learning material, and in format.
Today, I expect academic publishers to print a revised edition of an
out-of-date textbook in both digital and physical forms, provide online
teaching resources for an iconic edition accessible across multiple
devices, or commission a new manuscript about a particular area of study
if the proposed title offers a new and credible interpretation. I expect
publishers to offer a text that embraces new research and offers flexible
update options online and in print. I expect searchable text, the capacity
to store my library on a device no larger than the palm of my hand, and
to be able to read in the bath. I expect to be running my fingers along my
bookshelves and remember the places and times where I bought much
loved editions of much loved books. I expect to engage with text, author,
and publisher via social media and in person in my own bookshop. I
also expect other readers to want different things from their own texts,
and as a bookseller I want the capacity to be able to provide that choice.
I’ve talked at length about a market driven and financed by consumer
demand, and of the ways in which I believe that the market – the reader’s
choices and preferences – will shape the academic text of the future. But
there are other aspects to a global marketplace and consumer culture,
with little financial muscle but of immense social influence, which I trust
and hope will enhance academic text in the future. The ability to access
the printed word is not available to every consumer. Text to speech, variable on-screen text justification, accessible texts, fonts and backgrounds,
visual rather than textual explanation, animation rather than tabular data
description are all innovations deriving from a marketplace which is not
yet financially powerful, but will be. As learning becomes a truly international activity, the demand for accessible text will grow, and resources
devoted to development and publication will be correspondingly greater.
Of all the options the creators of academic text will explore in the future,
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Jaki Hawker

of all the excitement creative choice will bring to reading, this particular
option is my own personal favourite textual future.
I’d argue that the book of the future will be inclusive, collaborative,
available across multiple platforms and in a number of formats. Whether
pre- or post-publication funded, I’d also expect that book to be financially
viable. Bookshops, successful bookshops, online or in a university, make
hard choices. If a book doesn’t sell, and if there is no market, you’re not
going to find it on our shelves. It’s very easy to predict, in the excitement
and discovery of Open Access text and learning platform development,
with print on demand capacity and custom publications, that the future
of text contains infinite possibilities. Perhaps it does. But I believe, just
as a bookshop makes choices governed by the consumers, those infinite
possibilities will be created, enabled and shaped, by the market. In my
eyes, it is our readers and their personal and financial choices who are
as important in the creation of text as the publisher, and it is the reader
who will determine the success or failure of any textual project, whatever
form that project may take.
Luckily, we’re all readers.

Notes
 C. Cerejo (2013) ‘Navigating through the Pressure to Publish’, Editage Insights,
http://www.editage.com/insights/navigating-through-the-pressure-to-publish,
accessed 4 September 2015.
 Publishers Communications Group (2015) Library Budget Predictions for 2015,
http://www.pcgplus.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Library-BudgetPredictions-for-2015.pdf, accessed 7 August 2015.
 É. Archambault, D. Amyot, P. Deschamps, A. Nicol, F. Provencher, L.
Rebout and G. Roberge (2014) Proportion of Open Access Papers Published
in Peer-Reviewed Journals at the European and World Levels 1996–2013, http://
science-metrix.com/files/science-metrix/publications/d_1.8_sm_ec_dg-rtd_
proportion_oa_1996–2013_v11p.pdf, accessed 7 August 2015.
 J. Priem, D. Taraborelli, P. Groth and C. Neylon (2010) Altmetrics: A Manifesto,
http://altmetrics.org/manifesto, accessed 4 September 2015.
 LIBER (2015) The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age,
http://thehaguedeclaration.com, accessed 7 August 2015
 Student feedback panels, The Academic Professional and Specialist Group
Conference (Booksellers Association) 2013, 2014, 2015. Most recent
programme, www.booksellers.org.uk, accessed 10 July 2015

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An Economic History of Bookselling



 J. Kelly (May 2015). Internal company reporting in conversation with Jaki
Hawker.
 J. Hawker. Internal company sales reports, Blackwell’s.
 Supreme Court Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., http://www.
supremecourt.gov (home page), accessed 7 August 2015.
 D. Lederman (2012) ‘Fleeing rom “Free” ’, Inside Higher Ed, https://www.
insidehighered.com/news/2012/11/05/flat-worlds-shift-gears-and-what-itmeans-open-textbook-publishing, accessed 7 August 2015.
 Bookboon blog (600+ Open Access textbooks), http://bookboon.com,
accessed 7 August 2015.
 E. Drabble (16 December 2014) ‘Teens Prefer the Printed Page to ebooks’,
Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2014/dec/16/
teens-ebooks-ereaders-survey, accessed 7 August 2015.
 I. Lapowsky (2015) ‘What Schools Must Learn from LA’s iPad Debacle’, Wired,
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/los-angeles-edtech/, accessed 7 August 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0018

OPEN

11

The Future of the Academic
Book: The Role of Booksellers
Peter Lake
Abstract: Universities, lecturers, and students are faced with
a plethora of choice when it comes to courseware, choices that
both complement and replace the traditional textbook. The
future role of university booksellers will be to provide the best
discovery, delivery, and evaluation tools to help lecturers and
students choose and get the most benefit from their learning
resources. Whilst booksellers will continue to offer a retail
presence for students, their business model will evolve and
become more reliant on services and software revenues from
universities.
Keywords: booksellers; courseware; delivery; discovery;
evaluation; learning resources; services; software;
textbook
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0019.



DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0019

The Role of Booksellers



At a time when the global demand for tertiary education is at its highest
and set for sustained growth in the years to come, textbooks, so long
a staple of undergraduate courses, are in decline. Student numbers are
going up, sales of textbooks in all formats are going down and their
traditional role as the supporting guide or narrative to a subject is being
challenged. Growth in demand for tertiary education and the impact
of the Internet and the networked society on how that education is
delivered mean that students and educators now have a much wider and
richer array of learning resources (referred to here as ‘courseware’ for
convenience) to support course delivery, study and student success. This
chapter focusses on the undergraduate textbook as this has long been
the main product offered by university booksellers. What is the future
role for those booksellers as universities and students adopt new ways of
course delivery and new courseware?
That textbooks are in decline is not a surprise. The networked society has not been kind to the traditional content providers. The music,
film, newspaper, and publishing industries have all been disrupted
as consumers become producers and make their music available via
file-sharing services and their videos on YouTube whilst disseminating
knowledge on Wikipedia and obtaining and spreading news on social
media. Many established players have faltered, new digital competition
has emerged, and publishers are rethinking their business models and
value propositions.
Perhaps the surprise is how well textbooks continue to perform
compared to other areas of publishing such as business, professional,
and financial, where online and data-driven solutions have all but
replaced the book. In part this is due to the fact that textbooks do their
job well – providing a well-structured and user-friendly guide to a topic
and, in part, due to the naturally cautious approach of faculty to making
changes to the way established modules and courses are delivered.
But this is changing as some major trends impact on how universities
deliver their courses. First, the increase in demand for tertiary education
is challenging the traditional university model. Globally, the tertiary
education participation rate for 25–34-year-olds has increased to just shy
of 40 per cent compared with 25 per cent for 55–64-year-olds with most
of this growth coming from Asia and emerging markets. The traditional
university model, despite new universities being established, cannot meet
this demand, and there is a strong growth in distance learning, with new
digital platforms being deployed to meet this demand.
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Peter Lake

Allied to this has been the growth in massive open online courses
(MOOCs), some carrying college credits. Over 6 million students are
enrolled on MOOCS, some of which are taught by among the most
distinguished of professors. MOOCs have not only been part of the
response to the increasing demand for tertiary education but have also
been a clear demonstration of the potential for lecture capture, live
streaming and video-on-demand as a core component of course delivery. A second trend is the flipped classroom and blended learning where
instructional content is delivered outside the lecture hall, with lectures
becoming smaller, discussion-based groups. Students do their research
outside of lectures by watching online lectures, collaborating in online
discussions and, of course, accessing and reading recommended books.
Textbooks from commercial publishers still play a part, but they are now
joined by open textbooks, MOOCs, online lectures and other resources,
including lecturer-authored material. Add to this mix student vloggers,
the impact of gaming on how content is presented and experienced and
the rise of automated paper production based on text mining, and it is
clear that courseware now comes in multiple formats, from multiple
suppliers with competing business models.
Another reason the textbook may be less relevant in the future:
publishers are racing to replace them with new digital services. These
new services blend traditional textbook content with adaptive learning
technologies, embedded testing and assessment features, integrated
assignment functionality, personal study wallets and records, and
collaborative learning tools. These services are being widely adopted in
the US and there are some very encouraging indications that these more
personalised learning pathways are producing better results for students
and educators.
So if the university bookseller is going to be selling fewer textbooks,
what will its role be in the future? Traditionally, the bookseller has been
on campus providing a retail service to students and working with
faculty on the selection and sourcing of the most appropriate learning
resources. That business model will have to change and evolve. The
student retail model will certainly persist and change as a broader range
of goods and services will be offered to students. The move to digital
and new forms of courseware will, however, make on-campus retailing
uneconomic at some universities. Overall, the emphasis for booksellers
will shift to providing services, software and solutions to universities. It
already has in a number of markets.
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The Role of Booksellers



There will be three main components of this shift: investment in and
development of learning resources management services; digital content
delivery platforms; and data analytic services. Behind the development
of all three is the knowledge that with the wide range of courseware now
available to universities only a very small percentage of their requirements are ever going to be met by a single supplier or single service.
Lecturers and universities will be taking resources from multiple sources
and booksellers are well placed to work with universities on the selection
of resources, their deployment and integration, and in providing evaluation tools.
Learning resource management will be a key enabler for universities
going forward as they blend resources from multiple providers and in
multiple formats with their own self-generated resources. Booksellers
are already helping with the discovery and selection of resources, with
services such as Barnes & Noble College’s Faculty Enlight, Amazon’s
CourseMaterials Tool, and Follett’s Faculty Discover. Although these
services have a focus on textbooks, they are already broadening their
coverage to include MOOCs, open educational resources, YouTube
videos, and have facilities for lecturers to upload and include their
own material. Soon, all courseware will be covered and as part of the
discovery process lecturers will be able to see what is being used at other
institutions and to share their recommendations and experiences. As
well as discovery and selection, these services will offer value for money
assessment and purchasing options to help with budgeting and planning. And, of course, these services will not only be valuable to lecturers
but will also be used by students. There will quickly develop a comprehensive database of student opinion and feedback that will inform both
courseware selection and the future value proposition development of
publishers and others.
Digital content platforms are another area of development for booksellers, with services such as Yuzu, Blackwells Learning and Kortext.
Today these are ebook platforms that offer the benefit of aggregation
and integration. Universities want ebooks tightly integrated with their
virtual learning environments (VLEs) so it makes sense to specify only
one platform for any given institution to deliver content from multiple
suppliers. The focus for most of these ebook platforms, therefore, is not
on selling directly to students but rather working with universities to
provide students with a common ebook experience and to work with
lecturers in integrating specific pieces of content into their VLE module
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

Peter Lake

design. This also fits in with the trend in some markets for courseware to
be provided to students by their university as part of their course fee.
A second, important market for these platforms is and will be
governments in a number of emerging markets where ebooks offer a
more reliable route of getting textbooks to students, especially the high
percentage of distance learners in these markets. As these platforms
develop, they will offer the benefit of disaggregation as content provision
will move to open-market models, and content owners will allow much
more customer-defined purchasing of packages of content to be used
within lecturer-curated courseware. With this in mind, the capabilities
of these platforms are being expanded to include integration with adaptive learning software and will offer lecturers both authoring tools and
course-building functionality. Finally, these platforms will offer all the
multiple types of courseware available to lecturers and students locally
and will provide seamless integration into any and all of the publishers’
new services that are centrally hosted.
The third area of development is in analytics and evaluation services.
The economic benefits of tertiary education remain very compelling:
across the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) the lifetime earning capacity for someone with a tertiary education is 50 per cent greater than someone with a higher secondary one.1
The cost of providing that education is also increasing, either as a cost
to the general taxpayer, or in the fees charged to or debts accumulated
by students. Governments, universities, and students all have a significant interest in the most effective learning pathways and in developing
employability skills alongside academic skills. Reducing the time and
cost to gain a degree and/or increasing the social and economic benefit
of a degree are key policy areas.
Booksellers are already working with universities on providing data
and analysis that, for example, compares the impact of lecture attendance, library usage, and textbook usage to degree outcomes (attendance
and textbook usage are highly correlated to degree outcomes, library
usage less so). They are working with lecturers on analysing different
patterns of ebook usage within student cohorts and feeding data into
student engagement systems. This is really just the tip of an iceberg as
more and more data will be available to universities on how, where, and
when students study.
Data models will be developed to include all courseware usage,
VLE usage, library and library platform usage, attendance, and work
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The Role of Booksellers



completion data alongside levels of interaction with fellow students and
lecturers. In some instances, booksellers will help develop these models
and services – especially those who work with a number of universities
within a market – whilst in many others they will be able to provide
university specific and comparative data on the effectiveness of the
different courseware available to institutions. Booksellers will work with
universities and lecturers on determining what is the best combination
of content, tools, and platforms for producing the best outcomes for
their students.
So from one perspective the primary role of booksellers will not
change: in the future booksellers will still provide a retail service to
students and will still work with faculty on the selection and sourcing
of the most appropriate learning resources. But the bookselling business
model will change. The retail offer will remain, and will have to broaden
to remain economically viable. However, the investment and development focus, particularly for the larger booksellers will shift and will be
on developing richer resources, platforms, and data to help universities
provide the best courseware and learning outcomes for their students. In
doing this, booksellers will focus more on their core asset: a deep understanding of and relationship with universities, lecturers, and students.
As a result, they will find new, exciting ways to support university and
student success.

Note
 See OECD (2014) Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators, http://www.oecd.
org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf, accessed 9 September 2015.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0019

OPEN

12

Back to the Future: The Role
of the Campus Bookshop
Craig Dadds
Abstract: Campus booksellers with close links to their
university play an essential role in supporting the academic
activity of students and the research work of staff, as well
as the cultural life of the university. This assertion was
overwhelmingly supported by feedback from one hundred
members of the academic community at Canterbury Christ
Church University during a Periodic Departmental Review
of Library Services in November 2014. When there is so much
emphasis on providing the ultimate student experience – an
academic bookshop on campus is a key asset.
Keywords: academic; bookseller; bookselling; bookshop;
campus; Canterbury Christ Church University;
collaboration; learning community; partnership; student;
student experience; university; university owned
Lyons, Rebecca E. and Samantha J. Rayner (eds).
The Academic Book of the Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016. doi: 10.1057/9781137595775.0020.



DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0020

Back to the Future



Whatever format the academic book of the future predominantly
takes – whether virtual or physical – it is about providing options for our
students and academics. In the book trade the only thing certain since
the demise of the Net Book Agreement in 1995 is that we must expect
the unexpected, and roll with the times. But we need to do more than
roll with the times – we need to take charge and create opportunities.
And we will do this by working together with not just publishers and
librarians – but with our lecturers, as colleagues and authors, and with
our students and customers.
As curators of content, our academic libraries and bookshops continue
to play an undeniably important role in the experience of what it means
to be educated and entertained. Bookshops and libraries are not merely
noodle factories as acknowledged by Kurt Vonnegut in his wonderful
speech of 1976 dedicating the new library at Connecticut College, New
London.1 They are worked by experienced and dedicated crews of
librarians and booksellers. And – to paraphrase Neil Gaiman – unlike a
Google search, which will return you 100,000 answers, these navigators
of knowledge are able to bring you back the right one. In the New World
of online marvels, we must not lose sight of the physical artefact, which
will continue to play an important role. The book has always been about
collaboration, in its production and dissemination, in its journey from
author to reader – it is ideas made flesh. In this sense its ebook offspring
should be no different.
Books can be purchased and accessed in hard copy and by online
retrieval. In the future, academic bookshops will survive as clicks and
mortar, adopting online purchasing and smartcard technology; by
emphasising the tactile experience of browsing; by expanding product
range and services; by offering author signings; workshops and events. So
it is not an either/or question of ebook or hard copy; escalators or stairs;
or whether these storehouses become impersonal keyboards and clicks,
or shelves lined with beautifully produced books. They must provide for
both: the existence of bookshops serving their communities – university
or high street – is vital to our cultural well-being. That is at the heart of
the matter. We must ensure bookshops do not become redundant in the
delivery of content – whatever form that content takes.
We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer
to another bookshop. This means as much as two thirds of sales disappear.
Some of this spend doubtless migrates online; but much of it vanishes from
the book sector entirely.2
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A Periodic Departmental Review of Library Services took place at
Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) in November 2014. What
follows is a summary of the overwhelmingly positive response from one
hundred CCCU academics when asked by email: What are the benefits
of an academic bookshop on campus?3
The benefits of a bookshop seem too obvious to annunciate – to quote
an anonymous bookseller: ‘Words cannot do justice to the pleasures
of a good bookshop. Ironically.’ In testimonials received from CCCU
academic staff an outpouring of support emerged, not only regarding
the value of a physical bookshop on campus, but in particular one that
is university-owned. A Booker Prize shortlisted author, the Programme
Director for our MA in Creative Writing, commented:
In my four years at CCCU, the one thing that has truly impressed me, and
that is a match for any institution in the world, is the campus bookshop.

Another respondent said the university bookshop is a ‘centre of text at
the heart of campus’ and ‘a symbol of academic rigour and learning’. It
demonstrates in a very physical manner what is involved in the work of a
university. The bookshop promotes this not only to current undergraduates, researchers, and conference delegates throughout the year; but to
prospective students on open days, to guest speakers and external examiners, and to visiting overseas academics from partner institutions. The
bookshop, with its in-store and window displays, is ‘one of the few places
[on campus] where there are obvious clues of academic life’, according to
another responder.
The bookshop contributes to academic life by the promotion and
provision of resources. A core activity, delivered in close partnership
with academic staff, is the collation and production of recommended title
reading lists which, one responder highlighted, ‘enable students to turn
up to classes with books, prepared and ready to participate’. The curation of recommended books relevant to subject areas studied at CCCU
is vital. As is the speedy replenishment of stock on a ‘just-in-time’ basis,
and customer orders that are ready for collection the following day, all
with an automatic discount. It isn’t just about selling books, it is about
meeting customer needs and providing our students with options when
it comes to accessing information and acquiring knowledge; whether
that is an ebook, a second-hand purchase or borrowing a title from the
university library. Booksellers are happy to price-check against online
sellers because, contrary to popular belief, it is not always cheaper online.
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By working closely with publishers and academic staff, the availability
of custom books and ‘book bundles’ ensure good value. Our bookshop
benefits immensely from its inclusion within the Department of Library
Services at CCCU. Our staff regularly help students search the library
database. Libraries do not put bookshops out of business. Where texts
are too expensive, they can be borrowed or accessed; but ebook users
continue to use bookshops.
Approachable and knowledgeable booksellers are crucial. It is necessary to pass the ‘good bookshop test’ – is being able to ‘find books when
you are not looking for anything in particular’ or books the browser
‘wouldn’t have found on their own’. This ‘browsability’ was more recently
termed by Mark Forsyth as ‘the unknown unknown’, in a specially
commissioned Books Are My Bag promotional title.4 The online bookseller equivalent is their ‘also bought’ selections. The bookshop offers
a valuable physical space when it comes to taking time out from the
pressures and demands of everyday academic life; it is ‘a place for staff
and students to wander among ideas and to generate chance sparks of
inspiration’. The university bookshop is an ‘essential part of the student
experience at CCCU’ but also ‘supports the teaching and research of staff
magnificently’ as illustrated in the following anecdotes:
Recently, I tried to buy an obscure, almost out of print book on Elizabeth I
from a) Amazon and b) the Publisher to no avail (they only had three copies
and couldn’t find them). The CCCU bookshop was the only outlet that found
me a copy, I rest my case.
I know that I can ask for a book that the library do not stock and you can
find it and have it ‘in House’ within days. This makes my work more research
focused, more up to date and more effective. It is something I particularly
value, even if I am not sure of the title and only know I need a book by
Husserl!!
Only this morning I was approached after class by an anxious international
student who needed some reading guidance and wanted titles recommended
to her. I was able to walk her into the bookshop and put the appropriate
volumes straight into her hand. Problem solved.

Other academics have argued that the presence of a university-owned
bookshop on campus ‘adds to our image as a Place of Learning’. It is
an ‘essential part of a learning community’; and a ‘powerful message of
intent and delivery, of what, as a university, we are all about’. It has been
described as ‘CCCU at its best’, and its booksellers as ‘book ambassadors
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Craig Dadds

who go into the world holding a CCCU banner’. Like many high-street
bookshops, the university bookshop is a modern, welcoming retail
environment with seating and an adjacent Touchdown Café; but as a
university-owned bookshop:
It underscores the open-ended quest for understanding and enlightenment
that must surely be at the heart of a Church-founded institution of Higher
Education ... without it we’re in danger of reducing education to the level of a
purely financial transaction.
It belongs to us – we can have a say in what is provided, stocked and offered to
staff and students in a timely way. It is run by colleagues who understand our
programmes, our requirements, and who are open to new ways of working.
They are student and staff centric, they go the extra mile.

The university bookshop helps students identify with the university; and
like the library, chapel, sports centre, art gallery, and student union it
is an essential part of the student experience. The bookshop’s Twitter
account (@cccubookshop) has received many positive direct messages
and tweets from followers external to CCCU lamenting the absence of a
bookshop at their university.
During open days introductory texts are recommended to those
interested in courses at CCCU, and such engagement might make all the
difference in terms of converting prospective students to new students.
Including the open days, bookselling at CCCU has evolved ‘to meet the
disparate needs of different campuses and respond to the diverse mix of
programmes’.
Ownership allows for a closer working partnership with CCCU
academic staff across all faculties and schools; as well as with colleagues in
the library, and many other professional service departments. The bookshop stock is organised to reflect the faculty/school structure at CCCU.
One section is dedicated to publications authored by CCCU academic
staff; as well as CCCU students. This demonstrates to our students (and
the general public) how tutors are actively engaged in research, exemplifying scholarship in their field of expertise. Publications by students are
also promoted and displayed:
The shop promotes local and/or lesser known visiting writers and smaller
presses in a way that the large chains will simply not do.

The bookshop distributes CCCU publications such as John Lea’s 77
Things to Think About: Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (2012).
Currently discussions are under way to investigate the potential of
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

creating a CCCU Press, making postgraduate work readily available
online and in a printed format.
The bookshop supports the university’s public lecture series, as well as
conferences and author signings. The latter is sponsored by the School
of Humanities, and the Faculty of Education at CCCU. Authors recently
included Esther Freud and Louis de Bernières with forthcoming readings
from John Boyne, Michael Morpurgo, and Shami Chakrabarti planned
for 2015–16. In total 34 events were organised by the bookshop in the last
academic year. These are a form of outreach opening the university to the
local community and supporting the university’s widening participation
agenda. As one respondent stated, the university is ‘actively recruiting
many students who have grown up in homes with no books’ and ‘some
of whom live in areas with no bookshops, or small bookshops with only a
very limited range of bestselling titles’. Conferences and book signings, with
Michael Rosen or Anthony Browne, have resulted in more books in school
classrooms and in the hands of teachers and pupils. Attending university
is an exciting but potentially daunting prospect and according to one
academic ‘the presence of an in-house bookshop and a friendly face ... could
mean the difference between a student being a proud graduate or not’.
If our mission is to develop knowledge and pedagogic practice for our
students and the community at large, the bookshop is in the forefront of
supporting this essential role.

Notes
 K. Vonnegut (1994) Welcome to the Monkey House, Palm Sunday: An
Autobiographical Collage (London: Vintage Books), pp. 469–77.
 D. McCabe (2013) ‘Why Bookshops Matter’, The Bookseller, http://www.
thebookseller.com/blogs/why-bookshops-matter, accessed 4 September 2015.
 Responses from CCCU staff have been anonymised.
 M. Forsyth (2014) Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted
(London: Icon Books).

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view
a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/version4

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0020

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

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

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0022

Further Reading

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0022



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397–441.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0022

Further Reading

Zichuhr, K. (2013) Who’s Not Online and Why (Washington, DC: Pew
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org/2013/09/25/whos-not-online-and-why/, accessed 4 September
2014.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0022



Index
Academic Book of the Future,
57–63
academic books, 2, 3, 5–7, 15,
20, 21, 57–63, 67–69, 75–77,
80, 89, 98
academy, 6, 13–14, 16, 26, 47, 75
accessibility, 14, 49, 84, 86,
87, 89
AHRC, 2, 3, 8, 63, 71
Amazon, 95
Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation, 47, 48, 49, 51,
52, 53, 54
arts and humanities, 12–13, 16,
58–61, 68, 69
assessment, 2, 4, 7, 13, 14, 21,
51, 59, 60, 94
Association of American
University Presses (AAUP),
47, 53, 55
Barnes & Noble, 95
Blackwell’s, x, 6, 95
Bookboon, 88, 91
book history, 12, 84–90
book supply chain, 39, 41, 44
bookseller, 7, 86, 92–97, 98,
100, 101
bookselling, 3, 84–90
bookshop, 7, 42, 89, 90, 98,
99–103
The British Library, 2, 3, 5, 6,
8, 57, 59, 61–62, 63 n.1, 64,
65, 71, 78


California Digital Library, 49
Cambridge University Press,
33, 34
campus, 7, 70, 94, 98, 100, 101,
102
Canterbury Christ Church
University (CCCU), 7, 98,
100–103
CILIP, 79, 80, 81
CLOCSS/LOCKSS, 59, 79
codex, 4, 12–13, 14, 15
collaboration, 12, 58, 61, 62–63,
70, 79, 99
consumer, 6, 22, 85, 89, 90, 93
courseware, 93, 94, 95–97
Crossick, Geoffrey, 8, 51
CrossRef, 79
devices, 15, 16, 44, 76, 80, 89
digital humanities, 18, 22–23
digital preservation, 74,
78, 79
Digital Public Library of
America (DPLA), 79, 80
Directory of Open Access
Books (DOAB), 79
ebooks, 4, 5, 20, 21, 22, 34,
43–44, 62, 68, 77, 87, 88,
95–96, 99, 100, 101
economics, 76, 78, 85, 86, 96
ethics, 79–80
European Library, 79
evaluation, 4, 7, 95, 96
DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0023

Index



Flat World, 87
Follett, 95
format, 4, 12, 27, 34, 35, 36–37, 89, 99,
103
funding, 6, 12, 35, 48, 60–61, 86, 87

MOOC, 7, 62, 94, 95
Muse OPEN, 49

Global Research Council, 62
Google, 5, 59, 78, 99
Goldsmiths University Press, 37

OAPEN-UK, 54, 59
Open Access, 2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 27, 37, 47,
48–52, 58–62, 64 n.15, 67, 70, 76, 78,
79, 84, 86–88, 90
OpenIntro, 88
Open Library of the Humanities, 51,
59
Oxford University Press, 87

Harvard University Press, 43
Heath Trust, 79
HEFCE, 28, 35, 70, 73
humanities, 12–13, 15, 16, 18, 21–23, 26,
33, 35, 47, 49, 58–61, 68
innovation, 4, 6, 8, 16, 25, 53, 59, 87–89
The Internet Archive, 79
Jisc, 50, 52, 54, 59
Johns Hopkins University Press, 49
JS Group (also John Smith Group),
x, 7
JSTOR, 66, 68
King’s College London library, xii, 6,
80, 82
knowledge infrastructures, 5, 39, 40,
41, 42, 44
Knowledge Unlatched, xi, 5, 45,
51, 59
Kortext, 95
learning resources, 92, 93, 94–95, 97
librarianship, 57, 74, 79
libraries, 5–6, 13, 44, 45, 52, 53, 57–63,
67–71, 75, 77–81, 85, 99, 101
library data, 66, 67, 68, 69–70
linked data, 19–20
Liverpool University Press, ix, 5, 51
Manchester University Press, xi, 5,
market, 34, 37, 42, 43, 85–90, 96, 97
market research, 32, 34
monograph, 12, 13–14, 16, 20, 22, 23,
33–34, 37, 42–43, 47–51, 61, 62, 67, 70

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0023

national libraries, 5–6, 57–63
New York University Press, 48

Palgrave Macmillan, vii, ix, xi, 3, 5,
32–38, 50
Palgrave Pivot, 3, 8, 35–37
peer review, 4, 21, 27, 33, 34, 49, 50, 79,
85, 86
PhD thesis, 14
Policy Press, 37
PORTICO, 59, 79
Practice as Research, 4, 24, 25–28
preservation, 5, 14, 48, 50, 59–60, 62,
78, 79
Princeton University Press, 34
print on demand, 4, 6, 32, 90
printed book, 14, 15, 18, 21, 23,
43, 68
Project Muse, 49
promotion, 13, 14, 19, 75, 100
publisher, 7, 32–35, 37, 40–45, 47, 51–53,
79, 81, 85–90, 94, 101
publishing, 2, 5, 33, 41, 47–52, 67, 68,
85–86, 93
reading, 15–16, 20, 22, 50, 68–69, 77,
84, 94, 100, 103
Research Councils UK (RCUK), 62,
65
Research Excellence Framework
(REF), 2, 13, 26, 34, 35, 44, 66, 67,
71 n.7
research output, 4, 14, 28, 35, 59
research policy, 57, 61



Index

Sage, 37
software, 15, 92, 94, 96
Springer, 34
Stanford University Press, 37, 49
student, 16, 51–52, 59, 68, 69, 86–89,
93–97, 98, 99, 100–103
student experience, 7, 51, 98, 99, 101,
102
supply and demand, 6, 41, 85, 86
technology, 3, 14, 22, 28, 33, 52, 78–79,
99
textbook, 7, 51–52, 75, 87–89, 92–96
UCL Press, 45, 52
UK Research Reserve, 66, 68
UKSG, xi
university, 5v, 13–14, 21, 37, 46–53,
67–69, 78, 80, 87, 93, 94, 97, 99–103

University of California Press, 49
University of Chicago Press, 47
University of Manchester Library, 80,
82
University of Michigan Press, 49, 54
University of Minnesota Press, 49, 53
University of North Carolina Press,
48, 53
University of Nottingham library, xii,
6, 66, 67, 69
Vega, 50
video essay, 4, 24, 26, 27–28
Wikipedia, 21, 78, 93
WorldCat, 79
Yale University Press, 49
Yuzu, 95

DOI: 10.1057/9781137595775.0023