Editorial

Citation

Cassell, K.A. (2007), "Editorial", Collection Building, Vol. 26 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/cb.2007.17126caa.001

Editorial

I was recently listening to a presentation by the director of a university press, and it reminded me about some of the realities of what is happening to scholarly publishing and its possible long-term effect on libraries. In many academic libraries there is less funding to buy scholarly books, whether they are in print or electronic, since libraries have had to put their budget into electronic databases which are predominately composed of journals and journal articles. The effect of this on scholarly publishing is that the publishers are selling fewer and fewer copies of their books, and many are struggling to survive. I know that in this fast-paced culture many people prefer to read journal articles. Yet the book is different as it is able to develop information on a topic in a much more expansive manner. Jenica Rogers-Urbanek says in her interview in this issue that “the information in monographs remains unique.” It is not necessarily what is found in a journal article. Journal articles tend to deal with more narrowly defined topics than books. However, some subjects require a book in order to have enough space to develop a proposition or theme adequately. Therefore, it is not a question of one or the other but rather the need to have a mix of both.

There is more and more effort to sell scholarly books as e-books. This is fine, but I think the jury is still out on whether scholarly presses can sustain themselves financially on e-book sales. Also libraries have been slow to buy e-books because they really don’t know if their users want to read whole books online. Maybe they just want to preview a book online and then check out the book to read it in its entirety. Or maybe the users are willing to read some books online but not others.

Rice University Press has resumed operations as a digital publisher this year. It will operate much like any university press except it will provide its materials online. Users can purchase a copy of the book through print on demand. So is this the future? Will libraries choose the e-option or will they order a print copy? My guess is that at least some will order books as print copies.

Can libraries help scholarly presses to survive? Will libraries try to protect their monograph budgets and continue to buy print books? What will library users demand? These are all important questions for collection development librarians as we think about the future and ponder the question asked by Barbara Quint in Information Today (January 2005): “But where will the scholarly books of the future come from?”

Kay Ann Cassell