[Air-L] book prices

[Tim Laquintano]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Jonathan Sterne, Dr. <
jonathan.sterne at mcgill.ca> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
>
> Of course, for nonprofit university presses, income from journal publishing
> subsidizes book publishing, which in most cases is a big financial loss for
> the press.  So those of you in book fields should be a little circumspect
> about celebrating the death of the journal.
>
>

I was in a professional development seminar last year with David Blakesley,
a professor at Clemson who moonlights as head of Parlor Press, an
independent scholarly press. If I recall correctly a number of times in the
seminar the point was made that for whatever reasons (status?), top-notch
academic presses have often been reluctant to engage in one profitable part
of scholarly publishing: textbook publishing, which might be able to
subsidize the production of monogaphs. Thick and expensive first-year
composition handbooks, for example, have been lucrative for commercial
publishers.

With that in mind, Parlor has begun to publish peer-reviewed essays for use
as texts in first-year composition classes. The essays have all been
released under creative commons licenses, and composition instructors have
the option of creating their own anthologies from the various essays and
ordering print-on-demand copies, which is how Parlor hopes to subsidize
monograph production. I may not have everything totally right here, and I
don't know how it has been working or how long it will take to start
generating funding, but it seemed an intriguing model.

Tim

Tim Laquintano
Assistant Professor of English
Lafayette College
Easton, PA