On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 1:57 PM, Jonathan Sterne, Dr. < jonathan.sterne@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