Monthly Archive for June, 2011

From Matthew Reisz, Times Higher Education

There has been much jitteriness among publishers and academic authors of late as both parties grapple with the consequences of digital and cultural change.

Speaking at the Modern Language Association of America’s annual convention in Los Angeles earlier this year, Leslie Mitchner, of Rutgers University Press, pointed out that new technologies are giving scholars ever more opportunities for research. A project to digitise the entire contents of the Vatican Library, for example, will make reams of new material available to academics around the world. But, as Mitchner said in a session on “The brave new world of scholarly books”, this is no panacea. While such projects open the door to new research, paradoxically, there are fewer opportunities to get published, get a position and get tenure.

According to a recent report by the Association of American University Presses, technological and cultural shifts seen in the past decade have challenged publishers’ business models and “may even threaten many of the intellectual characteristics most valued by the scholarly enterprise itself”. It is of the essence of this enterprise to be “in it for the long haul” rather than “the next viral hit”. Yet, the report warns, traditional monographs risk becoming “largely static objects … instead of vibrant hubs for discussion and engagement”.

Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses offers a somewhat idealised picture of the value added by academic publishers. (It is not difficult to find titles with covers that seem to have been “designed” by a monkey with a typewriter picking a typeface at random.) But the report also offers a frank assessment of the commercial challenges. Although journal publishing has made a successful transition to the digital age, “maintaining its long-standing primary business model – subscription sales to institutions – while at the same time creating opportunities for new revenue streams”, academic books are a long way behind and are only just “beginning the transition from print to digital formats”.

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From James McGirk, 3 Quarks Daily

Writers are anxious about the Internet and all things electronic, as we worry these newfangled ways of entertaining ourselves might someday obviate our own work. The solution, perhaps, lies in understanding and adapting to this new medium. Consuming enough that we can master its complexities and render appealingly intelligent confections for our readers. But who are these readers? Are they different online than they are in print? Some of them aren’t even human. There is a new form of reader browsing the Internet. For this is no longer just the age of mechanical reproduction; we now have to contend with mechanical readers as well.

William Gibson, who coined the term “cyberspace” imagined it as a mass consensual hallucination, rendered as a cityscape, the prominence of each shape on the horizon an index of how much data was passing through a single point; a point which in 1982 a reader might have thought of as a mainframe computer, and what today, nearly thirty years later, we might identify as an html address or site. On Gibson’s Internet Google would glow the brightest, soar the highest; be an Empire State Building to the Internet’s Manhattan. Most users don’t look at the Internet by volume, however, they read it pane by pane, navigating from bookmarks or through searches, feeding keywords into an ‘engine,’ a series of algorithms, to retrieve lists of linked addresses to the information they seek. These lists are customized to the user, the results tweaked by the user’s location and previous searches. The more searches you make, the more information about yourself you reveal, the more customized the experience becomes.

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