The existence of a ubiquitous and cheap worldwide communications network that increasingly makes documents easily and freely available will require a transformation of academic library collecting practice. It will be driven by a number of specific developments including: the digitization of content; the development of print repositories; the…

This study is a comparison of AUPress with three other traditional (non-open access) Canadian university presses. The analysis is based on the rankings that are correlated with book sales on Amazon.com and Amazon.ca. Statistical methods include the sampling of the sales ranking of randomly selected books from each press. The results of one-way…

Are university presses ready for their close-up? In a nod to Hollywood, a growing number of trade publishers are producing book trailers to promote new titles. But do video teasers have a role in university-press publishing? What about longer formats? Based on an entirely unscientific poll of publicists at 25 university presses, the answer appears…

This article talks about Mormonism, which has been sensationalized more often than most other religions. Since before the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and through Mitt Romney's run for the U.S. Presidency, an unprecedented number of news stories have been published about the Mormon faith. Historian Richard Bushman has termed the last…

Much of the current North American academic crisis of publishing, tenure, and promotion is both the cause and the effect of this fetishization dominant in the humanities: that of the grand narrative of knowledge-production, respectably bound with a spine. Short works will get one only so far, no matter how many of them one produces, or how well.…

The blurb is a paratextual element which has not previously been subjected to systematic analysis. We describe the nature and purpose of this publishing epiphenomenon, highlight some of the related marketing issues and ethical concerns and provide a statistical analysis of almost 2000 blurbs identified in a sample of 450 non-fiction books.…

Discusses the nature, functions, goals, and responsibilities of university presses and their relationships to trade publishers, parent universities, and the academic community as a whole; and concludes that the biggest problem confronting university presses today is uncertainty about where financial support is going to come from. (JPF)

Discusses the pros and cons of the increased willingness of university presses to include trade books within their lists. Describes an experiment in which the same manuscript dealing with a nonacademic subject was submitted for publication at five university presses. (JP)

This paper presents the findings of a 1982 survey of members of the Association of American University Presses and other American book publishing firms with a net worth of of $500,000 or more. A low survey response rate of 25 percent is noted. Survey findings are reported as follows: (1) acid-free paper is used by 65 percent of respondents; (2) of…

Reviews the history of publishing of Latino literature and journals in the U.S. Nineteenth-century Latino publishing in different geographical regions is examined and the impact of social changes on 20th-century writing is discussed. Bilingual publishing and the role of academic presses are highlighted. (MMU)

Academic libraries, university presses, and commercial ventures are embracing print-on-demand publishing to improve services as well as reduce costs. The concept dates to the early 1990s, but problems with the technology coupled with a lack of interest by libraries and book vendors hindered its popularity. Today, print-on-demand remains ideal for…

Librarians, university press publishers, and scholars, find themselves at an unusually stimulating and challenging time in the history of these respective professions. The forces of technology, and privatization are changing the nature of their work environment, even as their fundamental mission remains, for now, the same. Committed as they both…

A frustrated author recounts his own experiences and those of others in dealing with publishers. He concludes that academic publishers prefer exchanging ideas and academic gossip with authors to the basics of business, letting the books sell themselves to a captive audience of academic libraries. (MSE)

University presses serve a prominent gatekeeping role in scholarly publishing because they, unlike commercial presses, can select books which transmit knowledge without being wholly captive to the marketplace. To analyze the cyclical flow that continually advances intellectual life, this selection procedure was examined with a study of the…

The economic and social factors affecting the publication of scholarly and scientific/technical material throughout the world following World War II are identified and discussed. An outline of the state of scholarly publishing immediately following the war precedes considerations of the role of university press in scholarly and technical…