Let me begin by thanking you for this honor. Like most of you I belong to many professional organizations and all of them have provided me with the opportunity to grow intellectually as well as forge the enduring professional associations that have so enriched my life. From the beginning of my career, however, CLAH has always served as my professional home. It is because I consider myself fortunate to be one of you that this award means so much to me. I am grateful indeed.
My talk today will break with tradition. All my distinguished predecessors have used this occasion to recall their intellectual formation and discuss key moments in their careers. For reasons that I find difficult to explain, I have tried and failed to produce a similarly structured talk. Perhaps, my failure is nothing more than a native New Englander's natural reticence. Whatever the reason for my difficulties, I have decided to limit the autobiographical details to the bare minimum in order to offer some observations about the powerful forces now churning beneath the surface of academic publishing.
First, the brief autobiography. Returning from a year's research in Buenos Aires in 1972, I joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the newest campus in the UNC system. It then had 3,500 students, most of whom were first-generation college students. Until tenure, I taught eight courses a year, four of them American history surveys. My first-year salary at UNCC was $7,500. When I retired after 41 years on the faculty, UNCC had more than 25,000 students. My teaching load had been reduced to two courses in colonial Latin American history each semester and my salary was surprisingly generous. Much more important to me personally and professionally was that I had been joined by three wonderful colleagues in Latin American history: Jürgen Buchenau, Jerry Dávila, and Tom Rogers. Those of you who are employed in this nation's long-established research institutions may see my situation at UNCC as satisfactory at best, but my hope is that the larger number of CLAH members who are employed by second- and third-tier universities and colleges will be encouraged. My message is, simply, that things can get better and that a rewarding career is possible in these humbler settings.
You will not be surprised to learn that I have never spent five seconds wondering if I chose the wrong career. It has been my good fortune to spend my entire working life doing something I love. While I found enormous satisfaction in the classroom and am very proud of what I achieved along with my Latin Americanist colleagues at UNCC, it is clear to me that my professional identity has always been rooted in my life as a scholar and author. I am sure that many of you feel the same way. The importance of research and publication to us collectively is what has led me to today's conversation.
During the first half of my career, opportunities to publish flourished. University presses expanded their Lain American history lists, as did some trade publishers. As enrollments grew in our classes, textbook publishers ambitiously recruited new authors in our field as well. Think of the many textbooks still utilized in our field that were first published in the 1980s and 1990s. Among them is Colonial Latin America (now in its ninth edition with Oxford University Press), which I co-authored with Mark Burkholder. With the expansion of book publishing, the number of quality journals in our field proliferated simultaneously. By the new millennium, however, this rapid growth in publishing options had lost momentum. Today, all the principal arenas in which we publish are under intense pressure.
Many of you are aware of the problems we now face. In 2002 a Modern Language Association committee published The Future of Scholarly Publishing, which initiated an intense discussion across the book-dependent disciplines.Footnote 1 The American Historical Association's Perspectives on History followed the MLA report in 2003 with a series of articles focused directly on the unique problems confronting our discipline. James McPherson, then president of the AHA, identified declining university and college library book purchases and reductions to the subsidies given to university presses as the chief threats to the survival of the history monograph.Footnote 2 Roughly a decade later, in 2012, William Cronon, writing as AHA president, used the pages of Perspectives to revisit this issue. After acknowledging the continuing financial troubles afflicting academic libraries and university presses, he went on to suggest another, perhaps more daunting issue: the fact that the young readers of the electronic era may lack the patience to read long-form scholarly books and articles. Put another way, can academic historians find readers in a generation that most commonly accesses the past via Wikipedia? Despite this worry, Cronon made clear that he embraces and celebrates the opportunities offered to us by “blogs and tweets, Wikipedia entries and Youtube videos, web pages and Facebook postings.”Footnote 3 While some may find intellectual and polemical opportunities in these new venues, Cronon's point is that books and long-form articles are now threatened by both the cultural changes unleashed by the electronic era and the financial problems identified earlier by McPherson.
Given the wide circulation of these pessimistic assessments of the future of the traditional book at the highest levels of our discipline, outsiders might be surprised to discover that since 1990 more and more history departments have installed the requirement that junior faculty publish a book as a precondition of tenure. Once committed to this requirement for their youngest members, few departments fail to require a second (or third) book for promotion to professor. As of now very few departments have accepted the e-book's equivalence to the traditional printed book in employment review decisions. So, while the book publishing business is roiled by financial troubles, academic historians have in effect doubled down, putting in place employment practices dependent on a continued expansion of book publishing. Collectively, we value scholarship (indeed, scholarship is at the center of my professional identity). But don't we need to ask whether pressuring our colleagues to produce more books as average book sales crash is the best response to the problems we face?
This contrarian behavior chiefly results from our protected place in this fraught environment. While academic publishers are dependent on selling the products of our creativity and labor once in print, you and I are not dependent on the profitability of these books. We are overwhelmingly the salaried employees of colleges and universities that reward our scholarly production without consideration of book sales. The most valuable rewards we receive for our published work are tenure, promotion, and salary increases provided by our employers, not royalties. As a result, not only do we ignore book sales, but we most often single out for praise those books which move opinion within a narrow field of scholarship, rather than those that attract a large audience. Our reality is that we are publishing more and more books while average book sales steadily decline.
Confronting New Realities
University press and textbook publishers cannot hold themselves aloof from the consequences of this reality. Many university presses have lost staff, some have cut advertising and travel budgets, and others no longer attend meetings like the AHA. Nearly all now subcontract key publishing functions like copyediting. Some cut costs by hiring corporate book “packagers” who manage production from copyediting to preparation of final files, a practice already well established among commercial publishers. Many press directors are now routinely asked by university administrators to justify their budgets or, in some cases, to justify the very existence of the press. Indeed, the long-established University of Missouri Press narrowly escaped closure in 2012.
Because their overhead is so much greater, publicly held textbook publishers face even more intense pressures. In this commercial corner of our world, decades of reckless corporate acquisitions have left most textbook publishers vulnerable. My own co-authored world history textbook The Earth and Its Peoples was first published by Houghton Mifflin Company, which ran into financial difficulties a few years later. As they reorganized, HMCo. sold our book to Cengage Learning, which soon faced its own crisis, finally emerging from Chapter 11 only last year.
Textbook publishers also face intense competition from the used book market. Three decades ago used books found their way into my classroom via one local used bookstore. Today a highly efficient used book market is organized nationally by large corporations that sell online as well as via campus bookstores. Most textbook authors will tell you that the greatest threat to their royalty income comes from the sales of their own used books. The efforts of publishers to maintain profits by raising prices and shortening the revision schedule have not succeeded. In fact, these efforts to stabilize earnings have generated intense criticism from politicians and academic administrators who worry about the textbook costs faced by students.Footnote 4 The diminished viability of their traditional model has propelled textbook publishers toward electronic publishing, despite the steep startup cost. Most now believe that this format will eliminate, or nearly eliminate, used book sales, thus compensating for its lower profit margins.
The circumstances of even long-established specialist journals are also being altered by new technologies and new forms of aggregation and access. Traditional journal subscriptions have fallen drastically, as has advertising by publishers, as you and I moved our literature searches to Project Muse, JSTOR and similar online resources. Despite the scale of these changes, the financial viability of the leading journals in our field has not yet been threatened because transfer payments from search engines and savings in printing and mailing costs have compensated for lost revenues. Nevertheless, important questions remain. In a world where electronic-only journals with minimal peer review proliferate and the influence of our articles is increasingly measured in online “hits,” will traditional specialist journals in our field be able to maintain their reputations and distinct identities? And, more importantly, will they be able to rely on the services of uncompensated authors, peer reviewers, and editorial board members in an era when association with a journal's “brand” becomes less meaningful professionally?
At the same time that university presses, textbook publishers, and journal editors move in the direction of electronic publishing, they are also hustling to find secondary revenue streams and new ways to cut costs. Nearly every university press is struggling to catch up with textbook publishers and scholarly journals by experimenting with electronic formats. In fact, every publishing contract I have signed in the last seven years has included a provision for an e-book version. The key problem is that, while these electronic versions are sold at much lower prices, the actual savings in production costs are small. It costs a university press something like $25,000 to $35,000 to publish a traditional book, but the cost saving for the electronic version is $5,000—often less. That is, among scholarly publishers the savings produced by electronic publication are dissipated by the discounted sale price charged for the e-book. Real savings will be found only if university presses continue to trim editorial and marketing costs. Put simply, university presses face an existential crisis. As stated directly in the conclusion of a report issued in 2011 by the Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing of the Association of American University Presses, “The dominant business model for scholarly publishing over the past several decades—sales of print books and journals to institutional, retail, and text markets, supplemented by modest amounts of institutional support—is no longer sustainable.”Footnote 5
Declining library purchases of historical monographs is a key contributor to this crisis. According to one long-established university press editor, libraries now purchase an average of between 40 and 80 copies of books published by Latin American historians (this is down from something like 300 to 400 copies in the early 1990s). The simultaneous publication of discounted e-books has done little to reverse this decline. As average sales have declined, university presses have been forced to re-commercialize their backlists by bundling them in electronic format and selling them to libraries at heavily discounted prices. In this uneven migration toward e-books everyone understands that sales of traditional print books will continue to decline as average prices paid for electronic books continue to fall.
Although the phenomenon is general across historical fields, increasing specialization in the field of Latin American history has certainly influenced the decline in average book sales. We are now organized in subfields that narrowly circumscribe our reading habits and, more importantly, our book purchases. Do historians of modern Mexico buy books on colonial Peru? Do historians of colonial Brazil buy books about modern Chile? More to the point, perhaps, do colonial social historians of Mexico or Peru or the Rio de la Plata buy books published by colonial economic historians in their own field? Our current reality is that only a handful of breakout books attract readers, or, more importantly for this discussion, buyers from outside the confines of a narrow subfield.
I urge you to contemplate this harsh reality as you visit the AHA book display. Could there be a more compelling monument to our collective enterprise and creativity than the stacks of scholarly monographs piled on the tables of the university press displays? Think of the years of research and writing embedded between the covers of these volumes. The seldom-reflected-upon reality now floating beneath the surface of this collective achievement is that total sales for a monograph in our field now average less than 200 copies and a shocking number of admirable books sell fewer than a hundred copies. At this point in my career this dispiriting reality has consumed more and more of my attention. I have no easy solutions for us, but I am convinced that we must recognize the seriousness of this challenge and begin looking actively for ways of increasing book sales. I assure you that every other sector in the world of academic publishing is focused on protecting its interests as revolutionary changes sweep toward us. Their interests and our interests will not always coincide. It is time for us also to focus on the future of the book.
As I look at our perilous circumstances I am haunted by a dystopian image of the book's future imagined by Richard Brautigan in his 1966 novel, The Abortion. Brautigan's protagonist lives and works in a San Francisco library that serves as a depository for books that will never circulate, never be read. Nearly all are handwritten, some in crayon.Footnote 6 His job is to provide a welcoming ritual that confirms an author's effort and celebrates the intrinsic value of the book itself. Together with each author, Brautigan's librarian wanders the library stacks to locate the ideal shelf space where each book, once installed, will remain forever, books with titles like Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms, by Mrs. Charles Fine Adams.Footnote 7 Brautigan's imagined library celebrates the achievement of authors in a world where readers have all but disappeared. Is this our shared destination, my friends?
Acquisitions and Altered Priorities
University and college library book purchases have historically tracked the national economy. Periods of economic contraction coincided with reduced acquisitions. Periods of economic expansion commonly led to increased acquisitions. Reductions in university and college library budgets during the recent recession, however, have also reflected the game-changing impact of altered priorities among librarians and higher education administrators. Put directly, these influential actors no longer see the chief function of university and college libraries as the acquisition and dissemination of books and journals and, as a result, no longer believe that maintaining the size and currency of their book collections is crucial to their mission or to their university's reputation.Footnote 8
So, while a small number of great research libraries in the United States continue ambitious book acquisition programs, most second- and third-tier public and private sector universities, and many liberal arts colleges, have already deflected their budgets away from book acquisitions.Footnote 9 On these campuses libraries now spend 25 percent or less of their acquisition budgets on books and allocate an ever-larger proportion of their purchasing budgets to electronic-format titles and databases. The piratical pricing structure of scientific journals is among the key drivers of these altered library budget priorities. Following an increase of 600 percent between 1982 and 2002, scientific journals subsequently increased subscription costs more than 145 percent in the next six years alone. Today subscription prices for scientific journals average above $3,000 per year and some, fantastically, are above $20000.Footnote 10
Academic libraries’ altered purchasing priorities have been mirrored in the reallocation of their physical space. In many university and college libraries books are now stored in inconvenient compact shelving, or have been moved to hard-to-access satellite locations. Space taken from books has been transferred to student study rooms, computer stations, and staff offices. The UNCC library, for example, now boasts a ground-level coffee shop. Once in place, these decisions to reallocate space previously dedicated to bookshelves will not be reversed.
Additional reductions to library book purchases are inevitable. University administrators now closely scrutinize library circulation numbers. Cornell, for example, discovered in a 2010 study that 55 percent of books acquired since 1990 had never circulated. For the authors of these uncirculated books the dystopian future imagined by Brautigan is already in place. After confronting similarly daunting circulation numbers, the six campuses of the California State University system committed to reduce what they called “collection redundancies” (copies of a single book found on two or more campuses) by eliminating the purchase of duplicate copies among the six campuses except when justified by actual borrowing experience. Even e-book acquisitions are being subjected to similarly rigorous standards, despite their much-reduced demand on physical space and staff time. Many libraries are utilizing patron-driven acquisition (PDA) policies that provide access to digital books and articles only through subscription databases until demonstrated student and faculty use justifies a permanent acquisition.Footnote 11 Historians will immediately appreciate the effects of these decisions on our discipline, which finds ongoing utility in out-of-print books, collections of published documents, and other materials not likely to be digitized in the near future.
Many of us will soon face a more threatening challenge to book publishing. The majority of departments organized in colleges of arts and sciences already use articles, not books, as the key markers of faculty professional achievement. It seems much more likely to me that you and I will be urged to abandon the book than, alternatively, that our deans and provosts will create subvention funds to help prop up book publishing. From the perspective of higher education administrators this change would make faculty evaluation across departments more transparent and uniform.Footnote 12 While we as historians continue to assert the intellectual superiority of our books and long-form articles to the publication regimes used by colleagues in other disciplines, I predict these rival disciplines will have the whip hand in the longer term. In a world where a psychologist evaluated for tenure often presents 40 articles or more as a measure of professional competence and a historian being evaluated for the same purpose presents a book and one or two articles, we cannot presume that the historian's achievement will always be judged superior.Footnote 13 In my 41 years as a university professor I never saw evidence that a dean or provost had read a single book or article submitted on behalf of a tenure candidate. In this environment of willful ignorance, our arguments in support of the book's superiority will find little purchase.
While we are not in a position to fully anticipate the future of academic publishing, the likely direction of change seems clear. The migration toward electronic publishing will continue at university presses, textbook publishers, and scholarly journals. As this transition matures, the traditional printed version of the monograph is likely to become a presentation piece, produced in small numbers via modern on-demand printing technologies, to gratify authors.Footnote 14 In this environment our already small earnings from our intellectual property will effectively disappear. This downward pressure on the earnings of authors is readily visible in Amazon's recent offer of 700,000 titles delivered electronically for $9.99 per month, an offer that will surely depress the earnings of even the most successful authors of fiction.
As the potency of electronic publishing is fully revealed, our understanding of authorship as well as the integrity and coherence of our written work will come under intense pressure. The enhanced search capacities available to us in electronic books will, I believe, necessarily undermine our appreciation of authorial skill in argumentation and the organization of evidence. I recognize already my own deeply altered reading pattern with scholarly articles accessed through JSTOR or other data bases. Rather than reading entire articles, I now first disassemble them via key word searches, stripping out the material of direct use to me and reading the entire article only if it turns out to be closely focused on my own topic of the moment. Once this pattern attaches itself to the book, the effect will be devastating, I believe. We have always viewed ourselves as authors, not content providers. Historians admire and reward authorial skill, but the care we now invest in developing evidence across a book's chapters in service of some central argument has real value only to traditional readers. In a world where our chief function is to cull information from archives on behalf of other narrowly interested scholars, this long-valued subset of our collective skills will be lost.
The very idea of the book as an intrinsically coherent and indivisible intellectual product is also at risk. Nearly every textbook publisher already offers classroom adopters the opportunity to pick and choose chapters from multiple books, repackaging the re-aggregated material in either electronic or traditional paper formats. Do you think university presses will be able to resist the temptation to offer this same option to classroom adopters who want to repackage content from backlists and, eventually, newly published monographs purchased in electronic-format bundles?
Can we save the traditional print monograph in the long run? The answer is no, unless we can be satisfied by the on-demand availability of our work for a small number of traditionalists, something akin to the current state of vinyl records. In our effort to defend the traditional book we have few allies on campus with the exception of a handful of humanities departments. Even among these related disciplines there is substantial opinion supporting the adoption of the article-based regimes now in place in the sciences and social sciences. With university and college librarians unlikely to deepen their support for book acquisitions and with more and more university and college administrators viewing our attachment to the book as an impediment to the “rationalization” of employment review practices, the printed history monograph will soon be on life support.
Although the interests of academic authors and university presses will diverge on occasion during the transition to electronic publishing, it is university presses, and not campus administrators or librarians, who will remain our chief allies as we strive to protect our understandings of authorship and intellectual property as well as prolong the survival of the traditional printed book. Even as e-books gain ground, university presses will remain committed to traditional printed books as long as they are economically viable. In fact, as average sales of our books have plunged in the last two decades, many university presses have actually increased their production of new titles in the hope of finding a handful of high-volume books that can make up for the losses experienced with the mass of new history titles in our field and others.Footnote 15 This is the reason that you and I continue to find university presses willing to publish our books, despite the brutal sales numbers.
Changing to Meet the Challenge
It seems highly unlikely to me that we, as authors and classroom instructors, can save the print version of the history monograph in the long term. We may, however, be able to slow the transition to e-books and, at least in the short term, protect what most of us believe are the key elements of traditional authorship. But to effect even these small adjustments to the book's current downward trajectory, we must be willing to alter our behaviors and opinions. First, we must accept the fact that the future of the history monograph in print or e-book format ultimately depends on book sales and do what we can to boost sales. I realize that the majority of us avoid, if not actively reject, any discussion of book sales; we are scholars not peddlers, right? Nevertheless, if the sales of our books continue to decline, we will be forced as a discipline to surrender our current benchmarks of scholarly achievement and professional competence. As a tentative first step, perhaps you and I should commit to buying new, rather than used, books in our field, as a reasonable subsidy of the traditional book. If we will not buy these specialist books, who will?
Second, while library purchases of Latin American history monographs will never recover, it may be possible to recapture some of these lost sales by increasing the use of specialist books in university and college classrooms. This will require two substantives changes in our collective behavior. As authors, we must write books that are more hospitable to non-specialist readers. And, as classroom instructors, we must find ways to include more specialist books in our courses. I tested this model with the Diálogos Series I created at the University of New Mexico Press in the 1990s. During the two decades I served as series editor I discovered that relatively small changes in style and minor adjustments in advertising could improve the average sales for serious books based on original research. I asked authors to avoid unnecessarily abstract and obscure language and provide contextual detail that would increase accessibility for non-specialist readers. I also asked authors to put human actors on the page and move unessential historiographical discussion to the notes. Put another way, I asked authors to imagine an audience broader than the 10 to 30 specialists who might show up for one of their conference presentations.
The Diálogos Series during my tenure included edited books and a small number of books written specifically for the university classroom, as well as 25 traditional monographs. It is the performance of the 25 specialist books that is most useful to this conversation. During my editorship, we achieved higher levels of sales in Latin American history than are generally expected among university presses. While six of the single-author monographs had sold fewer than 700 books as of June 2014, the average across all 25 books was 2,500 copies. More impressive, the six most successful Diálogos monographs sold an average of 5,550 copies. The majority of those sales were for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate classrooms. I am sure that we all know of other works of serious scholarship in our field published by other university presses that have also enjoyed classroom success. As graduate school mentors, peer reviewers, and senior colleagues, can we move our field toward a self-conscious search for a broader readership? Exploring the small adjustments to a manuscript necessary to access a wider market seems more than sensible, given the perilous condition of scholarly publishing. Our only available targets for this expansion are educated non-specialist readers (a market now dominated by trade nonfiction books) or university and college classrooms. It is clear to me where you and I enjoy a competitive advantage.
These small concessions, if embraced, will not save the printed book, but they would certainly slow the steep decline in the average sales of serious books in our field. Remember that this publishing arena was reasonably healthy when average sales were in the range of 400 to 600 copies. However, we must also recognize that the combination of current graduate training in our field, especially the selection of dissertation topics, and the nature of tenure requirements operate in contrarian ways to limit any hope of expanding Latin American history book sales. Narrowly conceived projects are now rushed into print to meet the six-year probationary timeline of tenure review and seldom sell beyond the boundaries of the author's subfield. As a result, most editors and senior scholars believe that first books by young scholars will be the first electronic-only publishing category as we transition to the e-book. This transition would already be in place if not for the resistance of tenure committees to accept e-books as adequate markers of professional competence.
Finally, let me address a topic that will certainly be controversial. It seems to me that our behaviors as classroom instructors are often directly subversive to our desire to save the print book. We are all sympathetic to our students’ preference for used books in this era of fast-rising textbook prices, but we need to at least acknowledge that the sales of used books are existentially threatening for some of the publishers we rely on as authors. When we assign chapters instead of whole books from university press publishers, or stand mute when one of our students offers scanned copies of assigned chapters or even entire books to fellow students via Dropbox or some other online sharing program, we are surely undermining the prospects for the survival of the already-debilitated traditional book. I cannot and will not use my control over the syllabus to compel my students to fund the survival of the book, but certainly it is possible to make students aware of the book's perilous circumstances and adjust my reading lists to privilege whole books over chapters and excerpts. I fear, however, that little can be achieved in this direction, since so few of us are willing to acknowledge the importance of market realities to the survival of the book. Without a dramatic expansion in library purchases—highly unlikely—or enhanced sales for classrooms, neither printed monographs nor the still unproven e-book in Latin American history will long survive.
My recommendations are modest indeed, given the scale of the crisis we face. Even if you and I are put off by the idea that our scholarly achievements are commodities, we must recognize that the publications we value so much depend on the economic viability of academic publishing. We must therefore do our part in maintaining that viability. If we as authors and classroom teachers hope to affect the future of academic publishing, we must self-consciously strive to expand the audience for the history we write. The world of academic publishing is being transformed; retaining our current practices will not be an option.
