A piece in the Chronicle Review highlights AcademicPub — a new business that allows professors to assemble their own textbooks from a range of materials from book chapters and articles, to white papers and web site posts. Several university presses, including PUP have signed on to the service and you can read more about it here:http://chronicle.com/article/New-Digital-Tools-Let/129309/

What an ingenious way to precisely tailor course materials while lowering textbook costs. I wonder if it will catch on.

This past Wednesday I was given the opportunity to tag along with the PUP publishing team at BookExpo America.  I was advised to wear comfortable shoes, but I really had no idea what to expect. What, I wondered, is a “Book Expo,” and what does one do there? I learned that BEA is an incredibly important event for the publishing industry, as well as the ultimate book lover’s paradise.

BEA is held at the Javits Center, the same enormous conference arena that hosts the New York International Auto Show and the New York Bar & Wine Show every year. It’s a big place. I arrived and began to search for the Princeton University Press table, working my way through the maze of stalls and people in line for author signings. Was that Jimmy Fallon? (Yes! He was signing copies of his soon-to-be-released book.) Is it really worth standing on a half-mile long line for an autograph?  I discovered that the organized and experienced BEA attendees have strategies for navigating a day at the expo:

1. The expo’s guide contains schedules of the times and locations of every author and speaker event, so map out an itinerary of author visits.

2. Look for the best free bags.  McGraw Hill was the winner this year, with bright red canvas tote bags that were large enough to hold a small child.

3. Plan an extra half hour to hour for your coffee run.  Judging by its queue Starbucks may be the hottest spot in the entire conference center.

However this advice only applies to those like me who came to spend the day cruising around the floor.  The important things going on have nothing to do with which celebrity’s autographed book you can score (though that is a nice perk) or who has the best free goodies. At the PUP table our representatives hold meetings with retailers to promote our titles, and field questions from the countless reviewers and curious show-goers who filter through.  This year the PUP was stationed in a prime location–right at the end of the University Press row and next to one of the show’s entrances.  The volume of people stopping at just at our stall was incredible!  It is overwhelming to think of how many publishing houses were present and how many books each had.  I have a whole new appreciation for how competitive, and how huge, the publishing industry is.

My personal experience at the show was absolutely wonderful.  I met great people from publishing houses located all across the country, and saw a host of innovative books that I look forward to reading in the future.  I got a signed Christmas cookbook (and a tasty brownie) from T.V. chef Mr. Food, had my photo taken with two pirates at the Galaxy Press booth (uploaded, as promised) and joined a champagne toast of Oprah’s last show with the friendly people at Abrams.  And, according to my bathroom scale, I came home with 33 pounds (!) worth of books.  My shoulders are still aching, but it was worth it!

While The Merchants of Culture is exclusively about trade publishing, according to Peter Dougherty, there are at least three lessons for university press publishers to be found in its pages.

Dougherty writes,

For the first part, he supplies an extremely useful tutorial in thinking about book publishing as a field, a kind of gravitational ecology in which there are few gains to be made without at least a few sacrifices. As economists would put it, there are no free lunches.

Second, by providing such a careful historical and empirical anatomy of the business, he presents a sobering X-ray of the factors that impinge on our publishing, as well as that of the trade. In his one mention of university presses he explains how a certain subset of us have stepped in to fill the breach in trade publishing created by the concentration of the industry, which has made us attractive publishers for mainly academic authors who might have opted for commercial houses a generation ago. Fair enough. But his account of the risks entailed in competing for sales in such a heavily concentrated marketplace reinforces what most of us university press publishers already know: that trade publishing is hardly a panacea for the challenges we face as scholarly publishers.

…

Thompson’s third and final lesson for us in our activities as university presses and as publishers is more hopeful than the zero-sum maneuvers we learn by studying the ecology of the field: we should remain positive and resourceful in our outlook. The quotation above, “Good publishers…are market-makers in a world where it is attention, not content, that is scarce…” is a useful watch phrase. It is our capacity to see what another fine scholar, Ronald Burt, describes as the “structural holes” in our respective disciplines, and to perceive these openings in the scholarly landscape as opportunities for new books, that inspires us as publishers.

Read the complete review here in the AAUP’s monthly newsletter. (If you prefer a PDF version, try page 4 in this document: http://aaupnet.org/programs/publications/exchange/2011_winter.pdf)

Could this be a revolution in design publishing?

MIT Press has just released a new iPad app for its design title, NONOBJECT, by Branko Lukić and Barry Katz. The print version of this book was available in early November, but now you can buy it from the Apple Store and download it to your iPad for $19.95.

Inspired by Debussy’s notion of music’s existence in the “space between the notes,” NONOBJECT explores the designs made from the space between people and objects and produces a series of objects that can’t exist but perhaps should. The app complements and builds on the printed book, presenting flexible navigation based on touch controls, interactive 360º views, and videos that show what the objects would be like if they did exist. The new level of interactive engagement brings the book’s images to life.

“We get excited about those pairings of content and technology that genuinely benefit the reader,” said MIT Press Director, Ellen W. Faran. “How better to experience these unbounded nonobjects which open our minds than to explore them in new and infinitely varying ways in the NONOBJECT app?”

Fascinating! If you want to read more about NONOBJECT, check out its website here. You can also take a tour of the app’s features at http://www.nonobject.com/blind/ipad_demo_Short.mov.

If you’ve been wondering about Mumbai Fables‘ evocative cover, it was recently featured in The Huffington Post‘s “25 Outstanding Book Covers of 2010.” Carmina Alvarez-Gaffin, one of the designers at Princeton University Press, was quoted in the article describing how she and author Gyan Prakash worked in tandem to create a design for the book’s jacket:

The image that we ultimately used for the cover of Mumbai Fables is a painting titled “Bombay Buccaneer” by Atul Dodiya, and was brought to us by the author, Gyan Prakash. He loved the image and felt that the image truly captured the essence of his book. Though the book is nonfiction, it is very novelistic in feel, and conjures up the images of Bollywood cinema and the graphic novels of Bombay . Gyan Prakash felt strongly about using a fresh and modern image — not an image traditionally associated with Bombay–but something that would capture the Mumbai of today.

To view the rest of the article, click here. For more information and news related to Mumbai Fables, check out the Facebook page – if you “like” the page, you’ll receive notice of updates!

Continued »

Over at the Atlantic, Adam Roberts has been writing a fascinating five-part series about contemporary poetry. In the fourth part of the series, Roberts proposes that contemporary verse might take a cue from the Slow Food and other Slow movements and “help us transition away from monocultural reading habits.” He goes on to praise small presses:

In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer’s market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you’re used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they’re often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love—not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde’s notion of “the gift.” Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support.

Princeton University Press hasn’t yet made his list of recommended small presses, but with the return of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which includes Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City (a National Book Award finalist), and the new Facing Pages series, you can support what Roberts calls “obscure, high-brow lit”–or come spring, the cheeky offerings of Troy Jollimore’s At Lake Scugog and the lush and spiritual poems in Anthony Carelli’s debut collection Carnations!

You can (and should) read his other posts in the series here, and for more information on Slow Poetry visit the Slow Society site. Don’t forget to savor all of your reading experiences!

Why do we do what we do?

Harvard University Press’s blog has a great article that uses the Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute’s recent conference titled “Why Books?” as a jumping off point to discuss “Why (These) Books?”. University Presses regularly undertake important publishing projects regardless of the bottom line and produce amazing books whose importance is greater than their budget lines and profit and loss statements. Read the HUP Publicity Blog post for the complete story of the impressive series, The Image of the Black in Western Art.

Ten books, each hundreds of pages long, each full color throughout, with hundreds of illustrations, printed and bound in Northern Italy, all to the highest production specifications, for $95 per book. That’s a high price point, we know, but trust us – this isn’t a project for the bottom line, and probably no traditional publisher would risk doing it at that price. This is a project that could only be done by a university press because it’s likely that only a university press would let the scholarly and artistic value of the series overshadow the financial realities. We’re producing these books in collaboration with the Du Bois Institute because they represent an incredibly important trove of scholarship, and disseminating work like that is our charge.

Gene C. Fant writes,

Everyone knows the pressure that university budgets are undergoing these days, squeezing academic presses in two directions: Operating budgets are shrinking even as revenues from library and consumer purchases are declining. The fact remains, however, that there is still an important role possible for academic presses. They are repositories of great scholarly traditions, even as they find ways to extend those great traditions and even build new ones. Most professors who publish find that their pedagogy is informed by their scholarly activities. The trick, of course, is figuring out a business model that is functional in the long run.

…

What suggestions would you offer for the improvement of scholarly presses? Do you know of models that seem to be working?

An interesting point Fant makes is that the only time we really become aware of or start beating the drums for University Presses is when they fail — ie a closure is announced. Many University Presses are functioning well–surviving and even thriving through this economic downturn–but we don’t trumpet our horns. Perhaps we should.

What’s your opinion? Join the discussion at the Chronicle of Higher Ed here.

HuffPo shows love for PUP in “17 Most Innovative” UP’s

Anis Shivani got in touch with us several weeks ago to ask PUP publicity for the buzz on fall’s new releases. We knew he was writing a big UP roundup piece but hadn’t anticipated such extensive title-dropping – or such an earnest appeal to the media to pay attention – to which we say snaps, Anis, and thank you!

It’s always a small victory to see appreciation – and review coverage – for academic books in the mainstream media. We know that big names on important topics stand more of a chance at a mention than other equally worthy books in the catalog. That’s not news to us. But the Huffington Post piece which ran this past Saturday is bursting at the seams with enthusiasm for both our VIP releases and lesser-known authors. What a nice change of pace.

Princeton University Press was featured along with 16 other UP’s distinguished as the most “innovative” academic publishers. Shivani’s piece points to the disconnect between quality of material and media exposure. The main distinction of a UP book is, naturally, meaty content. A UP book is the filet mignon to trade’s burger patty in the realm of non-fiction: unprocessed, high-quality, muscle-building protein. We may not be dressed up with condiments and bursting with aggressive flavor but we’re lean, unadorned steak. Why eat beef if you can’t taste the cow?

Meat metaphors aside, why is the media so hesitant to bite? Why don’t we get more reviews? Our authors work just as hard – if not harder – than anyone signed with a major trade house for less quantifiable return. Ask a friend in academic publishing – better yet, find a publicist, and I’m sure she or he would be happy to wax on about the injustice of being overlooked by the heavy hitters in the entertainment industry. But this is not a rail-against-review-neglect post. This is a thank you to our friends at HuffPo and a “Hey, look at us! We’ve earned this attention” occasion.

We can only hope that a few key members of the media read Shivani’s piece and take it to heart: “university presses do not publish boring or excessively weighty or arcane books. They may not be into showmanship and high-stakes publicity maneuvers, but their steady, unrelenting focus on particular subject areas creates vast bodies of new knowledge that the mainstream reviewing community makes a great mistake in ignoring.”

The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog featured the Princeton University Press logo in a post about Yale University Press’s recent colophon redesign. Click through to read the other case studies, but first, here’s Monica Racic’s take on the new Princeton University Press design:

While many university press logos are simply (perhaps elegantly) a stamp of the university seal or a line of text using the university name, there are quite a few dynamic monograms that subtly defy the university brand. Princeton University Press: In 2007 Princeton University Press marked its hundredth anniversary with a new, and now highly regarded, design by Chermayeff & Geismar. Peter J. Dougherty, the director of the press, describes the redesign in the preface to the Princeton University Press Identity Guidelines: “The logotype, including a symbol that embeds the Press’s initials within a modern “P” and the classical Trajan typeface used the Press’s name, combined with the familiar orange and black deployed throughout all visual elements, lends point, personality, and elegance appropriate to our identity.”

Our friends in Washington, DC, Hooks Book Events have been getting some great exposure with this excellent piece in yesterday’s Washington Post.  The piece features a recent tour of our very own Robert Shiller and THE SUBPRIME SOLUTION.

We’ve been working with Hooks Book Events for the past year+ and have had great experiences and success with author events in Washington.

Congratulations go to our colleagues at Yale University Press who celebrated their centennial last Friday, November 14, by hosting a conference in New Haven on “Why Books Still Matter.”  The Press’s first hundred years have been memorialized in a new book by Nicholas Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press, 1908-2008.