The Future of Scholarly Book Publishing in Political Theory

I n 1995, I wrote an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education outlining the problems of publishing scholarly books in literary criticism and explaining why the Penn State University Press could no longer afford to remain active in this field. Of the 150 books about literature the Press had put out in the previous decade, 65% had sold fewer than 500 copies, 91% fewer than 800 copies, and only 3% more than 1,000. The pattern of sales in this discipline had eroded to the point where a press without much of a subsidy from its parent university could not sustain a publishing program in it anymore. It seemed clear even then that what we scholarly publishers have come to call the problem of “endangered species” would be spreading to other disciplines over time. Five years later, in an article I wrote for the newsletter of APSA’s Organized Section on Comparative Politics ~2000!, I analyzed data that seemed to show that field to be heading in the same direction as literary studies, and I concluded with not a great deal of hope for the future. Recently, at the invitation of the Association for Political Theory, I turned my attention to the subfield of political theory and offered this paper as background for the session on book publishing at the conference in November 2006. While many of the same pressures remain in place to bedevil university presses, and it would be premature surely to claim that we are out of the woods yet, there have been some significant changes that give reason to think the future may not be quite as gloomy as it appeared back at the turn of the millennium. First, before talking about the recent changes, let’s look at some numbers that illustrate how the market has eroded over the past few decades. My previous employer, Princeton University Press, did detailed studies of sales patterns in different disciplines. For political science as a whole, the average five-year total for books published only in hardback in the period 1960–1967 was 3,387. That average had already dropped to 1,768 for books published between 1971 and 1973 and by 1979–1981 was down to 1,274. Paperbacks began emerging in the late 1960s, but initially were typically released after the hardback had already been out for at least a couple of years. In political science, the average five-year sale for later paperbacks at Princeton was 2,623 for paperbacks published in 1973–1977. Helped by an NSF-sponsored study ~Fry and White 1975! of changing library budgets ~documenting a trend of more acquisitions funds going to journals and less to monographs from 1969 to 1973!, university presses began recognizing the seriousness of the erosion in library sales as early as the first half of the 1970s and adopted a new strategy of trying to recoup some of the lost hardback sales by issuing more titles simultaneously in hardback and paperback. By 1980, every book in political science at Princeton was being issued simultaneously in hardback and paperback. The average five-year sale for hardbacks in dual editions was 1,206 in 1977–1979 but only 996 by 1981–1983, while the paperback averages for those periods were 3,754 and 5,481, respectively. On my recommendation, Princeton began tracking sales of political philosophy books separately in the later 1970s. For books published in hardback only during these two periods, the average five-year sale actually increased from 1,292 to 1,440 ~but the number of titles included were very small, fewer than five!. For books issued simultaneously in hardback and paperback, the averages were 1,120 down to 975 for hardbacks and 4,393 up to 5,267 for paperbacks. With this relatively encouraging experience as background, I carried over the same strategy to Penn State when I came here in 1989. Many other presses by that time had long since jumped on the bandwagon of dual editions that Princeton had pioneered in the early 1970s with its simultaneous Limited Paperback Editions ~LPEs!, and competition with other presses, not to mention expectations from authors, made this the dominant approach in most fields of scholarly publishing, especially in the social sciences but also in many fields of the humanities, too. But the numbers were already beginning to suggest that this strategy had its limits. Let me illustrate by using data from sales of the 73 books in political theory that Penn State published over the 15-year period from 1991 to 2006. For convenience I’ll group them into clusters, dividing them into three five-year periods during which the Press published 29, 24, and 20 titles, respectively ~reflecting the overall pattern of initial growth of the Press’s annual output to a maximum of 80 titles in the mid-1990s and then a gradual retrenchment to about 50 titles a year currently!. In the first two periods, 1991–1996 and 1996–2000, the Press published only nine titles that were not dual editions and 44 that were, and of the nine, two were paperback reprints of books by Stephen Bronner and Jean Bethke Elshtain that commercial publishers had allowed to go out of print, leaving just seven as books issued only in hardback. Excluding Chris Sciabarra’s atypical Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical ~1995!, which enjoyed significant book club sales and total sales of 2,530 hardbacks and 7,385 paperbacks, the average total sales through June 2006 for the 43 remaining titles were 466 hardbacks and 1,366 paperbacks for the 23 books published in 1991–1995 and 243 hardbacks and 931 paperbacks for the 20 books published in 1996–2000. These represent declines of 48% and 32%, respectively—sobering numbers for any publisher. We knew already from statistics issued by the Association of Research Libraries that since the mid-1980s academic library purchases of monographs had dropped nearly 25% as an ever-greater share of their funds had gone toward sustaining journal subscriptions ~even after libraries began cancelling subscriptions in the early 1990s!. Anecdotal evidence, as well as information gleaned from Yankee Book Peddler ~the largest wholesale supplier of academic books to libraries!, suggested that more libraries than ever were opting to buy paperback editions instead of hardbacks when they were issued at the same time, thus contributing further to Sanford G. Thatcher is director of Penn State University Press. He previously worked at Princeton University Press as manuscript editor, social science editor, assistant director, and editor-in-chief. He is president-elect of the Association of American University Press.