Textbook Authorship: The Academic Ego, Part 4: Pricing Outfalls

Saturday, November 10, 2007

The Academic Ego, Part 4: Pricing Outfalls

This is the 4th installment of a previously unpublished article I wrote for academic editors to help them gain a perspective on the authors they work with. Author perceptions about academic freedom and the transformations of the publishing industry brought about through digitization challenge academic editors in new ways. (Copyright Mary Ellen Lepionka 2007: All Rights Reserved.)

Pricing Outfalls
Publishers began addressing the issue of pricing only when the great success of the used textbook industry became known, and again following price revolts early in the 21st century. Students now can buy used, foreign, and pirated English-language copies of textbooks online, and some universities opt to rent textbooks to deliver by the chapter to students via their intranet servers. The publishing industry also has responded with streamlined low-cost or coverless editions and e-textbooks, uncoupled from their supplement packages. Nevertheless, textbooks that don’t do well—or that compete directly with the publisher’s more successful new acquisition—often are retired, and the academic ego is bruised again. "I got dumped for a bigger gun," one angsty author put it.

In academic and scholarly publishing, in contrast to textbook publishing, complaints about prices usually refer to the high premiums that libraries must pay for print and electronic journals that publishers monopolize. Library consortia have fought back to great effect, aided by online networking. In some well-publicized cases libraries have cancelled their subscriptions for the most expensive scientific, technical, and medical journals from companies such as Elsevier, Wiley, Academic Press, Blackwell, and Kluwer.

In addition, many scholars and researchers increasingly publish their work online, often using electronic clearinghouses for peer review. They make their articles available on a noncommercial basis, self-publish, and also generate increasingly popular blogs for academic discourse. These trends further challenge the publishing industry at the same time as they help stimulate the growing open-access movement in academe (Suber, 2002), such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Free Online Scholarship (FOS), and MIT’s Dspace.
Editors must be sensitive to the fact that authors have more options now than ever before. The road to successful projects must be paved carefully with information about the textbook publishing industry.

Freedom to Publish
Many academics champion the open access movement in the belief that it safeguards freedom of thought and expression. Academics take academic freedom very seriously and tend to believe that the publishing industry (and mass media) determine what gets published (or aired, etc.). They seem not to realize that publishers, like television networks, base their decisions on 1) market data, rather than on conspiracies sealed in closed executive meetings, and 2) shareholder expectations, rather than on megalomaniacal quests for world domination. In contrast with the realities, scholarly outrage over perceived threats of censorship or abridgement of academic freedom may be grossly oversimplified and thus tough for editors to deal with.

This outrage may stem in part from appocraphal imagery concerning mind control, perhaps from literature about cults or classic works such as 1984 or Manchurian Candidate. In textbook publishing, it also comes from the application of ideas about political correctness, in which, in Diane Ravitch’s words, publishers and editors become the “language police” in response to public pressure (2003). Editors requesting changes to a textbook manuscript may be thus accused. The authors of an introduction to psychology textbook who refuse to mention Sigmund Freud, because they do not approve of Freud’s ideas, for example, may fault the publisher for caving in to the demands of the prospective customers who teach the course! In this manifestation, the academic ego rests firm in the notion that people should know enough to want what the author is providing (and if they don’t, the hell with them).

Unlike editors of trade nonfiction, textbook editors routinely must ameliorate conservative, liberal, fundamentalist, Marxist, deist, feminist, existentialist, and other ideological “expository” prose to protect naive audiences and to avoid alienating the instructors who order the textbooks. Ufortunately, crusades in defense of Intellectual freedom may extend to moral claims about human rights to knowledge. A creator of prying and crippling computer viruses famously defended himself by claiming, "I don't publish viruses to cause a panic. I only publish to spread knowledge. I don’t think knowledge should be punished" (Zeller, 2005). Where knowledge is sacrosanct, then, so is the expression of it, and by extension the one who does the expressing. This is heady stuff, especially for people who live for what they know and what they think they know--the academic authors with whom academic editors must travel (like so many Sancho Panzas).

Labels: academic authors, Academic editors, Academic ego, author-editor relations