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What is the future of book publishing?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

What do TPC readers think the future of book publishing looks like? Recently I’ve had a book proposal declined by multiple presses that seemed, on paper, like natural fits given their past titles. Some of the rejections have cited financial difficulty with projects like mine mainly as a function of the current publishing landscape (for instance, reduced institutional/library demand for a print run in the age of digital media). It’s a real shame that worthwhile research projects may be killed in the womb, not for lack of merit, but for lack of a viable market.

Do any readers have any helpful insights to share?

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10 responses to “What is the future of book publishing?”

  1. Anonymous

    This is a great question. I have published a few books, monographs and edited volumes. And I hope there is still a place for books in our field. They are a special kind of contribution to scholarship – one can do something in a monograph that one cannot do in a few related articles.
    But your worries are well-founded. Look at how many books you have on your shelf, and how many you buy each year. I suspect people are not buying many anymore. (I still buy quite a few … and I get many for free because I referee for book publishers, etc.). Clearly, this makes producing books less profitable. Further, many people are just illegally downloading books – I hear this from people all the time: “I downloaded your book from Kazakhstan”. This too cuts into the profits for book publishers.
    I ask everyone who has not yet published a book: guess how many copies of a philosophy book a publisher sells? And, for those who have published a book, you should post the number of books you have sold on this site. It will be a reality check for people.
    But let us hope that philosophers can still publish books.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      “And, for those who have published a book, you should post the number of books you have sold on this site.”

      Okay, so how many have *you* sold?

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        A textbook sold about 1200, monographs have sold about 700, 410, and 230, and edited volumes have sold 240, 225, and 0 (it was just published).

    2. Anonymous

      To be fair, books are insanely expensive. I’m just a grad student and it’s impossible to buy them when they go over $100 USD. I don’t really believe that this is entirely because of production costs. Book publishers have a monopoly and are trying to milk it as much as they can (see for instance the ridiculous prices for textbooks or even the cost of an activation key). They are bringing this on themselves.

      I bet they would sell more if they sold the books in bookstores too.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        To add to the last anonymous, I don’t buy many books because I have to make frequent moves and books are difficult/costly to move due to their weight. If someone deigns to offer me a permanent position then I’ll start expanding my library. Nonetheless, I know many philosophers with large collections of books in their office, including other early career people, so I think it’s false to imply that people don’t buy books anymore. Rates of hardcopy book purchasing could well be decreasing. However, it seems to me that academic books are primarily meant to be purchased by libraries, not individual people. When I read books now I tend to access them digitally via my library.

        I think the best option all around is for authors to arrange for their books to be published open access, but that requires a lot of funding, I presume.

  2. Michel

    B1 has sold 476 copies. I think someone has picked it up as a textbook, because it continues to sell a few dozen a year.

    B2 has sold 4 copies, but I don’t have the numbers for last year yet, and the press was bought and sold twice, which may have interrupted things. They don’t seem to have approached libraries, which they should have, because it’s for a pretty niche audience (…but of more than four). It’s also far too expensive; at $100, it will struggle. If it had been priced at $20, I’m convinced it would have sold a decent number

    B3’s sales are unknown, because I don’t have the numbers yet. I imagine it will be between 40-100, mostly library sales (which is what B2 should be). It’s also quite expensive, though.

    Books 4-6 are with their publishers. I expect them to be in the same range, though B4, which is out next month, will have broad interdisciplinary appeal, so should do a bit better.

    I’m writing B7 now, and I think the topic is exciting enough that, so long as it’s reasonably priced, it should sell more like B1. We’ll see.

    Reply
  3. AGT

    I suppose the correct question is: what is the future of book publishing in a system oriented toward maximum profit at lowest possible costs? To THIS question, the answer might well be: none.

    But this isn’t the same question as whether we SHOULD be publishing book, whether it makes sense to write books. To THIS question, assuming free human inquiry is a worthwhile endeavour (and I think it is), the answer is affirmative.

    So, the real question is more like: why are keeping the present profit-oriented, business-like form of book publishing in place?

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    I’ve published no books (yet?), and don’t like books for financial reasons. Unless they are subscribed by my institution (like many OUP books), given that there is way more stuff for me to have time to read, unless reviewers specifically ask me to cite something, I wouldn’t want to pay for what I have to read.

    On a seperate manner, a friend of mine told me that he was really upset that the publisher only sold hardcover versions of his book. This made his book expensive and adversely affected his readership.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    Some interesting publication information. As noted, people have absurd expectations for how many academic books one can expect to sell. Copernicus’ book was initially printed in a print run of about 300 copies in 1543. A second edition was only published in 1566 (23 years later) – and it was a print run of about 400. This was a “must have” book for serious astronomers in the late-1500s – and every university had someone who taught astronomy.
    Most academic publishers have moved to a print on demand model. But these are the sorts of numbers you should think about when you think about academic publishing and book writing.
    It is very costly to set things up for the first print of a book. And if publishers can only expect to sell 200 to 400 copies, you can begin to understand why they price the books so high.
    Many of the academic publishers count on library sales to retrieve the costs of production.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    My book — a collection of primary sources that are worth having bound together for practitioners in a couple particular subfields — has sold a bit more than 300 copies after a decade of sales. Half of those sales came in the first 18 months, and since then it’s been a couple dozen sales a year.

    Reply

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