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How conservative publishers and authors risk killing off books and chapters across university social sciences and humanities

Four years ago, drawing up my reading lists for the new academic year, I realized with a start that I had almost stopped setting books altogether, in favour of journal articles. The reasons were simple. Students at the London School of Economics are demanding ‘customers’, with a huge appetite for work, a serious commitment to doing things properly, and (on the MPA programme where I teach) lots of career and work experience already behind them. Hence we long ago had to radically upgrade all our facilities for them. And for reading lists that meant they were no longer issued on paper but held on Moodle, our electronic ‘Learning Management System’.

If I cite journal articles on my reading list, my students would have instant one-click access from Moodle to the PDF copy. They could download them to their PCs for study wherever and whenever needed, and keep them permanently in full text form beyond the seminar week, using the PDFs for later essay writing and revising for exams. In addition, the whole class could access and read the same materials simultaneously. And I can add journal articles right up to the last minute in digital on-demand form.

By contrast, if I cite a paper book (and they were almost all paper-only four years ago), none of this was feasible. I would have to ask our exceptionally busy and talented MPA students to spend hours chasing around the vast LSE library in search of elusive paper copies of books. Even for key references, they would have to wait for access to one of the necessarily limited number copies in our teaching collection. Certainly the whole of six seminar groups for my courses could never access the same books at the same time. We would do our best with electronic study packs, but they could only cover one chapter per book for copyright reasons and they took our Library months to prepare. You could not have any last-minute thoughts on what to put in the e-packs.

As in so many other industries and areas of our social life then, the competition of ancient, pre-digital forms of products with modern digital forms was inherently uneven from the outset. And for a long time it got worse as time went on. The outcome was foreseeable and known to everyone in the publishing industry and in academia decades ago. But the conservative book publishers were determined to follow the music industry down the path of digital denial for as long as they possibly could. Partly this reflected some genuine intellectual property rights (IPR) anxieties, but partly also an entrenched commitment to existing ways of doing things.

Even for textbooks and the ‘intermediate texts’ often used in teaching more advanced courses, publishers for a long time came up with digital ‘offerings’ that were hopeless in their useability. The text was digital all right, but you had to read it live on screen, and it was ponderous to navigate, often because of pointless ‘frames’. You could not quickly scan text, and although you could sometimes print bits, you could never save it or annotate it. I can think of several different useless digital formats, where even if you set the textbook students would legitimately complain about its poor functionality.

Yet academics also were into digital denial in a big way, especially in the humanities and softer social sciences. Here books remained a main medium of scholarly communication. And often in these areas referencing practices have been so poor for so long that very many journal articles were not cited by anyone – especially in the humanities. Hence academics were mad keen to hang onto books, as the only things that get (lightly) cited.

And of course academia and publishing are both full of book fetishists?—?people who genuinely love reading books, objectify them, love bookshops, love the heft and feel and smell of books, lap up articles about how anonymous little grey Kindles can never compete etc,. etc. (Disclosure time?—?my house and my LSE study are both packed with thousands of the blighters too)....Continue Reading

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