Frankfurt Report 2009
The Entrepreneurial University Press
The Charleston Conference: Usage and Innovation
A View from Ithaka: An Interview with Kate Wittenberg
Amended Google Settlement Submitted
Miscellany:
University Press Books Honored
Books for Understanding Updates
U.S. v Stevens Argued Before Supreme Court
Green Press Initiative Publisher Toolkit
Submission Policy
Calendar: See the Events Calendar at www.aaupnet.org
Peter Givler
Executive Director, AAUP
Everyone expected that this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair would be slower than usual, but no one knew by how much. As it turned out, it was slow, but not nearly as bad as the 2001 Fair that took place a month after 9/11, when there were significant last-minute cancellations and many empty booths. Attendance this year was down by 4%, according to the Fair management, and my general impression in Hall 8 (headquarters for U.S. and U.K book publishers) was that almost all the usual publishers were there, although perhaps with smaller stands and fewer people. The AAUP members I spoke with all felt the business they were doing was, if not great, certainly good enough. This was surely helped by the fact that the book trade in the U.K and Western Europe has been much less affected by the economic downturn than it has been in the U.S.
A few items of general interest. Each year the Fair designates one country as a Guest of Honor. This year it was China, which caused a certain amount of drama during the Fair because of the Chinese government’s policies restricting freedom of expression. The New York Times has provided a good summary: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/asia/19books.html.
In April, I became Chair of the International Publishers Association’s (IPA) Copyright Committee, and in that capacity attended a number of IPA and other publishing association meetings held during the Fair. One matter of general concern is how the World Intellectual Property Organization’s (WIPO) so-named Development Agenda will play out. The Development Agenda basically instructs WIPO to give particular attention to the needs of developing economies. Under that directive WIPO is now considering the question of whether it should, by means of a treaty, mandate that its members implement copyright exceptions in their national laws to address the needs of Visually Impaired Persons (VIPs), and to permit cross-border transfer of educational materials.
According to the World Blind Union, 80% of VIPs in countries with developing economies live below the poverty line. No one disputes that low-cost or cost-free access to the written word in appropriate formats—large type, Braille, audiobooks, etc.–is a fundamental requirement for personal and social advancement. The only question is whether this goal can be best achieved by means of a WIPO treaty, which takes 5-10 years to create and up to an equal amount of time to be implemented by WIPO’s member states, or whether there is a faster path to implementation through voluntary cooperation among stakeholders. Representatives of VIPs, publishers organizations, and reproduction rights organizations (RROs) have been making good progress on creating a framework for the necessary infrastructure.
The ethical imperative for an exception permitting cross-border transfer of educational materials is perhaps less clear. On the one hand, there is an undeniable need for low-cost access to educational materials in developing economies. On the other, educational publishing is the bedrock of local publishing in those same developing economies, accounting for as much as 90% of the industry. So what would be the overall effect of an educational exception on the local publishing industry and the development of an indigenous book culture? From a legal point-of-view, bringing something as broad as an educational exception into harmony with the Berne three-step test will present interesting challenges. This complicated issue is scheduled to be formally introduced at WIPO later this fall.
Finally, and on a completely different note, Saskia DeVries and Eelco Verwerda at Amsterdam University Press convened a two-hour meeting of interested parties to discuss the desirability of starting a European Association of university presses. 50 people attended, representing some 30 presses from 12 countries. The challenges are obvious, but there was great enthusiasm for the idea and a wonderful discussion of needs and possible joint projects. An organizing committee was formed, and there will be a follow-up meeting at the London Book Fair next year. This is a very exciting development; AAUP began with just such a series of informal meetings held in the 1920s at the ur-precursor to BEA, and I wish our European friends every success.
Robin Derricourt
Director, University of New South Wales Press, Australia
How does a university press stay solvent, with resources to fulfill its mission, when it receives no funding in cash or kind from its parent university, has no foundation support, and operates in a relatively small and highly competitive market? One simple answer is flexibility and diversity, a willingness and structure that allow adaptability and change, with an entrepreneurial staff willing to embrace the new or different. In challenging times for US and other university presses the UNSW Press example from Australia may be of wider interest.
University of New South Wales Press (operating since 1962) has continued to expand annually and with over 50 staff is now the largest of the diverse university press operations in the southern hemisphere. We operate in a domestic market of 22 million people, but with only 40 universities whose libraries are both centralised and boast of their efficient interlibrary loan system, so they do not provide an adequate market for domestic books. To enable to us to survive and to grow we have developed structures and strategies that differ from most of our US colleagues.
The first is diversity of activities: we are book publishers, we run a retail bookshop, and we also provide marketing, sales representation and distribution services for the books of 35 other publishers. In 1997 we rebranded our sales division as Unireps (renamed NewSouth Books in 2009) and took on a wide range of academic and up-market trade lists from Australian and international publishers. Our Australian sales representatives are our own employees, operating a monthly sales cycle of 12 sales kits (not two seasonal kits) and we do the marketing and publicity for the overseas publishers, while the domestic publishers handle their own marketing. Operating NewSouth means for us we can control our own reach into the trade.
Since 1997 we have also operated our parent university’s campus bookshop, selling all books at discount while paying directly to the university a cash dividend from sales. In its first year the shop was named Australia’s Campus Bookseller of the Year and has won or appeared in this award many years since. The strength is that a textbook (and course materials) shop at the start of each semester turns into an outstanding general and academic bookshop for the rest of the year; and is supplemented by an on-line bookshop with seven-figure revenues, a secondhand bookshop and outreach for event sales.
There are several advantages to a university press in being book publisher, bookseller and book representative/distributor. They lie first in cash flow and the ability to generate a modest annual trading surplus which would not readily be achievable from publishing alone. The economies of scale support overheads in IT, accounting, operations and general management which it would be hard to maintain on the revenues of a mid-sized publishing list alone. For UNSW Press is structured not as a university department but as a not-for-profit company whose directors, including outside experts, are appointed by the university.
Australia has four university presses, in the conventional sense of fully staffed operations creating printed books for sale; some other universities have developed small in-house and e-book operations. Of the four, those of UNSW and Melbourne University operate as companies, those of the universities of Queensland and Western Australia as departments with a modest annual grant; both these include literary fiction in their programs. Melbourne formerly operated their university bookshop and now receives a large annual university grant as well as foundation funding. Queensland formerly ran the university bookshop which they have now subcontracted. Only UNSW Press has its own sales and distribution division.
Willingness to move into new areas of activity has to be matched by willingness to withdraw from them. Until 1974 we were also book printers. In 2009 we closed our 45-year old warehouse and outsourced order fulfilment: a decision brought on by the substantial growth of sales (and stocks!) and the ever increasing capital costs of software development and physical infrastructure; we were able to reduce staff numbers as a result. Australian has no wholesalers, only publisher/distributors and these provide the efficiencies of scale.
But primarily a university press is judged by the quality of its publications. We have maintained diversity in our publishing: our books win many awards, though sales revenues and public praise are not always neatly aligned. Flexibility in our list development is achieved by the energies of our commissioning but also by our structure. Publishing decisions on individual books do not involve the university or the board members; they are taken at an internal meeting of editorial, marketing, sales, production and financial staff; each contract proposal has to meet criteria of excellence, saleability and financial profile. The Press list emerged, unusually, from a tertiary textbook program but in the face of stiff competition from the multinational publishers this has been in retreat, as has a small program of professional books. The current model for quality scholarly books is to underwrite their publication from internal resources on condition of matching funding from the institution hosting the research. There are challenges here since Australia’s centralised government research funding body disallows used of grants to help publish results.
Our larger emphasis has been on important “books of ideas” for a wider audience, often but by no means always authors based in a university, aiming at a market beyond the specialist; this award winning list is one which has all the challenges of the “crossover” titles. Experiments in more ambitious trade non-fiction have had their challenges too. The most successful titles include ones which sell a substantial coedition to a US or other international copublisher. We have maintained our own books for a program of trade reference publishing, but focusing on proven strengths. And a final program is creating books which meet our criteria for content but sell back to the sponsor: institutional histories, for example. Occasionally like any publisher we have acquired lists by purchase or collaborative arrangements, but we have also been willing to sell a title or a list for strategic reasons.
All this produces a program of 60-70 books a year, spreading the publishing risks across a range of genres. And spreading risk in ever changing markets is probably a major benefit of the diversity in our operations and approach. As a university press, our primary goals lie in fulfilling our mission and in the content of what we publish, rather than in financial surplus, but our primary duty is to survive on the resources we can create so that we can continue to publish. With no external subsidy, a flexible approach to what we do and how we do it has enabled us to continue and grow.
For further information on scholarly publishing in Australia, see Robin Derricourt’s articles:
“Scholarly Book Publishing in Australia: The Impact of the Last Decade”
Journal of Scholarly Publishing 33 (4), 2002
“For a few dollars more: a future for scholarly books in Australia?”
Learned Publishing 21 (1), 2008
“Book publishing and the university sector in Australia”
in Making books: contemporary Australian publishing (ed. Carter & Galligan), UQP, 2007
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
For the past 29 years, academic librarians and academic publishers have gathered in Charleston, SC, in early November to discuss common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition.” In 1980, it was an informal group of 20 sharing problems and brainstorming solutions—now, the Charleston Conference hosts more than 1,000 attendees every year. This past November, while the hallways seemed less crowded than in 2007 (before the current economic decline had taken hold), plenary sessions were still filled to capacity and the program was overstuffed with interesting topics. Despite its growth, the conference maintains its reputation for collegial professionalism between publishers and academics—and still puts the emphasis on practical knowledge sharing over visionary set pieces.
One particularly well-conceived panel of interest to AAUP members was a session on the e-Duke Books project subtitled “What have we learned?” The session featured Michael McCullough, Sales Manager at Duke University Press; Lois Schultz, the Duke librarian handling cataloging and MARC record creation for the e-book collection; a Georgia State University librarian who acquired the collection; and a representative of collection vendor YBP. The session was a frank discussion from all sides of how an innovative e-book experiment was developed, and the real challenges they met.
Other AAUP members spoke at sessions on how the economy affects editorial programs and on advising librarians on best practices in publishing. Doug Armato, University of Minnesota Press Director, and Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka President, spoke at the annual “I Hear the Train A Comin’” plenary, focused on what’s around the bend in scholarly communications. Many of the plenary sessions were recorded and are being made available, after editing, at http://www.katina.info/conference/video.php.
The official 2009 Charleston tagline was “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but another, one-word theme seemed prevalent in many sessions and informal conversations: “usage.” In the journals world, usage statistics have long been an important component of pricing and licensing discussions. A detailed presentation on how the Institute of Physics develops journals digital pricing made clear how key the “cost-per-access” data point is (as did several tough questions from purchasing librarians in the audience). As monograph-length scholarship begins to ford the book-journal digital divide, usage statistics are going to have an increasing impact on value perceptions in the book world. Indeed, the GSU librarian mentioned that e-Duke Books’ offering of COUNTER-compliant usage data was a point in its favor.
There are “usage stats” in the print world, too, of course, though they are often more anecdotal and based on the only partial picture of circulation studies. Highly specialized monographs in small fields can be reasonably assumed to have low circulation (or usage). While it is reasonably argued that increased discoverability of e-books may increase even the most esoteric title’s usage, the expectations, standards, and patterns of usage will always be different for books and articles.
The most primal of a book’s “usage stats” is at the base of one of Charleston’s hot topics this year: patron-driven acquisitions. Under this model, books (in whatever media) are not purchased until requested by a library patron. The University of Denver shared details of their demand-driven acquisitions pilot project. Blackwell Book Services maintains the Denver library’s approval plan, and is paid for metadata and profiling work. While certain collections remain on an automatic approval basis (not waiting for a patron request), other books are simply exposed through library systems until a user requests the title. Books are sourced through whatever means will be the appropriate mix of fastest and cheapest, and patrons are given the choice of print and/or e-books when possible. Denver selectors continue to do their usual job of selecting library acquisitions up to the point of purchase. At the end of the pilot, selectors’ choices will be compared to user requests and general collection needs to see if this model will continue.
While the Denver librarians talked of this experiment, their hometown was host to another relevant conference, Educause. There, the overlapping ideas of e-books and library-catalog-as-storefront were implicated in Syracuse University librarian Suzanne Thorin’s bombshell statement that “the library, as a place, is dead.” The basic research tool of browsing the stacks may be taken out of the toolbox, with online search and discovery serving as a substitute (though not a replacement). Days later, Thorin faced an uprising of scholars on her own campus protesting the plans to move part of the Syracuse print collection to a storage facility more than 200 miles away. The bits and bytes and algorithms are thriving, but the stacks have life in them yet. Back in Charleston, publishers and librarians strive each year to bring some harmony to the resulting clamor of scholarly communications.
Interviewed by Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Early in 2009, Kate Wittenberg was appointed to the position of Project Director, Client and Partnership Development at Ithaka. A longtime member of the AAUP community, she had previously served as Editor-in-Chief at Columbia University Press, and went on to found and direct the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC) at the university. As head of EPIC, Wittenberg oversaw pioneering projects in digital publishing, including CIAO (Columbia International Affairs Online), and Gutenberg-E.
Wittenberg brings this history of innovation and experimentation to her new position at Ithaka, in which she focuses on consulting for research institutes, scholarly publishers, and libraries who are involved in the planning and sustaining of digital resources. Among the services she and her colleagues in Strategy, “help clients conceptualize and plan projects, develop business models, think about partnerships, and analyze infrastructure and staffing issues that need to be addressed in the digital environment.”
Responding to questions by email, Wittenberg offered her thoughts on press partnerships, digital scholarship and tenure, sustainability for scholarly publishing, and the thinking that is driving Ithaka’s newest projects. Says Wittenberg, “I believe we are in a period in which there are unprecedented changes taking place in digital research and scholarly communication, and I find it very exciting to be able to play a role in helping those involved in this important work.”
MB (AAUP): Gutenberg-e, which you worked on at Columbia, focused on the relationship between publishers and scholars and the challenges of prevailing tenure standards. Is Ithaka doing any work on these issues?
KW: The relationship between publishers and authors and the related issue of academic credentialing is at the heart of scholarly communication and university press publishing. The Gutenberg-e project suggested new ways of thinking about born-digital scholarship and demonstrated that both scholarly publishing and peer-review can make the transition to a digital environment. These issues are also central to Ithaka’s work, and a number of our projects here focus on these and related issues. In one of our current projects we are consulting with a research center that is developing an inter-connected set of digital initiatives that will introduce new models for publication of digital scholarship as well as the mechanisms for peer review and credentialing of that work.
MB: It seems that while publishers have been willing to try new digital models, junior scholars are reluctant to change, fearing that those making tenure and promotion decisions are not as open to these formats. Do you think presses can work more with scholars to change these perceptions or is this something that will have to happen within the community of scholars?
KW: This gets right to the heart of the problem. I honestly don’t know whether changes in the perception of digital scholarship can come from the outside through innovative work being done by presses, or whether it is something that must be generated by the scholarly community itself. I suppose I really believe that it will have to come from a number of places. That is, as presses provide an increasing number of viable options for publishing peer-reviewed digital scholarship, and as scholars themselves demand the platforms and tools that will allow them to present evidence and make arguments in new ways, the academy will have to create new mechanisms for credentialing and professional advancement that acknowledge the value and richness of
these new types of scholarly communication.
MB: What are the biggest obstacles to press partnerships with other institutions?
KW: Historically, presses have worked independently from other parts of the information industry. Until now they have not only controlled the development of content, but also its discovery and delivery, creating and managing their own systems for content development, production, and marketing. In a print-based world, it was possible to remain largely independent, and thus maintain one’s autonomy and “brand” in the publishing environment. I think that this tradition has made it difficult to create close partnerships with other organizations, partly because of a concern about losing one’s identity. But now, the old model of working in an industry that operates independently from other sectors of the community is no longer effective. The desire to remain apart from other players in the information industry has become a handicap for presses in an environment where collaboration and partnerships are necessary in order to succeed.
MB: Has the current economic climate made the need for new partnerships and initiatives more urgent for presses?
KW: Yes, the current climate has clearly increased the urgency for new partnerships, and although this need has been driven by a very difficult economic environment, I believe that in the long-term, this drive to collaborate and innovate is a good thing. Presses cannot deal with the dramatic challenges posed by the economy and advances in technology alone. While one natural reaction to these changes is to focus on trying to repair the traditional model of university press publishing, I think that all of us involved in this field are starting to see that partnerships, collaboration, and new models are where we need to focus our energy in order for presses to survive and thrive.
MB: Has the Case Studies in Sustainability project affected Ithaka’s thinking about future projects that it might undertake?
KW: Yes, this project has definitely affected our thinking about future projects. We have been thinking about how to maximize the impact of this project for the community, and we are considering a number of possible next steps. One possibility is to develop tools for project leaders that will help them plan and implement sustainability strategies from the early stages of their work. Another idea is to develop a curriculum or institute for project leaders that would enable discussions and interaction among leaders who are facing similar challenges and need some guidance in thinking about their business and organizational planning. We are interested in knowing from the scholarly publishing community what would be helpful next steps in this project in terms of the challenges they are facing.
MB: What sorts of new initiatives or experiments do you see as most promising for making scholarly publishing more sustainable?
KW: Scholarly publishers face real challenges, but also significant opportunities in the current environment. Academic presses have played an enormously important role in advancing the scholarly communications process, and the value and skills that they bring to the table can remain important going forward. Presses must be seen as central to the university’s mission, as well as important players in the scholarly communications process. I believe that the most promising activities for presses will involve the following: thoughtful but bold experimentation with partnerships that complement their skills and reduce their costs; a clear focus on the next generation of readers/users and their changing expectations and needs for scholarly content; and a willingness to embrace change by re-envisioning their role, and thus making themselves essential partners in the academic process.
For example, presses might begin to see themselves more as research centers that play a significant part in leading innovation in a scholarly discipline, rather than as production-and-dissemination organizations. Or they might consider partnerships with technology organizations that can support the new ways in which scholars and students conduct research, teach, and learn. A number of presses are already moving in these directions, and this is a very positive and exciting development. It will be important for the scholarly publishing community as a whole to do this on a larger scale as our environment continues to present both new challenges and opportunities.
The parties to the Google Book settlement submitted a revised version of the settlement to the court late on November 13. Revisions include a reduced scope of coverage (limited to works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada), the establishment of a fiduciary working out of the Book Rights Registry to look out for the interests of orphan works rightsholders, an increase in the possible number of library access terminals, and the ability for rightsholders to make their books available for free or under licenses such as those from Creative Commons. The “most favored nation” clause that was a cause of concern for many has been eliminated, allowing the Books Rights Registry to “license to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.” Publishers from the U.K., Australia, and Canada have been added as plaintiffs, and will have representation on the Books Rights Registry.
Under the revised settlement, the deadline to claim books has been extended to March 31, 2011.
In a court order filed on November 19, Judge Chin gave preliminary approval to the revised settlement. In his preliminary approval, he set important dates for moving forward: supplemental notices will be sent beginning December 14, objections to the amended portions of the settlement must be filed by January 28, and a final fairness hearing has been scheduled for February 18.
In a memorandum filed the day following the court order, November 20, Amazon requested that judge to reconsider the preliminary approval he had granted to the settlement, citing that the decision was made without the benefit of opposing viewpoints from members of the class.
View the amended settlement agreement and the supplemental notice (a shorter document which details the changes to the settlement) here: http://www.googlebooksettlement.com
View a redlined version of the settlement: http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/amended_settlement_redline.pdf
Books published by university presses were much lauded this fall, with five National Book Award nominations, one of which went on to win in its category. On November 18, Keith Waldrop’s, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, published by the University of California Press, was named winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for 2009.
Joining Waldrop with nominations in the Poetry category were Versed by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University Press) and Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (University of Pittsburgh Press). In Fiction, American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell, a story collection published in the Wayne State University Press “Made in Michigan Writers Series,” was nominated. Adrienne Mayor’s masterful combination of storytelling and scholarship in The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy, (Princeton University Press) was nominated in the Non-Fiction category.
The announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize Winners also highlighted the importance of scholarly publishers. Two university presses had published the work of 2009 Nobel Laureate in Literature Herta Mueller in translation: Nadirs is available from the University of Nebraska Press, and The Land of Green Plums and Traveling on One Leg from Northwestern University Press. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has had her work published by a number of AAUP presses. MIT Press recently published Catherine Brady’s Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA, tracing the life and work of one of this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine.
AAUP congratulates these presses, along with the many other AAUP members who every day publish works honored and valued by scholars, associations, and prize committees.
Press release:
http://www.aaupnet.org/news/press/october2009prizes.html
All prizes and honors received by AAUP books:
http://www.aaupnet.org/news/prizes.html
In October, AAUP released a newly revised version of its Books for Understanding New York City bibliography. Now featuring more than 300 titles from 34 presses, this extensive list includes books on the city’s history and culture, as well as guides and reference works.
Other recently updated Books for Understanding Lists include China, Social Security, the Nonprofit Sector & Philanthropy, Somalia, Sudan, and Voting & Elections.
http://www.booksforunderstanding.org
US v. Stevens, a case that raised First Amendment concerns about a federal statute intended to outlaw the animal cruelty, was argued in front of the Supreme Court on October 6. The justices generally seemed skeptical of the statute, asking questions and presenting hypotheticals that pointed to possible overbreadth of the law’s language.
AAUP joined librarians, publishers, writers, and other media groups in an amicus brief urging the court to declare this statute unconstitutional, in view of the danger it poses to First Amendment protections.
AAUP statement: http://www.aaupnet.org/news/press/stevens.html
A decision is not expected until early 2010.
“Court seems hostile to law against animal-cruelty depictions”
Analysis by Tony Mauro, First Amendment Center:
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx?id=22169
The Green Press Initiative (GPI), of which AAUP is an industry member, makes available a Book Publisher Toolkit, which details steps and guidelines for responsible paper use. The toolkit also features brief case studies from publishers of various sizes, and a breakdown of the various Forest Certification Schemes.
Staff at AAUP member presses are encouraged to submit article proposals to The Exchange about initiatives at member presses, industry news or trends, and other topics of interest to the scholarly publishing community. Feature articles are typically 700-1300 words in length.
The copy deadline for the Winter 2010 issue of The Exchange will be Monday, February 1. Initial proposals should generally be submitted at least one month in advance of the copy deadline.
Proposals may be sent to the Exchange editor, Meredith Benjamin, at mbenjamin@aaupnet.org.
University Presses in a 140-Character World
The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses
View from an Introductory Member Press
Managing Metadata: Common Issues for Publishers and Librarians
AAUP 2009 Annual Meeting Wrap-Up
Annual Meeting Grant Recipients
Kathleen Keane Assumes AAUP Presidency
Tony Crouch Honored with 2009 Constituency Award
AAUP-Impelsys Program Offers New E-Publishing Solutions
Miscellany:
2009-2010 Committees and Chairs Announced
AAUP Joins Amici in US v. Stevens
Jim Leach Confirmed as NEH Chair
Latest Ithaka Report
Books for Understanding Updates
2009 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show Exhibit
Submission Policy
Calendar: See the Events Calendar at www.aaupnet.org
Colleen Lanick
Publicity Manager, MIT Press
We live in a time where we ask a new acquaintance to “friend” us rather than exchanging phone numbers. National news programs routinely receive tweets containing questions from viewers during news segments and baseball mascots hold up signs that say “Follow me” and list a Twitter handle. Social networking sites have become a powerful source for virtually all of our news and entertainment needs. Recently, I noticed a tweet from a colleague that simply said, “Princeton University Press is now on Facebook. Twitter, Facebook—next the world! muahahaah.” Amusing and perhaps a little diabolical, but it is evidence that the university presses, from Cambridge to British Columbia, have embraced and started to harness the power of social media.
A quick and unscientific survey of several university presses confirmed that most are using some form of social networking, and that the majority are using Facebook and Twitter. A few have pages on MySpace, Good Reads, and other smaller sites, although presses are not generally as active on these sites. Social networking pages are easy to set up, but once the account has been registered and images uploaded, the challenge becomes how to use these incredibly popular and influential sites in a way that fits into current publicity and promotion for specific titles and the press as a whole.
When we first launched Facebook and Twitter pages at MIT Press, we were very aware that we were The MIT Press, not an individual, and had to be careful about how we presented ourselves. The goal is to become part of the community, not alienate it with hard sales or elaborate marketing pitches. Our pages started as an experiment to try to connect with readers who might be using social media, but we never expected them to be as successful as they are—we currently have about 5,000 fans on Facebook and over 2,600 followers on Twitter.
Our primary goal is to put a face on the press and allow our personality to shine through. We try to respond to all comments and questions and encourage interaction with our readers. For a special Facebook feature, we interviewed our acquisitions editors about how they got started in publishing and what kind of books they were interested in. Recently, we asked our fans on Facebook to comment on their memories of the Atari video game. We had a new book on the topic and offered free copies to the first five people to wax nostalgic in our comments section. More than a dozen comments were posted in just a matter of hours. We have a handful of fans and followers who consistently comment on a particular subject area. Of MIT’s list, technology, environment, and art titles generally see the most activity.
The University of Arizona Press, like many presses, joined Facebook first, and opened a Twitter account more recently. Kathryn Conrad, Arizona’s Interim Director, says they use Facebook, where they have around 170 fans, for spreading news about press events (including photos) and about media coverage for their titles. They use Twitter very differently. Their thousand-strong Twitter community “does not like marketing or self-promotion,” she says. “So, what we are doing here is trying to actively engage in the communities that are relevant to us.” They use Twitter to “engage not only in talk about books and publishing but about our state and local community, environmental concerns, indigenous rights issues—anything that relates to what we publish.”
Brian Bowen, Publishing and Marketing Coordinator at Yale University Press, views their Twitter following, currently at 3,500 and growing steadily, as a vital part of their promotion. He has been able to track which posts attract the most clicks, and has found that “the 140-character format allows would-be book buyers to stumble upon our content in the process of their normal web browsing.”
Most staff at member presses believe social networking sites should primarily be used to communicate with media and consumers, and not for direct sales, though I was pleased when on a recent post linking to a Q&A with the author of a recent book, one of our fans commented: “ I have been seduced by social marketing and have ordered the book.”
Rebecca Ford, blog editor and voice of Oxford University Press tweets, uses Twitter to build relationships and communicate with journalists about Oxford titles. They currently have around 1,300 followers. “It’s important to be accepted by the community,” she said. “You have to participate in the community, not just provide information. It is worth it if you want to invest the time to get into the community.” She has experimented with give-aways, promoting the original content on their incredibly successful blog, and linking to openly available content from Twitter. She also promotes author participation on Twitter, encouraging authors to talk with each other and collaborate.
The key to keeping people interested in your content is involving them in the discussion and paying attention to their issues and concerns. “Twitter allows us to communicate both directly and indirectly with readers and tweeters who do or might enjoy Yale books,” says Bowen. “I’ve used the @reply feature to respond to readers’ questions related to our books. Both help to expand our readership and create an online personality for the press.”
While they routinely receive comments on their posts such as “great article,” and “I really want to buy that book,” the most gratifying response Arizona received on their Facebook page centered on a post they did about the press celebrating its 50th anniversary. A local journalist saw the post and emailed Conrad saying she would like to do a story for a local weekly. “It turned into a cover story including interviews with multiple staffers and authors,” Conrad said. “We got great coverage without ever making the pitch.”
Arizona has had many fruitful interactions on Twitter as well. “We discovered a local blog that then publicized a promotion we had going on. I helped a customer find one of our books she thought was out of print. We discovered a specialty account we’d never heard of and donated some hurt books for a fundraising effort they had going on. In general, I would say it’s a lot like being at BEA or a book festival: you never know what good thing will come of it.” Conrad added that they have, “been exposed to more publishing news than you could ever find in the mainstream media.”
It is doubtful that social media will replace traditional publicity and marketing efforts. Rather, they enhance what we are already doing and afford us more direct communication with our audience, a crucial aspect that is occasionally lacking in more traditional efforts. So many of us get our news via social media that it is only logical that university presses want to participate in this rapidly growing phenomenon.
Most university presses use social media to discuss what is happening in their community and the publishing world as well as what is going on with particular books and authors. At MIT, we have found it very useful to follow others, including colleagues at peer presses and trade houses, journalists, authors, and other organizations and individuals that are relevant to our list. Editors are using social networking to attract authors. Publicists can quickly scan Twitter for alerts when book review editors resign or contribute to the buzz about a particular topic or title, and authors can keep the press and their followers interested in what they are doing to promote their new book. The possibilities are endless.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
In May 2007, when the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced its plan to fund collaborations among university presses, excitement about the possibilities of the program abounded. Just over two years later, fourteen grants have been awarded, and some have reached the stage of having published works to show for their progress. Four directors from presses that are part of collaborative grants convened at AAUP’s 2009 Annual Meeting for a panel entitled “The Mellon Collaborative Publishing Grants: Reports from the Presses,” and some spoke with the Exchange later to fill out their comments.
All four of the projects represented have the aim to publish in underserved areas of the humanities, often prioritizing scholars’ first books. The Modern Languages Initiative (MLI), for example, arose when the presses involved noticed that while program enrollment in Modern Languages was up, publication was down. Junior scholars in the field were thus having difficulty getting tenure books published, explained Fred Nachbaur, Director of Fordham University Press. Fordham is collaborating with California, Penn, Virginia, and Washington on this new program.
The Ethnomusicology collaboration, led by Indiana University Press in conjunction with Kent State and Temple, focuses on the way in which field of ethnomusicology is underserved by traditional monograph publication. The group received a one-year planning grant to research the feasibility of developing an online platform for the multimedia content (audio/video) that is frequently an essential component of scholarly works in ethnomusicology. Janet Rabinowitch, Indiana Director, explained that the presses also worked with the Society of Ethnomusicology on the project, to ensure that the proposed platform would best serve the needs of scholars in the field.
A few common themes can be found amongst the collaborations: their work with the Mellon Foundation helped the publishers to clarify and focus their aims, the grants raised press profiles at their parent universities, and working with other presses proved both challenging and extremely rewarding.
Moderator Steve Maikowski, director of NYU Press, provided a perspective from a collaboration entering its second year, the American Literatures Initiative (ALI). NYU works with Fordham, Rutgers, Temple and Virgnia on the initiative. Maikowski acknowledged the various challenges that the presses dealt with in their first year working together, but said, “the good news is, we have good books published now” – a sign of successful collaboration by any standards.
Press groups dealt with the practical aspects of collaboration in a variety of ways, but all agreed that communication among group members was paramount, despite its challenges. J. Alex Schwartz, Director of Northern Illinois University Press, member of the Early American Places Initiative with the University of Georgia Press and NYU Press, suggested that it “has to be somewhat official,” if presses with their own standards and customs, working hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles apart, are to successfully collaborate. Maikowski echoed this idea, emphasizing the necessity of having someone who is clearly directing the program, as “an enormous amount of work [must go into] management.”
While receiving a Mellon grant is certainly a major boon for a press, it does come with its own set of obstacles. The distribution of grant funds was a practical concern that occupied an unforeseen amount of staff time. Some directors noted the difficulty of re-opening acquisitions pipelines in subject areas that the press may have not published in recently.
However, all the directors seem to agree that the benefits far outweighed the challenges. Beyond the obvious advantage in cost savings that comes from pooling resources, Schwartz described the “creative dynamic” that resulted from working with other presses, and the “different mindset” which was necessary to approach the collaborative project.
Nachbaur counted among the advantages for smaller and mid-sized presses the opportunity to benefit from staff at partner presses who occupy positions that may not exist at others. The MLI initiative for example, has one person at each of the five presses handling a different aspect of marketing for the project’s titles.
The cooperative process has also served to motivate staff members. Schwartz explained that his staff has felt more like a part of a larger community as they work on this “serious inroad in scholarly communications.” This sense of community extends beyond the publishing side of the process. Nachbaur believes the initiatives have created an “intellectual community for the [subject] area.”
At the panel, Maikowski expressed a hope that the collaborations might result in the development of efficiencies from shared resources, which could potentially have an effect greater than a one-time cost savings. His hope is that “reducing the cost of publishing monographs [will] mean we can keep publishing them.”
The integration of e-publishing into the grant projects varies. Initiatives like the one in ethnomusicology have focused on formats beyond the traditional monograph, and the most recent grant was awarded to presses who will study the viability of a collaborative university press distribution system for e-books. For the grants focused on first books, however, Maikowski explained that Mellon did not want a digital-only outcome. The grant did provide funds for the conversion of print-ready PDF files through XML to make books available in digital format, an option that NYU Press, among others, has taken advantage of.
Many of the valuable lessons learned during collaboration have resulted from staff at different presses being forced to re-think the way they do things and re-evaluate certain aspects of their own press culture. The standardization of work-flow inherent in collaboration has led presses to try reduced print runs for books outside the initiatives, and experiment with new printing models, such as paperback originals versus dual editions or lower-priced hardcovers.
Maikowski gave an example of how his initial impulse was to attempt to lower costs by hiring more junior copyeditors with lower hourly rates. Convinced by his partners to go with more experienced copyeditors, he was pleasantly surprised to find out that their overall cost was lower, as hourly rates were higher but efficiency led to fewer hours per manuscript and a lower per page cost.
Within the grant-funded collaborations, press groups have already learned from each other. The ALI initiative developed an outside managing editor model in which all participating presses send their copyedited manuscripts to the project editor hired by the presses and receive back print-ready PDFs. The model ensures uniformity, and keeps costs predictable, as the group pays per manuscript. Maikowski described this model as “scalable,” and it has already been adopted by the Early American Places and Modern Languages Initiative groups.
As scholarly presses continue to search for new and innovative ways to continue their work of publishing high quality scholarship, these new projects provide a model that could be valuable even outside of grant-funded programs. Maikowski envisions this as a possibility, particularly for presses who are not able to increase their staff, but are looking to grow their list.
In addition to the four initiatives represented at the panel, six other grants have been awarded to press collaborations. Four additional grants from the Mellon Foundation have been awarded to presses partnering with their universities and other institutions on publishing projects. AAUP has recently compiled a listing of the collaborative Mellon grants received by university press collaborations to date.
Suzanne Guiod
Editorial Director, University of Rochester Press
At the opening banquet of the 2008 AAUP Annual Meeting in Montréal, Peter Givler announced what came as very welcome and long anticipated news to this editor: that the University of Rochester Press had become an introductory member of AAUP. This recently established membership category for not-for-profit scholarly presses that have yet to meet full membership requirements created an opportunity for our small press to gain access to an organization of our peer presses and the professional benefits offered by that organization.
Although this year’s annual meeting in Philadelphia was not my first, it was with some pride that I attended for the first time as a representative of a member press. The University of Rochester Press’s location in western New York State, small size, and relative youth have meant some insulation from academic publishing centers in the US, and from a ready source of advice, stimulation, collegiality, and the comfort of nearby editorial colleagues who daily confront and navigate the complexities of our particular brand of publishing and service to the academy. At times it has also meant less exposure to industry news, to marketing and development opportunities, and to the economies of scale provided by a concentration of like entities represented in a unified professional organization.
In just over a year, membership has meant a good deal to the University of Rochester Press. We have already been able to participate in web seminars on pressing topics like open access, the Google settlement, and improving editorial workflow with XML. We have benefited from exposure to sales survey results, have been able to give informed responses to our provost during a time of economic uncertainty, and to gauge our position and performance in relation to presses of similar income and output. Not insignificantly, we have benefited from access to the AAUP job board, which has brought applicants to our attention from around the country with training and experience specifically targeted to our needs, rather than solely from a local and limited applicant pool. And we have had access to cooperative marketing opportunities we otherwise might never be able to afford.
Arguably, however, the most meaningful benefit of membership has been the difficult-to-quantify value it brings to our authors, many of whom require publication with a respected university press as a condition of tenure review and promotion. Just as university presses bring value to the publishing process through strict assessment and certification of scholarship, so endorsement by AAUP puts us in the company of established university presses large and small, innovative and venerable. Inclusion in AAUP also reinforces the work our series editors do year-round, and the commitment of time and expertise our faculty editorial board members regularly donate.
The University of Rochester Press was founded in 1989, and in September will celebrate its twentieth anniversary on campus and in cyberspace. With some 400 titles currently in print and active publishing programs in musicology, African studies, European history, and the history of medicine, we publish approximately 25 new books each year, and several paperback reprints. The origins of the Press were unique in that at its founding the University of Rochester contracted with a commercial academic publisher for production, sales, and distribution support, while editorial discretion has remained solely a function of the provost-appointed faculty editorial board. This arrangement allowed a private university to launch a press in the difficult late 80s (where some locate the genesis of the current crisis in scholarly communication), to grow, and even to prosper through two decades of economic turmoil. The arrangement has further kept the university from having to become a printer, or a warehouse, or a collections agency, but instead allowed it to remain focused on its fundamental missions.
Our future as a member press is by no means certain; in the current economic climate the prospect of adding new employees in order to meet the requirements of full membership is a daunting one, but the rewards vital: AAUP membership—and in particular the annual meeting—vitally augments and complements the support our editorial department receives from its dedicated faculty board and the university administration. It goes without saying that there is no substitute for the deep expertise and collective wisdom concentrated at this meeting each year, the exchange of ideas, and, inevitably, the commiseration—and all this aside from the Chronicle’s reliably decadent dessert reception. As it turns 20, reviews its accomplishments, and anticipates its future, the University of Rochester Press hopes and indeed expects to be a productive and reliable citizen of the AAUP for decades to come.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Half a million. That is the number of additional records per year major book wholesalers Baker & Taylor and Ingram estimate they are processing in these days of digitization format proliferation: half a million records on top of the approximately 200,000 new books each year1. That is a lot of metadata, and it is more important than ever at every step of the book supply chain. Book metadata often needs to contain much more than title, author, ISBN, and price to make the leap from warehouse to reader—or database to device. Tables of contents, cover images, detailed subject headings, reading level, available formats, and reviews: all help consumers, retailers, and librarians discover and procure new (and old but relevant) books. The trick, for everyone in the book world, is creating and sharing accurate metadata for all of those millions of records.
The burgeoning challenge of book metadata was the subject of a recent symposium and white paper sponsored by OCLC Online Computer Library Center. In March 2009, they gathered experts and interested parties from the publishing, library, and standards worlds in Dublin, OH, to discuss common problems and potential solutions. Judy Luther was at that time completing research for the paper “Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow,” commissioned by OCLC and the National information Standards Organization (NISO).
While clearly an “interested party” rather than an expert, I was invited to speak to the group about the general experience of university presses dealing with metadata. Of course, in a community that ranges from presses publishing less than 20 to more than 2000 titles per year, and where the term “metadata” has not yet been fully adopted to describe bibliographic and marketing information, a general picture is not so easily taken. Before trotting off to Dublin, I spoke with several members, including Johns Hopkins University Press, a member with large book and journal publishing programs, and two presses who fall near the AAUP average: Cornell University Press, producing up to 140 new titles per year, and the University of Georgia Press, publisher of about 80 new titles per year. Not unexpectedly, the processes of metadata creation and management differed considerably. Johns Hopkins’ in-house database has an ONIX component and pushes data to both the press web site and trading partners (via either ONIX or spreadsheet). Both Cornell and Georgia were at the time researching ONIX solutions, including off-the-shelf software and service providers such as NetRead or Firebrand, and were providing data via spreadsheets or online interfaces to key sales channels.
Despite their differences, all three presses mentioned the same difficulty with providing ONIX. “The standard just isn’t standard enough,” I said to the OCLC audience. That choice of phrasing raised some eyebrows (and maybe a few hackles), but we cleared up the vocabulary. There are so many flavors of ONIX being requested from publishers—almost every channel has its own requirements as to which ONIX elements and tag variations are preferred (if they even accept ONIX). For example, while the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) recommends best practices, and will certify the quality of publishers’ ONIX feeds on 30 core elements, Barnes & Noble requires tailored compliance on half-again as many data elements to be classified as a top-grade ONIX supplier2.
But these retail-chain ONIX issues were only one small part of what was discussed in Dublin. The real crux of the symposium was the misalignment between the standards that have grown up separately in the library and publishing communities. MARC records (Machine Readable Cataloging) serve libraries’ needs from ordering to online catalogs. In many cases, librarians require at least basic MARC records in advance of purchase, and more and more expect MARC records to be provided with purchased titles (particularly with e-book collections). Even subject classification schemes differ between these two sides of our community. From the publishers’ end, BISAC codes are heavily weighted to trade books and were designed to help with store placement rather than broad consumer discoverability. Library of Congress (LC) subject headings are highly detailed, but provide much greater authority control.
Though these classifications and standards were designed to serve different needs, each side of the market has an even greater need for the metadata created on the other. The authority-controlled subject and author data from LC and MARC records can only help digital discovery and sales of publishers’ works. The book marketing information provided through ONIX to the retail supply chain is now just as important for library patrons, and in the growing adoption of purchase-on-request policies, library collections specialists. Crosswalks between MARC and ONIX for Books will be needed to combine this data into effective and sharable information flows. OCLC is particularly interested in that concept, and recently undertook a pilot project to experiment with ingesting publishers’ ONIX records, matching and enhancing the data with existing WorldCat records, and feeding back optimized metadata. That project has led to a new suite of metadata services for publishers. A second symposium, to move not just the conversation, but also the possible, forward, is planned for next year. Broadening representation, and easing metadata reuse and collaboration will be goals for the next meeting.
In the meantime, standards continue to change and evolve to serve the book communities’ needs. In April of 2009, ONIX for Books 3.0 was released, and is not backwards compatible with previous versions. The ISTC or International Standard Text Code, is being promulgated as “a global identification system for textual works”—that is, to identify a text rather than a product or format, as the ISBN is used. Progress is being made on the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) to help in the correct identification of authors, a task that is required not just for better discovery but also in royalties and rights systems (such as the proposed Book Rights Registry from the Google settlement). In July 2009, CrossRef announced it had registered 1.7 million DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for book chapters and references. While the complexity of metadata standards is growing, so too are the support systems for producing and sharing accurate metadata. In the coming months, AAUP is planning to survey its membership about shared problems and needs in this area.
Resources:
OCLC Publisher and Librarian Symposium Reports
Metadata White Paper: Streamlining Book Metadata Workflow
BISG Product Metadata Information and Best Practices
ONIX
Despite tough economic times and tightened travel budgets, nearly 500 members of the scholarly publishing community turned out in Philadelphia for the 2009 AAUP Annual Meeting. As always, the sense of collegiality and community that is a hallmark of AAUP pervaded the meeting from the first plenary sessions through till the late night receptions.
Two pre-meeting workshops got AAUP’s time in Philadelphia off to a great start, as the nearly 35 registrants for each had the chance to devote a day or more to hear from their colleagues on how they have faced some of the most pressing challenges publishers face in the digital era. “Rights and Permissions in a Digital Marketplace” attracted staff from all areas of university press publishing, and provided valuable information on how some presses are dealing with the challenge of digital rights and content. “Electronic Marketing” was also well received and featured lively discussions on topics from effectively utilizing social networking media to the relative benefits of “giving away” content.
Attendees came together on the first night of the meeting for the Opening Banquet, where they were welcomed by Executive Director Peter Givler. Historian Michael Zuckerman delivered the keynote speech, in which he took the unusual tack of describing the histories of “horses, and watches, and perhaps a bit about radio and newspapers,” in order to demonstrate that “many reports of many technological deaths have been greatly exaggerated.” He closed memorably by exhorting the audience: “when we go— if we go—let’s go gloriously, honorably, and, above all, joyously. There’s no crying in publishing.”
The Opening Banquet also saw the presentation of the 2009 AAUP Constituency Award to Tony Crouch.
Panel and roundtable sessions covered a wide variety of issues facing university presses today from formatting books for e-readers, to connecting the press with the parent university to the always popular “best practices” sessions in which colleagues share both what has worked well for them and what they wish they had not done.
The annual meeting is always a time of transition in AAUP leadership, as the current president becomes the past-president, and the president-elect assumes the reins. Alex Holzman, 2008-2009 AAUP President, gave his farewell address to the membership on June 19, in which he advocated for finding a new model for e-book production and distribution, despite the many challenges that will need to be worked out along the way.
The next afternoon, Kathleen Keane assumed leadership of the AAUP as she gave her inaugural address.
One of the most memorable talks of the meeting, and surely the most controversial, was Michael Jensen’s “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity,” part of Plenary 4 on Directions in Open Access Publishing. Now available on YouTube, the recording of his talk has now received over 1,000 views – not bad for a video on scholarly publishing! In his talk Jensen advocated that presses move towards a digital publishing model with a focus on open access, as a means of saving not only university press publishing, but civilization as a whole. Detailing frightening signs of environmental collapse, he implored the audience: “Please don’t think of me as a doomer – but I hope I’ve scared the hell out of you.” Judge for yourself at: http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html
If you were not able to attend the meeting, missed a session because of another held simultaneously, or simply want to have a second look at the presentations, many are available via the Annual Meeting Wiki and the online program.
Recordings of the entire meeting, individual sessions, and the Electronic Marketing Workshop are all available from Conference Media.
The 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting will be held June 17-20 in Salt Lake City at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown. The 2010 Annual Meeting Program Committee, chaired by Greg Britton (Publisher, Getty Publications), will meet in September to discuss ideas for the program. If you have ideas for sessions or wish to participate, please e-mail Greg Britton at gbritton@getty.edu. We hope to see you there!
The Carol Franz Memorial Grants, Whiting Diversity Grants, and Whiting Newcomer Grants were awarded to staff at AAUP member presses to facilitate their attendance at the 2009 Annual Meeting. Upon returning to their home presses, the grant recipients prepared reports describing their experiences and what they took away from attending the meeting.
Read more about the grants.
On June 20, 2009, John Hopkins University Press Director Kathleen Keane assumed leadership of AAUP. Keane will serve a one-year term, and succeeds Alex Holzman, director of Temple University Press.
Keane began her career in university press publishing in 2002, when she joined the Johns Hopkins University Press as director of finance and operations. She was appointed director of the press in 2004, assuming oversight of an extensive publishing program which includes 200 books and 70 scholarly periodicals per year, in addition to the online collection Project MUSE and customer services operation and fulfillment for 16 client presses.
Keane has been a member of the AAUP Board of Directors since 2007, serving for the past year as president-elect, and was a member of the Task Force on Committees from 2008-2009.
Before moving to the world of university press publishing, Keane worked in commercial medical publishing, holding positions at Harcourt Health Services and J.B. Lippincott & Company. Keane earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Connecticut College and a master’s degree in English from Catholic University of America. She received her M.B.A. from the Colgate Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia.
In her inaugural address at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, Keane discussed the various challenges facing university presses today, and some of the innovative ways in which presses have approached them:
The 2009 AAUP Constituency Award was presented to Tony Crouch, Design and Production Director at the University of California Press, on June 18, 2009, at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The award was established in 1991 to honor staff at member presses who have demonstrated active leadership and service to the association and the university press community.
In introducing the honoree, Martha Farlow, production manager at the University of Virginia Press, described him as “one of the most knowledgeable, generous, and green individuals in our community.” Crouch’s nomination was supported by many in the AAUP community who have benefited from the wisdom and insight he has shared over the years. The nomination letters all noted his generosity in sharing his time and experience with all levels of staff.
Crouch has served in his current role at the University of California Press for 21 years, and announced in his acceptance of the award that he would be retiring at the end of June. He received his initial training for the world of print and publishing in the UK before emigrating to Canada. He was the design and production manager at McGill-Queen’s University Press for seven years before assuming the role of Director of Publishing for the Province of Nova Scotia.
While at California, Crouch became involved with BookBuilders West, eventually serving as director, and receiving their Distinguished Service Award in 2002. In 2005, he was inducted into the PrintMedia Hall of Fame, marking the first time a member of the university press community had been selected for the honor.
Crouch’s commitment to sustainable publishing has been notable over the years. Calling him the university press community’s “Green Superhero,” Farlow recalled how he began investigating chlorine-free and recyclable papers in the early 1990s, and helped establish a corporate sustainability program at California in 1995. In 2009, California received the Sustain Print Award for Longtime Leadership presented by Book Business magazine.
Over the years, Crouch has served AAUP in a variety of capacities. He served on the Program Committee in 2003-2004 and 2007-2008, on the Eco Task Force from its inception in 2004 through 2007, then the Eco Subcommittee of the Design and Production Committee from 2007-2009, served as a Whiting Week-in-Residence host, and spoken on many panels at various AAUP meetings. In the wider publishing community, he has managed a book show for the Publishers Association of the West, and taught courses at the Stanford Publishing Institute. Crouch has been a valued member of the scholarly publishing community throughout his years of service, and the impact of his contributions will continue to be felt long after his retirement.