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Comment by gamepsys | Hacker News Reader

I just went through my bookshelf. While there were many authors that were professors, there were few books published by a university press. Are university presses a professors' first choice when it comes to publishing?

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University presses have less reach than a popular press, but the flip side of that is that they are willing to publish works only of interest to an academic audience. If you want to reach a wide audience, then, no, you don't want to publish in a university press. However if you want to publish a detailed study on a niche subject, no popular press will want to touch that. That's what the university presses are for. e.g., here's a title I came across at Princeton University Press, "A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century." Just based on the title, there's no way some place like Penguin Random House is going to even look at that manuscript.

The same author may approach different publishers depending on their intended audience. e.g. Daron Acemoglu published "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth" with Princeton but "Why Nations Fail" with Crown (a division of Penguin RandomHouse).

Another example of a niche collection of books from a university is Duke press' Latin America collection. Someone recommended looking there for information on a question that came up in a discussion, I had no idea it existed as an outsider. https://read.dukeupress.edu/latin-american-studies

Most of my technical books are from a University press. Random examples:

* SICP: MIT Press

* Modern Compiler Implementation in ML: Cambridge University Press

* Creating Symmetry: Princeton University Press (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161730/cr...)

It really depends on the nature of the book. If it's a first-year undergrad text that is likely to be purchased by thousands of students, a publisher like Addison-Wesley will be interested. If it's solidly mass market applied tech, like "Master Javascript in 32 Seconds" or something, someone like O'Reilly or Manning will probably take it. If it's more niche and technical it's likely to be a University press.

University presses do publish some absolute bangers. Creating Symmetry, for example, is an absolutely beautiful book combining maths and art. MIT has a great series on game design. Cambridge is very strong in machine learning and maths.

Wow, that's interesting because some of my favorite books are from university presses, often smaller ones (but MIT Press, Cambridge and Princeton are pretty well represented).

I do find that my philosophy and critical theory books are the ones that more heavily come from university presses. In general the humanities tend to have stronger presence in the university presses (largely because books, not papers, are the publication format of choice for those areas).

Well, if you go to grad school in humanities, or otherwise have more professional academic pursuits, you slowly end up submitting your home bookshelf to a huge takeover of very plain spines with small font.

They play a critical role in publishing regional authors and documenting folk cultures. Plenty of regional University presses will publish contemporary fiction, poetry, local history, etc.

It really depends on the field. On my shelf, things are pretty much just Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge or De Gruyters. Oxford is very prestigious in the field of these books, and a professor seeking to publish a book would likely prefer Oxford.

Yeah, OUP and Harvard are all over my shelves, among others.

It’s a lot easier than many folks suppose to reach the bottom of what the Internet has on a lot of topics—people toss around phrases like “all the world’s knowledge” and, oh boy, is that ever not true—and IME the next step is very often a few books from university presses.

I wish there was a better way to search all of the published books for relevant information.

The market for university presses is almost entirely other university libraries, potentially other professors, and the exceedingly rare specialist.

But when you need tenure, and you need to get published, they're the 1000x more willing to publish you than one of the major popular presses.

They also do academic reviews in ways that popular presses don't. If you are a history professor, a book published by Penguin isn't going to look as good in your tenure packet as a book published by Oxford.

Plus textbooks. Some of which sell in volume, like SICP mentioned above.

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