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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the major universities - the ones that could have publishing houses that matter - are too broke to be able to keep the publishing house running.

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You would be surprised. University of Michigan Publishing, one of the largest and wealthiest of the publics only has a staff of ~30, some of whom are shared with other departments. The university's annual contribution is well under $2 million. The entire University Library, the second largest research library in the U.S. after Harvard, has an annual budget of $64m (0.58% of the entire budget).

I think historically the larger presses were expected to be close to revenue neutral. They do well enough to limp along, but don't get the resources really needed to build new infra. As a cost center without significant tuition or grant funding, the library has little pull when provosts form their priorities.

Talking about "the budget" is meaningless in this context, you could similarly argue that Bill Gates can't afford to buy his kids bubblegum on any given day. After all his self-imposed budget for them is $10/day.

Look at the size and growth of the university's endowment.

Unfortunately talking about the "size and growth of the endowment" is similarly meaningless in this context for a number of reasons. Even if the funds were not restricted in a way that excluded funding the University Press, it's probably a poor measure of whether a University could "afford" to support a press.

Maybe if the university presidents and deans weren't looting the coffers for themselves, the publishing unit would have funding?

So wait, if that's true, is the article at hand here mistaken, or in bad faith?

Also, isn't the case that it is mostly the "major" universities that have their own presses in the first place?

Depends on what you call major. But it certainly isn't just Oxford, Harvard, and the like. Pretty much all US "University of X" (where X is a state) have their own presses.

Yeah, and see, I'm not claiming that the University of, say, Wyoming, has the money to keep their own press running. But the Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, and the like... they definitely do.

They usually cap the number of books they publish a year. Artificial scarcity makes their imprimatur more desirable.

Lol, we have the opposite problem—we need to have more books.

If we want to have more books, we need to protect the rights of the publishers—if publishers are not protected, then the market is just doing its job: publishing books is not going to be profitable if book contents are stolen without consequences. As a result, universities wouldn’t want to waste money publishing books, and for-profit journals would have to charge exorbitant subscription fees to compensate for the fact that no one except a few institutions will sub in the first place (everyone else will get the same stuff washed through an LLM).

The barrier to publishing a book is more or less non-existent. The barrier to getting a publisher’s name that is sufficient for someone to think (rightly or wrongly) that this book has a legit stamp of approval is somewhat higher if not all that high. And obviously implies that those publishers have to gatekeep to some degree.

Sure, we turn away crap, but so what? We don’t have a cap on how many books we can publish other than the time, labor, and money resources we have. Which are finite. We could publish more than we do now, and we have in the past.

For sure, but do we want the academic publishing landscape to be an oligopoly?

This is the current membership roster of the AUP:

https://aupresses.org/membership/membership-list/

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