As a point of calibration, a hot melt perfect binding machine for books up to 500 pages, up to 180 books/hour, is around $7000. You know the print cost for laser copies. The “print” aspect, incremental cost and logistics, for a book is pretty modest for any niche interest publications. Speaking here of functional performance of the published content, and not the fetish/status side of the physical book.

My local university press is a hit-and-miss affair. Some books have been real classics, some books have been laughably bad. The university press probably ranks low in institutional power pecking order and so have evolved to operate as little more than a vanity press for certain academic departments. The writing and editing of content proves to be only as good as the academic department pushing its publication. And that is often wanting. In my interest area of local history, my local university press, which should by rights be the top quality publisher, is all over the map in quality, while out-of-state university press books on our local history are uniformly excellent.