From print to digital and back again – Why the cost of academic books keeps changing

The theme of this year’s Open Access Week is ‘the cost of knowledge’. Jen McCall considers how the cost of academic books has changed in recent years and asks, what steps are being taken to ensure that the research published in long-form is sustainable, and affordable for all?

The sustainability of academic monograph publishing has long been called into question. Books have proved tricky to embed into the digital-first, open access trajectory of the journal article. Expensive and time consuming to produce, books don’t easily fit into ‘one size fits all’ production processes.^[1]

How much does an academic book cost?

Attempts have been made to give a true cost to the production of a monograph with hair-raising results, the most well-known is the Ithaca S+R Report , where all the elements, including staff time and overheads, involved in producing a book were taken into account. Going by these figures, the cost of knowledge produced in one book could be as much as $130,000.^[2]

The publishing landscape for academic books is complex and fragmented with thousands of publishers involved – commercial presses and university presses ( large and small ), niche ‘boutique’ outfits, and an increasing number of scholar-led open access publishers. This is a world away from journals publishing, where a few publishers control their lists of journals, with each conforming to the same submission, peer review and production systems.^[3]

Long form research has remained, however, the gold standard for key disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and the book has proved a resilient vehicle for scholarly output, despite repeated warnings that its days are numbered.^[4]

Indeed, the number of books published is going up and up. Scholarly publishers, particularly commercial publishing houses, have countered the problem of a steep and sustained decline in sales, by significantly ramping up the numbers of books they publish each year while charging more for each one. Whereas back in the early part of the 21 st century, publishers reported average sales of monographs in the 1,000s, today we are seeing sales in the low 100s. A recent study reveals that all commercial publishers and the majority of university presses are now publishing more books now than they were in 2015. Commercial presses reported sales of less than 200 per title and prices range from £50-£100 for university presses, £70-£120 for commercial presses.^[5]

Can you have too many books?

Going back as far as 2005, John Thompson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, was alerting us to the problem of overproduction of scholarly work and its consequences on academic research – including a lack of visibility for important books, lost in the multitude; and the constant pressure to publish in the academic environment .^[6][7]

Today, in a world where library budgets are squeezed and the pressure to publish in other (short form/article) formats is increasing, the need to find sustainable ways to publish long form research is critical. Some encouraging advances towards sustainability have been made in recent years, notably through different models and experimentation in open access publishing, and through digital-first publication and digital printing of books ‘on-demand’ – both flagged up in the outputs of The Academic Book of the Future project , run by the AHRC and the British Library in from 2014-2016^[8][9]

Print on demand and environmental sustainability

The printed book has proven remarkably resilient, despite the dramatic rise in eBook sales to libraries during the pandemic. All reputable academic publishers now publish their books in a digital format, and most offer a printed edition of their books alongside the eBook edition. Despite falling sales of printed books, they can make this work because of advances in digital and on-demand printing.

LSE Press is one such digital-first, open access publisher , but we recognise that it is important to continue to publish our books in print as well as digitally. We can do so by publishing our print books ‘on-demand’. The sustainability of our operation is a factor of critical importance for LSE Press, as the publisher of major new series LSE Global Sustainability . Print-on-demand allows us to service the exact needs of our market. We can print even individual orders for our books, cutting our carbon footprint, with no need for large print runs or resource-heavy warehouse space to store stacks of copies.^[10][11]

In a 2021 survey of English language academic publishers in the UK, Europe and North America, it was found that ‘Print on demand (POD), or ultra-short run digital printing, is now used by most monograph publishers. The majority of both commercial and university presses report that more than 75% of print sales are made of copies that are printed on demand.’ POD means also that no book now needs to go out of print – particularly important for servicing the ‘long tail’ of humanities and social sciences book sales, where books continue to be relevant for a long time after publication.^[5]

The cost of Open Access

The move towards open access (OA) publishing for scholarly books has enormous implications for the sustainability of research, and the accessibility of long-form knowledge, worldwide. There is clearly a moral argument for books produced by publicly funded academics to be made available freely to all. If this is the case for journal articles, why not books?

Despite growing pressure in the UK and Europe, OA mandates for books and the infrastructures needed for them remain in limbo . Following the journals model, most traditional publishers levy book processing charges (BPCs) to the author. BPCs are calculated by publishers to recompense them for the high cost of producing a monograph and are substantially more than a standard APC (article processing charge) used in journal publishing. Where the money to fund such a charge comes from is highly problematic, especially for academics working for poorly funded institutions, in low- and middle-income countries and in disciplines in the humanities and social sciences.^[12]

Over the last 10 years, experimentation and innovative publishing initiatives have proliferated, exploring no-BPC models of publishing OA books. OA-only university presses have emerged (like, LSE Press , UCL Press , University of Huddersfield Press ), largely as part of their institution’s library, and library budgets have been repurposed to support OA.^[10][13][14]

The cost of knowledge published in long form

The last few years have seen the mass consolidation of commercial book publishers, along with the launch of a tranche of new scholar-led operations and OA presses. We can be sure that scholarly book publishing will continue to evolve in line with new technologies, and the changing mandates and strategies of funders and governments.

That being said, in the last few years, the environmental cost of producing a printed book has been reduced by innovative technologies; open access has meant that the cost to readers of research published in long form has been eliminated entirely; new models to fund OA book publication without levying author fees have emerged; and sophisticated book metadata mitigates early worries about curation and information overload. Reasons to be cheerful? Perhaps we are indeed moving towards a more inclusive and egalitarian form of book publishing.

This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Impact or the London School of Economics. You are agreeing with our comment policy when you leave a comment.^[15]