Is a book still a book if it’s online?

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Books are beautiful artifacts. When a writer friend and his family remodeled their apartment recently, he didn’t give a thought to their living space. Instead, he spent hours dreaming of--then designing--bookcases to wrap around a new staircase. If you’ve ever read Nick Basbanes on book collecting, you know that bibliomania has inspired and illuminated people’s lives throughout history. But if the cost for even a small print-run gets expensive for some publishers, shouldn’t even stalwart book lovers give online publishing a chance?

That’s what university presses may need to consider, according to a new study reported at the site Inside Higher Ed this week.

For professors, ‘publish or perish’ is the oft-heard mantra; for the presses attached to the nation’s universities, ‘publish and perish’ may become theirs. New technology, higher production costs (the added expense of color plates in art history books is one example) and smaller annual budgets are making it more difficult for these presses to widely serve academic communities in the ways they always have. That’s the argument of ‘University Publishing in a Digital Age,’ a study conducted by Ithaka, a not-for-profit group looking at technology and higher education, and available on its Web page.

‘I wouldn’t want to see online publishing replace scholarly books entirely,’ says Michael S. Roth, Wesleyan University’s new president, who stopped by our offices Tuesday. Roth’s own books include ‘Knowing and History’ and ‘Freud: Conflict and Culture.’ I asked him how he would have felt if his books had gone directly online.

‘It’s tough when you’ve grown up with books to see the end result of your work as something that’s not exactly a physical book,’ he said. ‘Maybe this matters less to younger generations who don’t have the same experience.’

Like Roth, I struggle with the idea of reading a text online rather than on the printed page. And I’d certainly have difficulty seeing all my intellectual labors floating in cyberspace rather than between the covers of an elegantly designed book. But if the aim of writing is to share ideas and reach readers, shouldn’t we all just let technology take us in new directions?

If your scholarship is published on the Web, search engines will find it. Your study of Proust’s use of wine in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ will draw many Proust lovers (and probably a few winos). If it were located only on the shelves of certain libraries, it might take a long time for an interested reader to see a copy.

The study doesn’t say that books should be eliminated entirely at university presses (one could also download and print them); instead, it emphasizes that university presses must adapt to new technology to ensure their survival. On the other hand, despite the study’s forecast, some are thriving--I think of Harvard University Press and the Belknap Press, which have found brilliant ways to straddle academia and the mainstream.

Then again, says Roy Tennant at Library Journal.Com, all this is old news: Collaborative scholarly websites are already running; he cites eScholarship Repository as an example. Judge for yourself.

Nick Owchar