The Enduring Mystery of the Academic Book Market

Nature’s greatest mystery is anything to do with books: who reads them, how many there are, how much of them we read, what they cost, where we buy them, who makes money on their sale. Every day I step through a wormhole to try to keep up with attempts to probe this mystery and am happy to report that we are chipping away at this great unknown, but there is much work left to do. A recent piece by Dan Cohen, who is the head of the Digital Public Library of America, sheds some light on the puzzle of why sales of ebooks seem to have flattened out. A controversial article by Elizabeth Jones and Paul Courant argues that sales of university press monographs to academic libraries have not fallen off, a direct rebuke to every university press director in the country, who study their sales figures every day. I am skeptical of Jones and Courant’s claims, but we will have to wait for the results of a much more detailed project that has come to my attention—let’s call it the Large Hadron Collider of book data—are made public later this year before we can definitively dismiss Jones and Courant. I am myself participating in a project with my fellow Chef Roger Schonfeld on a study of how many books Amazon sells to libraries, for which we should have some preliminary data by June. And then there is the market research report from Simba, Scholarly & Professional E-Book Publishing 2015-2019, which describes in great detail just what is going on with ebooks in academic and professional markets. Taken together we have a picture of an industry that is changing but mature, a picture that is somewhat at odds with popular perception.
Source: Scholarlykitchen (2015)

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