¹ MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, “The Future of Scholarly Publishing,” Profession (New York: Modern Language Association, 2002), pp. 172–186.Google Scholar

² McPherson, James M., “A Crisis in Scholarly Publishing,” Perspectives on History 41:7 (October 2003), http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2003/a-crisis-in-scholarly-publishing, accessed April 7, 2015.Google Scholar

³ Cronon, William, “How Long Will People Read History Books?” Perspectives on History 50:7 (October 2012), http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2012/how-long-will-people-read-history-books, accessed April 7, 2015.Google Scholar

⁴ The chief irony here is that the very real financial pressures confronted by students have largely resulted from rising tuitions and fees imposed by politicians and university administrators, rather than from textbook costs.

⁵ Association of American University Presses, Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing, Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses (New York: Association of American University Presses, 2011), p. 32.Google Scholar

⁶ Brautigan, Richard, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971).Google Scholar

⁷ Richard Brautigan's vision was put into practice in the Brautigan Library. It was originally housed in a section of the Fletcher Free Library in Burlington, Vermont. This collection included only unpublished manuscripts and had a catalogue of 325 works as of 2004. The Brautigan Library was subsequently relocated. It is now described as a collaborative research and literacy project administered by the Clark County Historical Museum and the Digital Media and Culture Program at Washington State University-Vancouver.

⁸ See the revealing report Libraries of the Future: CSU LA Basin Pilot Project For Developing Cost-Effective Library Services and Resources for Student and Faculty Success in the 21st Century, produced in 2013 by representatives of California State University campuses in the Los Angeles Basin (CSU Dominguez Hills, CSU Fullerton, CSU Long Beach, CSU Los Angeles, CSU Northridge, and Cal Poly Pomona). Not only does this report push these libraries toward the electronic future, but it recommends also that the cooperating libraries avoid duplication in acquisitions and rely on interlibrary loan and similar sharing mechanisms. In this future, sales of scholarly books will continue to collapse.

⁹ See for example the feasibility study for a new publishing initiative produced by a liberal arts consortium led by Oberlin College in 2014. Lever Initiative: Investigating the Feasibility of Launching a New Open Access Publishing Venture for the Liberal Arts, http://jlsc-pub.org/lpc14/3/, accessed April 7, 2015.

¹⁰ The Guardian, April 24, 2012, reported on a memo from Harvard's faculty advisory council that said major publishers had created an “untenable situation” at the university by making scholarly interaction “fiscally unsustainable” and “academically restrictive,” while drawing profits of 35 percent or more. According to the report, prices for online access to articles from two major publishers have increased 145 percent over the past six years, with some journals costing as much as $40000. See http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices, accessed April 7, 2015.

¹¹ Stephen Arougheti, “Keeping Up With. . . Patron Driven Acquisitions,” Association of College and Research Libraries, http://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/pda, accessed April 7, 2015.

¹² The centrality of this process to modern bureaucracy is the focus of James Scott's Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).

¹³ If the market for history monographs suffers from oversupply—too many books for the existing readership—then substituting the publication of articles in competitive specialist journals for books in the tenure process may make sense. Lara Putnam generously shared with me a draft article, “The Opportunity Costs of Remaining a Book Discipline,” which explores the plausibility of this innovation.

¹⁴ In effect, this has already happened. Many monographs in our field are now published in very small runs using on-demand technologies that help university presses avoid getting stuck with unsellable inventory.

¹⁵ The recent unforeseen success of Thomas Pikkety's Capital in the Twenty-first Century, published by Harvard University Press, is an example. It has now in excess of 500000 copies in print. The windfall helps to subsidize the predictably low average sales of other books published by the press.