With the release of devices like the iPad, online publishing and e-books have become a bigger point of interest for both consumers and publishers.
But publishing giants like Random House and HarperCollins aren’t the only ones working on incorporating new publishing technologies into their operations. University Presses are also trying to figure out what role digital publishing will play in their futures.
University presses are publishing houses associated with major universities that typically publish academic or scholarly works, such as journals or text books.
Some university presses have already begun taking steps toward digital publishing, including the University of Nebraska Press. Several NU Press publications are currently available for the Kindle, said Rhonda Winchell, sales marketing director for the NU Press.
Selling digital copies or their publications online allows university presses to have larger audiences for their work, Winchell said. But digital publishing is still such a new concept that most publishers are still trying to figure out how to properly work with the new medium.
Other university presses have more fully embraced digital publishing over the last few years. Presses like the Oxford University Press and the Penn State University Press have launched programs to promote and support digital publishing across their campuses.
The Association of American University Presses, an organization that helps university presses with their publishing operations, even helps promote collaboration between university presses on digital publishing initiatives. In 2009, the association awarded a grant to the New York University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, TempleUniversity Press and Rutgers University Press to look into creating a consortium of university presses to make and distribute e-books using a common platform.
Digital publishing has become such a big issue for university presses that it was a major topic of discussion at the AAUP’s annual conference last month. The conference even heard a report from a specially created task force on how best to adapt to the new publishing world.
The task force, lead by Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, looked at a number of issues involved with digital publishing, from how much to charge for online material to what role libraries should play in distributing digital works.
Unfortunately, Withey said the task force wasn’t able to come to any easy conclusions on how presses can best adapt to digital publishing. While digital publishing presents a number of new challenges to university presses, Withey said it’s still to early to know what the answers to those problems will be, and academic publishing could still be in a period of transition for several years to come.
“This is only the beginning of the transition from print to a digital format,” she said.