|
|
|
John Vivian's annual wrapup of the news for academic authors has been called the most valuable service that any authoring organization can offer its members. Vivian, himself an academic author, is the founder of the Society of Academic Authors. He edits the SA2 news site. His academic home is Winona State University in Minnesota.
JOHN VIVAN |
|
|  |
STORY NO. 1
FOREIGN LEAKAGE
For years publishers quietly sold U.S. textbooks at much lower prices in less wealthy countries. It was the same model that pharmaceutical companies used. In 2003 bargain-hunting college students discovered they could order textbooks from foreign retailers on the web at huge discounts. New books could be imported for even less than used books. Although the extent of the phenomenon was impossible to measure, U.S. publishers saw it as a major, growing threat on revenue. For authors, who typically earn only 50 percent of their normal royalty rate on foreign sales, it meant further erosion in their income. Publishers and authors, however, could chuckle at the comeuppance for their nemesis -- the used-book industry. Mark Oppegard, president of Nebraska Book Company, one of the largest used-book panderers and which operates 112 college stores, said: "In a course with 50 kids we no longer are selling 50 textbooks." The Society of Academic Authors issued a contract alert, suggesting authors adjust their contracts with publishers for full royalties on foreign sales. |
STORY NO. 2
ACQUISITIONS NOUVEAU
Eager to cash in on the bonanza in standardized testing coming with the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law, publishers scoured for small testing companies to add to their bevies. Publishers also beefed up their existing assessment units. The payoff, a certainty, will come as states refine their expectations and shop for outcome assessment tools. The K-12 publishers will be ready. Not surprisingly, the mega-merger gluttony is over. The publishing giants are gorged and focused on integrating their acquisitions. Too, some big companies don't have enough cash left to contemplate going after rival giants. The last big sale was amid the imploding of French conglomerate Vivendi, which sold Houghton Mifflin to investor groups in the United States for a fraction what it had paid only a few months earlier. Houghton's new owners are still taking write-downs to square the books. |
STORY NO. 3
WHITHER HOUGHTON?
The new regime at Houghton Mifflin sees the Boston publishing house's future increasingly in textbooks and educational publishing. The new owners, Bain Capital and Lee Partners, hired Tony Lucki away from Reed Elsevier's K-12 unit Harcourt Inc., where he had been president, and installed him as chief executive. Lucki's forte is educational publishing. Insiders don't expect Houghton to jettison its trade and reference operations but their share of the house's revenue pie will shrink as education grows. Besides K-12, there are college disciplines in which Houghton has not been much of a player. |
STORY NO. 4
TEXTBOOK CHOICES
At tiny Baptist-operated Louisiana College, President William Rory Lee removed books required for a philosophy and a religion course from the campus store. The language was profane language in The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck, and a love scene in the novel A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines was, well, just too much, he said. As he saw it, the books' contents didn't comport with his college's values. The college trustees backed him up. Further, the trustees voted to require professors henceforth to clear textbook choices through department chairs and the academic vice president. Such perversion of academic freedom standards, even if only in the backwaters of academe, should not go unnoted lest they metastasize. For academic authors, the question looms: Could your works be next? |
STORY NO. 5
TEXT PRICING
As much as publishers wanted questions about marketing and pricing tactics to disappear, the volume of criticism notched upward in 2003. K-12 publisher lobbyists laid low in California, where legislators continued to sort through a personal financial relationship between state education executives and book lobbyists, which included personal loans. That, coupled with revelations that the state schoolbook adoptions board policy was to consider books regardless of costs, led to untoward questions about possible gouging and worse. Then it was learned that some states paid less than California for schoolbooks. A McDougall Littell literature book that went for $55.97 in California was only $50.49 in Texas. In the college market, there were new data about discounted foreign sales, sometimes at half price. Publishers responded that pricing was geared to local market conditions, implying that Third World sales would vaporize without the discounts. But critics said the U.S. pricing seemed also adapted to local market conditions but inversely, with jacked-up prices for domestic buyers. The Association of American Publishers mounted a defense, saying pricing was complex and shouldn't be subjected to simplistic comparisons. That, however, didn't wash with critics. One AAP explanation said myriad factors affected pricing, including author royalties. That riled authors, who have seen royalty rates erode in recent years from the once-standard 15 percent. |
STORY NO. 6
MANUSCRIPT REVIEWING
A whacko scheme by a tiny California history publisher to bribe professors into adopting its books blew up, putting pressure on other publishers to police their own manuscript reviewing practices. The scheme promised reviewers as much as $4,000 to adopt a book and then report back on its classroom effectiveness. Ethicists had a field day. The fury prompted North Dakota to consider a ban on professors adopting titles for which they had received even modest reviewing honorariums. In the end, almost everybody agreed that honorariums, typically less than $500 for a new-strings-attached review, is not an ethics issue. Some publishers, however, including giant Pearson Education, had some fancy explaining to do to justify some honorariums with especially attractive incentives for adopting. |
STORY NO. 7
JOURNAL PRICING
A campaign to encourage academics to protest journal prices by refusing to submit articles had clearly fizzled by 2003. But journal publishers remained under scrutiny for pricing. At the University of California at San Francisco, scientists Keith Yamamoto and Peter Walter focused on six molecular-biology journals for which, they said, Reed Elsevier was gouging users for electronic access. College libraries, their budget constricting, looked to cutting subscription. Among hardest hit were discount bundles like Elsevier's DirectScience, whose 1,200 titles included widely read journals but also some obscure ones. Cornell went with individual subscriptions to trim its $1.2 million outlay for Elsevier titles. Facing massive defections, Elsevier began unprecedented custom negotiations to keep customers. Even so, individual subscriptions remained high, and exceptionally lucrative to journal publishers. The favorite whipping boy of the critics were Elsevier, Kluwer and Wiley journals whose subscriptions exceeded $1,000 a year. |
STORY NO. 8
DUAL-MEDIUM TEXTBOOK
The textbook industry awaited the first major-league launch of a book simultaneously in print and online formats for big-enrollment adoption. For $100 students can buy Paul Krugman and Robin Wells' 800-page, hard-cover Economics or for $60 buy access to an online variation co-authored with Paul Romer. Upstart Atomic Dog has specialized dual-medium textbooks, but Worth is the first major publisher to test the possibilities. Elizabeth Widdicombe, president of Worth, noted that the online price undercuts used-book prices. Krugman was bullish on the prospects: "The current model will be less and less viable," he said, referring to problems posed by escalating prices, used-book options for students, and, now, transborder sales. "This is an attempt to get ahead of the curve," Krugman said. All publishers have online experience, but, despite their hoopla, their use of the web has been only to promote interest in traditional print projects. |
STORY NO. 9
PATRIOT ACT
Alarm grew among book people about the Patriot Act, which Congress passed six weeks after the 9/11 terrorism attacks. Section 215 was especially troubling, giving government agents the power to examine bookstore and library records secretly to see what individuals were reading -- without even going to a judge for a warrant. Not to worry, said Attorney General John Ashcroft. Defending the Patriot Act, which had had drafted, Ashcroft said the Section 215 provisions had never been used. To the American Library Association, which objected, Ashcroft said: "The fact is, with just 11,000 FBI agents and over a billion visitors to America's libraries each year, the Department of Justice has neither the staffing, the time nor the inclination to monitor the reading habits of Americans. No offense to the American Library Association, but we just don't care." Librarians were not comforted. A 2002 University of Illinois survey of more than 1,000 libraries found federal or local agents had made 545 visits to libraries under the Patriot Act to examine the borrowing and Internet-surfing records of patrons. The librarians, as well as publisher and author groups, were concerned that Section 215 had a chilling effect on the constitutional guarantee of citizen freedom of inquiry. |
STORY NO. 10
FLAT SALES
Year-end bonuses were barebones in educational publishing. Sales growth was merely 2.4 percent for el-hi sales through April, 1.0 percent for college. Profits were slim. Even conglomerate publisher McGraw-Hill, which hedges its bets with roots in diverse media fields, posted profits only in single digits. At Harcourt, 350 employees, almost seven percent, were laid off or nurtured into early retirement. Scholastic dropped 400 employees. To shareholders, the publishing houses said their crystal balls showed better days ahead. The federal No Child Left Behind law, for which publishers lobbied, are expected to goose sales of el-hi textbooks geared to new pupil outcome measures. Also, the state tax revenues that took a hit in the Bush recession are expected to recover, albeit slowly. With new revenue, schools can catch up on postponed book purchases. The troubled university presses reported strong sales gains, up 13.8 percent for hard-bounds through October. In the long term, however, the university presses have yet to regain losses from their peak years. |
OTHER NOTABLE 2003 NEWS
Portland State University created a book publishing concentration as part of its master's program in writing.
J.B. Lippincott, last in a family line to the J.B. Lippincott publishing company, Joe Lippincott, died in retirement at age 88.
Journal publishers Blackwell, Elsevier and Wiley continued to send journals to 600 academic libraries after the Faxon/RoweCom subscription service went belly-up.
The Society of Academic Authors urged members to review the out-of-print provisions in their contracts to determine whether the publisher can use new print-on-demand technology to maintain a book on a backlist forever and ever, to an author's disadvantage.
Journal publisher Elsevier Science responded to critics that online journal articles sometimes disappeared without explanation laid out new procedures for posting notices when it retracts an article because of plagiary or other problems.
President Bush nominated Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a textbook author, to chair his Council of Economic Advisors.
The driving force behind the National Writers Union, Jonathan Tasini, resigned to take create a new, broader-based organization, the Creators Federation.
Winners of the SA2 Talby textbook prize were Steve Ackerman, Peter C. Jurs, John Knox, Frederic H. Martini, John W. Moore, Conrad L. Stanitski, Robert B. Tallitsch, Michael J. Timmons, John Webber
The American Association for the Advancement of Science earned kudos from the Bush Administration for calling on journals s to be cautious in publishing scientific results that could be used by terrorists.
Education publisher South-Western, now part of Thomson, celebrated its 100th birthday.
University presses generally have not raised prices to keep pace with either inflation or the price of trade books in recent years, according to a study by book industry scholar Albert Greco.
Story-teller Joy Hakim whoseStory of US became a million-seller history textbook worked up a new science series tentatively title The Science Story.
The classic Molecular Biology, by James Watson, co-discoverer of the DNA double helix, was issued in a fifth edition by publishers Benjamin Cummings and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
The culture and politics journal Partisan Review folded after months of floundering following the death of cofounder William Phillips.
The American Historical Association no longer will investigate plagiary complaints because it's too labor-intensive and often inconclusive.
Iraqi scholar Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash was detained by the U.S. military for her studies on the effect of uranium-depleted weapons, which her publisher said was retribution for her unfriendly views on U.S. policy.
An expert on textbook authoring, Frank Silverman, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given only a few months to live.
U.S. occupation forces in Iraq began stripping the Hussein-era slant from school books.
A Paris court froze a disputed US$23.4 million golden parachute for former Vivendi chief executive Jean-Marie Messier.
Textbook printers Von Hoffmann and Quebecor closed facilities and laid off employees in response to declining orders.
Frederick Hetzel, 73, the retired director of the University of Pittsburgh Press, died of complications of rheumatic arthritis.
The European Commission halted its anti-trust review of a plan for French book publisher Lagardere to acquire Vivendi's European publishing operations for a lack of information that had been requested from the parties.
Richard E. Neustadt, 84, whose books on the U.S. presidency were required texts in countless college political science courses, died after a fall.
The historical methods textbook The Modern Researcher by historians Jacques Barzun an Henry F. Graff, was issued in its sixth edition.
|
|
