Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I've just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely.

It's unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in the book industry. But Rice UP is unique because it had committed to a fully-digital operation in 2006, with an interest in cost savings. To wit:

"We don't have a precise figure for our startup costs yet, but it's safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least 10 times less than what we'd expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model," [then-RUP publisher] Charles Henry said.

What was the problem then? Outgoing Rice provost Eugene Levy explains:

"The hope was that, without the burden of having to maintain a print inventory, the press might sustain itself largely on revenues from print-on-demand book sales. Unfortunately, book sales remained very slow, and projections discouraged the anticipation that revenues would, in the foreseeable future, grow to a level that could materially cover even minimal costs of operations."

What about those 10x cost savings? I own part of a small publisher, so I know a few things about the book industry, and I shall endeavor to explain. I've mentioned these matters before in the context of electronic books, but the spirit remains the same for digitally printed books.

People who believe that digital printing offers a considerable cost savings over offset printing are mistaken. On a per-unit basis, even at the very low runs typical of scholarly books (hundreds or thousands of units), offset printing is incredibly cheap, in the $1-2 range for perfect bound books, and not much more for casebound books. Book printing has been totally commoditized.

Digital printing is actually more expensive than offset printing on a per-book basis. The reason companies do it is not to save absolute costs, but to improve cashflow. A small publisher may not have enough cash to lay out on printing and warehousing thousands of copies of thousands of books, so printing digital on-demand editions at will enables a press to avoid tying up capital in a lot of books that tend not to sell very well. Offset printing, by contrast issues a double-whammy: the press doesn't make money until the books sell, but they still must pay warehousing costs and inventory tax on them.

Going digital to reduce costs is hardly guaranteed to save a publishing operation in dire straits. Even if the same number of readers opt to buy a print-on-demand copy of an electronic title (that's how it worked at Rice UP), there's no reason to believe the underlying financials will be any different. Put differently, a press that's struggling will continue to struggle after a digital transition.

So how do university presses stay in business? Here's the deeply mistaken answer of one Rice UP board member, who was too chicken to give his or her name in the Inside Higher Ed article:

"We're moving to a different era of scholarly communication where it's more accessible to more people, and where we don't have to worry about the commercial viability," the board member said. The reality, the board member added, is that "there is no commercial viability" in academic publishing and that the emphasis on such questions "is killing humanities publishing."

I'm all for the free exchange of knowledge, but these claims about commercial viability are just bullshit. There very much is commercial viability in academic publishing, and not only that, it's the same kind of viability you'd find in any media organization: having enough hits to cover the costs of the entire catalog. My main publisher, MIT Press, does this through a very lucrative textbook practice, which allows them to invest heavily in areas like new media. Other presses do so largely through the good fortune of a very few titles, often less than a handful. Take Duke University Press for example. Can you guess what keeps them in business?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this practice, by the way, although if I were a press director I'd be worried if most of my revenue was coming from only a few of my titles. But it's also important to cultivate those hits over time. If there's one glaring error that all university presses commit, it's in continuing to spend little time and money on editing and publicity such that appropriate (not all! don't flame me!) titles can be sold effectively to a large audience, just as non-fiction trade books are.

It's true that reductions in university subsidies for their home presses is partly to blame for the troubles in scholarly publishing, it's also true that many presses haven't found a way to become a greater part of the world, either. That doesn't mean selling out to trends (don't you dare put the word "neoliberal" in the comments), but it also doesn't mean playing see-no-evil, hear-no-evil.