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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
Welcome. This podcast is an audio event in honor of the retirement of Doug Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press. I'm Bill Germano, professor of English at Cooper Union in New York. My first professional life was as editorial director at Routledge. And before that, I'm proud to say working at Columbia University Press, I've been invited to act as host for a conversation among a distinguished slate of university press publishers as they discuss some recent and enduring issues that shape scholarly publishing today.
Bill Germano:Before I introduce them, though, I want first to thank Maggie Sattler, digital marketing manager at the University of Minnesota Press, for organizing our event, and, of course, Doug Armato for providing us with this occasion to speak with one another. Doug, we make no promises that we'll talk only about the issues and not about you. Now our group in alphabetical order, Doug Armato is director of the University of Minnesota Press. Beside a brief stint at basic books, Doug has worked at five university presses. He's been at Minnesota since 1998, more than half of his forty seven years in publishing.
Bill Germano:Lisa Baer is director of the University of Georgia Press as well as a past president of the Association of University Presses. Greg Britton is editorial director at Johns Hopkins University Press. Jennifer Crew is associate provost and director of Columbia University Press. Jennifer has been actively involved in executive boards at the Association of University Presses, the Modern Language Association, and the Association of American Publishers. Dean Smith is director of Duke University Press and also an adjunct professor at George Washington University.
Bill Germano:Lisa, Greg, Jennifer, and Dean, glad you're here. The format for this podcast is very seriously impromptu. Maggie urged us all to come up with questions about the world and the conditions of scholarly publishing. So let's see how we might stir at the scholarly publishing pot. I'd like to pitch the first question to Jennifer.
Bill Germano:Jennifer, what has scholarly publishing gained, and what has it lost since we started in the business?
Jennifer Crewe:The core of it is the same. In the old days, we used to sell many more copies of any book. And my favorite title from the early days of Columbia University Press, which I quote a lot, you've probably heard it, The Foraging Strategy of Howler Monkeys in a A Study in Monkey Economics. We sold well over 1,000 copies of that book.
Bill Germano:And
Jennifer Crewe:probably nobody has exceeded the research in it. But anyway, we would now sell probably 100 of that. And that's the big bad difference in terms of sales and supporting ourselves through the books. We used to support ourselves and now we don't. That's the big difference, I would say.
Bill Germano:Can I pitch the same ugly question to you, Lisa?
Lisa Bayer:So I came in a little bit later than some of the rest of you, not all of you. I don't remember a time when we really supported ourselves. Doug said something about, is the crisis in scholarly publishing still with us? And it was a crisis when I came in in the late 1980s as a graduate intern. So we know that the revenue streams have certainly diminished and diversified.
Lisa Bayer:I think we've had to change the way we engage, and this might be a positive. We have had to look outside. I think that university presses and universities, to a large extent, looked inside inwardly for a long, long time. There was an exclusivity and economic conditions have forced us to look outside to the public square to new audiences for better or worse?
Greg Britton:So what I notice is that there are probably more university presses now than there were twenty years ago. They are more diverse than they were twenty years ago. And yet there is this economic pressure on all of them. And the ones that are thriving or sustaining seem to have diversified their revenue streams. It tends to favor larger ones.
Greg Britton:It tends to favor ones with side hustles, like distribution programs or digital aggregation programs or journals programs. But books continue to be really, I think, threatened in this economy for those presses that don't have those side hustles as I call them.
Bill Germano:So you you've identified a whole bunch of things in in those remarks. And when I was at Columbia a long time ago, the distributions were becoming a very important part of what the press did, the portfolio. Jean, you haven't escaped this question. But, Jennifer, how important is what Greg has indelibly referred to as the side hustle of distribution to Columbia right now?
Jennifer Crewe:Well, I would say it's not only the side hustles, but the presses that also have endowments. There are some presses that do have endowments and that offsets any losses they have. But for us right now, we do sales for a lot of presses and it means we can support our own group and we don't have to go get another commission rep group. But yes, I would say the side hustles are essential, whatever they are, because we can't make it work otherwise. You have to get something else.
Jennifer Crewe:Now there are some publishers that do regional publishing and sometimes those books can help, but that's a little bit few and far between, I think.
Greg Britton:I'm now embarrassed that I said that my colleagues who run a journals program that dwarfs the books program, our side hustle, they would probably say our books program is the side hustle.
Bill Germano:Yeah. Well, I I I was going to indiscreetly comment on that, but I thought I can at least just once keep my mouth shut. Dean, what's it looking like at you on this regard?
Dean Smith:Sure. I I wanted to just follow-up on what Greg said, but the books are the personality of the press. They're the identity of the press. The journals are the mission driven aspect of what we do. I mean, we're celebrating our hundredth anniversary, and for sixty years, this press was moribund and was slated for closure.
Dean Smith:And it wasn't until Stanley Fish and Fredrik Jamieson and Evie Kosovski, Sedgwick, and others came to this press that transformed it. And the humanities then transformed the entire university, And the interdisciplinary approach in a renaissance in humanities transformed the whole entire university. And yet no one wants to tell that story, but I try to tell that story. And, Lisa, when you you were talking about when I got to Cornell, I don't think anyone in the administration visited the press in years. So trying to do things like publishing a book about the Grateful Dead show or doing something like that to bring people like, We're here.
Dean Smith:We're doing things. Or a book about John Cleese to sort of play back. I was looking for those opportunities to not be isolated. But ancillary revenues, that's the first thing I looked at when I got here because Poly external reviewers said, you know, we had too many people, too many FTEs. And you just are trying to figure out how are you gonna maneuver more ebook aggregations or more.
Dean Smith:I mean, we're considering things we never would have. One of the things we've gained is a knowledge of technology that we maybe we didn't want, right? Or knowledge of project management that maybe we didn't want. Like without a project manager on some of these things, you're done. But like we had recently been asked to do ebook sales for a UK publisher.
Dean Smith:Like just the sales and marketing aspect of that. Now that was something new, but services, Bill, are definitely something that we're looking at trying to do.
Doug Armato:Yeah. I think just sort of adding another side of the same issue is that the other thing which has changed is the customer base. I mean, when I started at Columbia, which was around the same time that Bill and Jennifer started, 80% of the book sales were to libraries.
Bill Germano:I know.
Doug Armato:And so that was the base. I mean, that was the market. And we considered the whole effort to sell books to individual readers and through bookstores and other things. It was almost like a hobbyist side of the business. It wasn't like where the money really was.
Doug Armato:And I remember you know, looking through green bar printouts of sales for books, and you just see line after line after line of libraries and library booksellers. So that's changed a lot, and it's just a lot harder to go retail.
Greg Britton:Yep. Can you point to one thing that happened with libraries? Was it simply their atrophying budgets? Why did that change?
Doug Armato:Well, I mean, I think the universities have changed, but also it's really the federal government. I mean, you know, that we came into the business sort of on the heels of the National Defense Education Program in the federal government, which supplied an enormous amount of money to universities and caused a boom in higher ed, which I think in the early days, I think those of us who started them thought of that as normal because that's when we started. But it wasn't normal. It was a boom. It was a post Sputnik moment.
Doug Armato:And university attendance you know, literally doubled in ten years. So that was the boom we rode, and it it's really, you know, been ebbing ever since.
Bill Germano:There's a question that one of you crafted. Are university presses and university libraries still close allies. And I think it's a it's provocative on on several levels. Lisa, do you wanna jump in on that one?
Lisa Bayer:Yeah. I I think that was Doug's question, and that was a really good one. Sorry. Sorry to out you, Doug, but it was a great question when I read it. So I'm sitting in the main library at the University of Georgia right now in our suite on the 3rd Floor, and I just had a meeting with a new librarian this morning.
Lisa Bayer:They make a point of all new department heads meet all other new department heads in the libraries, and that includes the press and our literary journals. I was explaining to our new Assistant Director of User Services, the relationship between libraries and university presses, a little bit about why Georgia moved the press to report to the libraries about 17 ago. And it's the fault of, I think it was Teresa Sullivan at Michigan because she did it first and our provost was friends with her and he wanted fewer direct reports, he's like, I'm going to do that at Georgia. So there are two ways to think about this. There's the reporting relationship, which I think 45 or 50 university presses now report to their libraries at their institutions, which is kind of wild if you think about how that's progressed.
Lisa Bayer:But then also the relationships between presses and libraries that Doug alluded to. Forty years ago they bought 80% of our books and that has absolutely changed. And I personally love and appreciate and have learned so much from being part of the UGA libraries. It's like being in a learning lab all the time when we sit down together as department heads, 20 of us or whatever every month, and they ask me questions. I ask them questions.
Lisa Bayer:I grouse when they mention certain things that they want. And I'm sure they grouse when I say things about our pricing or our ebook programs. I think it can be viewed as a very positive thing, but I also, it's certainly not the relationship that it once was. Absolutely not.
Bill Germano:Doug, since you've been outed by Lisa in terms of the question, do you wanna make it more provocative, or do you wanna try to respond to it substantively?
Doug Armato:Well, I tell a story, which is what I do most of the time. And I say that the first library conference I went to, which was back when I was at the University of Georgia Press, it was a Charleston Conference On Library Acquisitions. And I spoke there, and the librarian said, several of them said, Oh, well, you're the good guys. We like you. It's the scientific publishers, it's the Elseviers who are really making our lives difficult, but we really like you.
Doug Armato:And over time, that became to, again, feel like more of a distant relationship, and to some extent it's tempting to see libraries as a proxy for university budgets, and just sort of see that as the emphasis of universities has changed away from a lot of the fields that we publish in, that basically the libraries have followed the university's priorities. I think it's a way in which it access the university's management of what we do and what faculty do, is to reduce the resources available to the humanities and social sciences.
Jennifer Crewe:Yeah, I just wanna jump in and say one thing. I really do think that provosts or administrators think, okay, books and books, so they should go together. And there isn't really much thought given to how different we are. They wanna put up stuff for free and they don't really want the physical objects either. And that we wanna earn revenue and sell the stuff.
Jennifer Crewe:And I just think there are so many different things that we do and also the systems, there isn't really that much synergy to be had in the systems that we run. I mean, the administrators, they want to save money and so they want to say, oh, you do this and you do that, you can do it together. But actually, I think it's more expensive for the library to take on some of the stuff that we do.
Lisa Bayer:So I agree with Doug and Jennifer, and I remember after I came to Georgia it was the first press where I had been that had reported to a library and Joe Esposito wrote this scathing Scholarly Kitchen piece saying having a press report to a library is like putting the pig in the butcher's shop or something. I don't even remember what it was, but it was awful and I thought, oh my god, what have I done? But I will say everything is dependent upon culture and relationships. We have actually benefited tremendously from working very closely with our metadata librarians and the Digital Library of Georgia and Special Collections around open access projects, metadata standards. We poached a metadata librarian from the libraries to join the press all and those things could have happened if we were, you know, in separate reporting arrangements.
Lisa Bayer:I doubt though that we would have the mutual understanding and respect for one another. Both and.
Doug Armato:And you're right that there's people involved here. There's faculty. And, you know, faculty are also embattled, but faculty are very committed to the books. And, you know, years ago, a colleague, we we all know, a former colleague, Lindsay Waters of, Harvard University Press, gave a talk here at Minnesota and was just talking about the importance of books actually selling, and how there were more books being published than the market could absorb. And it was a very cold eyed impression of things.
Doug Armato:The first question he got was from a graduate student saying, so what I hear you saying is you're gonna take our books away from us. And Lindsay sort of successfully backpedaled on that, but that's sort of where the rubber hits the road.
Dean Smith:I've had relationship with the the Duke Library since I've arrived, and and there's been no talk of us reporting to them. We increasingly find ourselves in a similar position of trying to demonstrate our value library as well. They got hit with a major $6,500,000 cut at the beginning of COVID. And then no more print acquisition for, like, two years. And it was great because I go it's a very kind of back channel relationship where I'm like, hey, you know, my warehouse is about to be closed.
Dean Smith:I found out people were still working in the library. So I'm like, maybe I don't need to close the warehouse. And kept it sort of partially open or else we would have been facing. So the library has been a really key strategic partner for me since I've been here, whether it's, hey. Do you guys wanna get in on this thing for this book, Duke author?
Dean Smith:Do you wanna open this book? Do you have you know, there's a great relationship there. Anytime I need to know what's going on in the provost's office, I reach out to Joe Salem. He's very helpful. But increasingly find ourselves trying to find out, hey.
Dean Smith:What's gonna happen next? What are we we've we had to lay off 44 librarians, recently because of the funding cuts, and that was a very difficult situation. But strategically, we share a fundraising resource. So they've brought us into we've done joint events. There's just a kind of great synergy between us, and there's no reporting relationship.
Dean Smith:So whenever I need something he happens to be a Grateful Dead fan with along with me, so we do other things as well along those lines and sort of subversive moments that people do can't figure out. You know, that's been a really good I think we have to, like, find those alliances in this situation, and and I, you know, I've enjoyed that so far. But great question.
Bill Germano:Following up on that, I was gonna ask a question about the work one needs to do to adjust and explain a public face. How is the outside world meant to understand what a university press does, and how has that changed over the course of of your career? Greg, are you feeling brave?
Greg Britton:Yeah. I'm I'm I'm, stalling for time, actually. I should say great question, which is the the great, time staller. No. I find that I'm looking for books both personally and in acquisitions that solve an identifiable problem.
Greg Britton:When I get a manuscript, when I get a proposal, I think, what work does this book do for us? And I'm not sure that I would have asked that question twenty years ago in as sharper terms. It's really looking for things with a pragmatic edge. Even works of literature solve certain problems sometimes. So I will sweep those into that as well.
Jennifer Crewe:I would say, I mean, for those of us who are here in the Pleistocene era, Doug and Bill and I, question. We didn't think about the general audience. We were so because libraries, the 80% that Doug mentioned, they were buying the books. And so we were there to publish new research, to get people tenured and promoted and to publish for the libraries and the scholar community. But at some point, and I don't know exactly what year, but it was the year when a lot of the trade publishers were realizing, oh, I'm only selling 2,000 copies of whatever it is.
Jennifer Crewe:And they stopped doing high brow, I would say, general interest books. And we came in and swept them up. And then we had to learn how to do things differently and reach a general audience. And I think now when we talk around the table about what, well, around the zoom squares about what books we're gonna do, we always think now is this gonna be general interest or scholarly? And we make sure we do at least, half of the books can travel across disciplines.
Jennifer Crewe:Whereas before we were really just thinking, we'll do a book for a particular micro discipline. But now we need that general audience, and we're happy to have it when we can get it.
Doug Armato:Yeah, because as we went from that 80% libraries to say 25% libraries and the rest selling to readers and booksellers, obviously the mix has changed, so we've gotten much stronger on that side. I think that the ground for that transition was partly laid by Bill Germano. I mean, because when he went to Routledge, all of a sudden books had four color covers, and it's like, where did this come from? I mean, university presses were known for sort of dowdy one or two color covers, if that, and Routledge sort of was a press that began to signal that scholarship could be exciting and that it should have its own identity. And I think that we didn't know why at that point, but we we found out why as the years went on.
Bill Germano:Minnesota's list was so important and Duke's list too. But I think I and Hopkins. But I think I looked at those houses, and I tracked certain editors, and I would say, darn it. That editor got that manuscript before I could even have an opportunity to talk to anybody about it. But there was so much energy going on in the eighties, into the nineties.
Bill Germano:You stole ideas wherever you could, and that was part of our job description back in the day.
Greg Britton:I feel that energy every day, and maybe it's a nervous energy or a competitive energy or an existential dread. I don't know.
Lisa Bayer:I think that it's difficult to feel that kind of enthusiasm and hopefulness sometimes. You know, if you read Inside Higher Ed in the Chronicle every day and look at the horrible things that are happening in terms of pressures on scholars and scholarship, and it's not even on scholars, just on smart people. It doesn't have to limit it to that. So I still get excited about books from our trade list to our scholarly list and our creative list. But I don't know, Greg, and maybe it's just also because we're all of a certain age.
Lisa Bayer:It's a little bit harder now, I think.
Greg Britton:Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's me. I fall in love every day. When I see a book proposal that I think, oh my god,
Bill Germano:is So
Greg Britton:anyway, it's optimism over reality, maybe.
Bill Germano:This is a podcast that's going to be listened to by people who are already connected to scholarly publishing, but it is a job for hopeless romantics. You have to be able to fall in love every day with ideas and sometimes tolerate the people behind the ideas and sometimes you like them a lot. But if you only publish people you like, you'll go out of business really quickly. And getting excited by ideas that you cannot possibly understand as well as the author does is an act of enthusiastic humility that you have to sustain absolutely every day. That's the thing I most miss about that.
Bill Germano:But, honestly, it's a lot of it is like teaching. You know, I do a lot of talking to people about their works, their manuscripts. And it's funny. We were talking before about you could sell a thousand copies when Jennifer talked about the howler monkeys. Back then, they could have 500 pages of research.
Bill Germano:Now you have to have a question. The howler monkeys wanna know what you have for them in ways they didn't care about forty years ago. And I think that's the so what? Jerry Graff and his wife have that little book, they say, I say. It says the two most important questions when you're writing something is the first one is, so what?
Bill Germano:And the second question is, whoever thought otherwise? And I use this in every presentation about writing, and I watch people cringe because they're looking at their work trying to think, what's the takeaway? What's at stake in what I'm producing? Not my homework, but what I want people to take away and use. If I were still in the business, that's what I would be trying to focus on.
Jennifer Crewe:Also, would say you have to focus because now with attention spans, we can't have 500 pages of research. We have to have, like, at the most, 80,000 words, And whatever it so they have to distill it down to the, so what.
Doug Armato:I mean, I'd also think there's a general strategy of, as Bill described, oh, well, looking at all of the other presses, they get things that you wish you'd gotten. And to me, a lot of it boils down to what the Baltimore Orioles infielder Wiggly Killer said, hit them where they ain't. You're always looking for the areas that are underserved, the topics which hadn't been looked at. I mean, just for something that stands out. Trade houses, commercial publishing is very risk averse, which is something that Scholarly Publishing had the reputation for for a long time, as being sort of dusty.
Doug Armato:But in reality, in a lot of times, we're out there just trying to break into new areas and say something people haven't thought before. That I think is where the serial love affair that Greg refers to really comes in. It's just like a query shows up in your email inbox and you just say, Oh, I haven't heard that. You know, that's really interesting.
Lisa Bayer:Can I say that what I fall in love with every day is that we still have 15 to 20 students, graduate, undergraduate, apprenticing in the press every year, young people who still want to be publishers? And that to me is what is hopeful. I just hope we leave something for them. Forty years ago, that was me and that was everyone on this call. And now, and they're still coming and we're turning them away and our donors are still funding them because they believe that this is a career, this is a path worth following for a lot of good reasons.
Jennifer Crewe:Just exactly that, we have an editorial assistant opening, you know, 400 applicants.
Lisa Bayer:Yes, yes.
Jennifer Crewe:Wow. I mean, a lot of those like at least half say, but even two, half are just robo, you know, but the rest are legitimate and good.
Greg Britton:Both Dean and I teach in the George Washington Publishing Program. And this semester, I have 50 students who want to be acquiring editors and are getting a master's in in this. It's something, one didn't need when we came into publishing.
Jennifer Crewe:I don't think there was such a thing.
Greg Britton:There was not such a thing, and yet there is this enthusiasm for being in publishing in this new generation. So Lisa, I see it all the time and it's exciting.
Dean Smith:We have a lot of PhD students come in post grad, you know, that and they're working mainly in our editorial department and a lot of those have stayed on. They stay on. They go into publicity and they it's a very unique thing.
Lisa Bayer:Our last four full time hires have been PhDs, newly minted PhDs with humanities degrees.
Greg Britton:You know, when I think of these students, the young ones coming up, I think of how we have all been stewards of our publishing houses and of publishing itself. And when I think of what Doug has done, I came to Hopkins, which is happily the oldest university press in America. And, I opened a file drawer, and I found letters, emails from Doug Armato. And I can tell you Doug writes a mean email when he wants to. And I'm keenly aware that before Doug, there were others, and there were others before them.
Greg Britton:And we all run these, sort of legacy programs that some days look like nineteenth century businesses. We're manufacturing things and putting them in warehouses and then selling them sometimes on the streets. And other times are completely digitally forward tech companies. But that's all part of that legacy. I'm aware every day that it's like, don't break this because there are people who will come after us.
Bill Germano:A couple of people have mentioned AI, and one of the questions you guys came up with is twither AI. I like that twither. How is the AI tsunami different from or similar to past massive paradigm changes for publishing such as the Internet and ebooks? Actually,
Dean Smith:this morning was talking about how it kind of reminds me of 1995 when we put the first journal online and I was working with Charles Watkins' father on the journal Material Science Bill, that was the Chapman and Hall side of the Thompson acquisition when executives from Thompson Information Services Limited looked at sodomy and the pirate tradition, and it was like, what is going on here? But, you know, I guess I did experiment with some usage stats and was asking questions of the CHAT GPT variation, and I came up with some really interesting answers. But as a teacher in the program with Greg at GW, I'm wondering when the student's gonna be able to select their avatar, select the course. I mean, I've checked some of my lessons, you know, and and to see how sophisticated it is, especially even about university presses. And I was not turned away, let's say.
Dean Smith:I didn't use any of it, but it was I was like, hey. This is in the ballpark kind of thing. And Doug, the work that you did with Manifold, which is amazing and helped transform Brown and and many of us to kind of get some solutions over to some of these university departments. We the iNowdy Center was a a user of it for a few years and then decided that publishing was too hard. But but when you think about the monograph of like, here's the monograph, here's the PDF, could you add links of of relevant video, could you add citations, could you add text to those citations, full text?
Dean Smith:We're not that far away from something like that, I don't think. I don't know what that becomes or what that looks like or how it gets paid for or whether a box gets dropped off at the library, I have no idea. But you could imagine that it would be easier than us trying to get all of that stuff together. You know, that's just sort of where it stops. I'm a little bit afraid to go any further there.
Dean Smith:We have a project coming out speaking of regional publishing and the history of RTP, which at the end it's like RTP is a slow adopter of AI. You know, all those companies, the tech companies, biotech companies there are supposedly slow adopters. Well, is that a bad thing or a good thing? You know, you don't know.
Greg Britton:As I think about the threat that monographs especially face, I'm wondering if the tools of AI can be brought to bear on making those possible. And the alternative is that monographs disappear. As we acquire fewer of them, we publish fewer of them. And that's sort of heartbreaking to me to think of. I would love to know how to use those tools to make it possible.
Greg Britton:I don't know the answer to that, but that's the question that I'm curious about. And I mean the the tools of AI in doing all of the routine tasks of publishing that need a human to keep an eye on, but that are expensive and take up a lot of time. Constructing metadata, writing alt text for images, whatever else.
Jennifer Crewe:You know, one thing about being in publishing, there's some challenge or something new probably every two years, maybe every year. And that's the part that keeps it going and keeps us on our toes and wondering what the hell. And this is such a moment, I think. I mean, we had that when the Kindle came out or even when the iPhone came out. I remember there have been moments when we were wondering were books gonna continue to exist?
Jennifer Crewe:You know, was it all gonna be digital? Which didn't happen. And I think with AI, we're in a moment like that, but it's also, it's not just us, it's the whole university. We have to see how everything changes as a result of this. But I think what Greg just said about getting the more mundane little tasks done that we wouldn't have to that's a good use of it.
Lisa Bayer:Yeah. And a lot of publishers are already doing that, particularly in marketing and ED and P. I agree with Jennifer. I think that this tsunami, it's going to come. It may or may not hit us.
Lisa Bayer:It might dissipate owing to what I think is some sort of false economic support. There's no there there in some ways. Also when I hear my 17 year old son say, I want to use my brain. I'm shocked that he says that frankly, but I want to use my brain mom. I don't want to use AI, but that gives me, okay, the pendulum will swing.
Lisa Bayer:It may knock a few of us off on the way, but 85% of our sales are still print books.
Doug Armato:Right. I mean, what you're saying is very helpful, but it's also that technology sometimes appears on the horizon as a threat, but the other side of that is culture. And culture tends to mediate how we use technology and what it means to us and how much space it takes up. We've certainly seen that over time with ebooks. That I mean, it started out looking like a threat.
Doug Armato:I remember a university librarian here at Minnesota I worked with saying, you know, once the technology is perfected, we really only are going to need one copy of each of these, globally. So you sort of feel that sense of doom, but then you find out, well, people are using ebooks differently than print books. They use them for different functions. They have senses of affiliation or object fetishism, which leads them towards the books and that's professors, but it's also students. So the culture moderates the technology again and again.
Doug Armato:So
Lisa Bayer:what you're saying is we think of AI right now as this opaque, oh my God threat, but it will be filtered and shifted and changed by people, by the things my son is hearing on TikTok or whatever in a very small way. Yeah, no. And actually that's helpful too.
Doug Armato:Yeah. And there's an element of passion and desire and love, which is the word Greg used, you know, that runs through all of this. That's, I think, what keeps it afloat because the technology itself is not always helpful.
Greg Britton:It seems like one of the greatest promises of AI in the university is that it allows for individualized learning, learning at your own pace. Guess what else does that? A book. K? A book is the ultimate individualized learning.
Greg Britton:So, I don't think we're done yet.
Bill Germano:I think the same the same librarian who predicted that ultimately we only need one copy of a book globally is probably the person who said that books never need to go out of print. And I'm just curious, following up on one of the questions that one of you sent, does a book ever need to go out of print? Should books ever go out of print?
Greg Britton:Oh my. At Hopkins, we have a room which is our library, which is books in pub order from the eighteen seventies through the present. And as I shelf read in there, I see books all the time that I am really proud are now out of print. Stop by. I'm happy to show them to you.
Bill Germano:Are there other implications work wise of keeping books in print, quote, unquote, forever?
Lisa Bayer:I think that right now, it's relatively simple to digitize a backlist title. It costs something like $300 to get the files and put them into various third party aggregators and retailers and others. When that changes, when those economics change, then that will change it for us. Know, right now it's fairly simple if you have the capacity. And I would also argue that we all have books on our backlist that are still in print that are objectionable or, you know, of their time.
Lisa Bayer:Part of me thinks they should be available. They should be part of the record.
Greg Britton:That's what libraries are for.
Lisa Bayer:Well, maybe, but what if you live really far from a library and you want to see a copy of the Confederate Receipt book, which was one of our best sellers. I don't know. Doug remembers that book.
Doug Armato:Oh yeah. Coffee Made of Acorns. Never forget it.
Lisa Bayer:Actually, are others that are worse, but, but I don't know. Should we be in the, in the position of making those decisions?
Doug Armato:I think that this is especially keen in an era when aggregation tools such as AI are learning or training themselves in a lot of cases on questionable information, questionable or false. And how the algorithms work determines what's there. But at the end of the day, without the context, you don't really know the perspective that those facts are issuing out of and that they're being shaped by. So I think there's always a worry about having too much outdated knowledge out there in the world. And so I do think that there are books that should go out of print and still available in libraries and archives and other things.
Doug Armato:You just can't tell once you start amalgamating things. You just really can't tell what basis someone determined something was true.
Lisa Bayer:That's a good point.
Bill Germano:By the way, Outdated Knowledge is a great title, Doug. So one of you should commission a book called Outdated Knowledge.
Lisa Bayer:It's a series.
Bill Germano:Yeah, is. It is.
Doug Armato:Yeah. Too late for me.
Jennifer Crewe:That's to perhaps us decide what should be in print and what shouldn't. It's a little bit like us deciding who gets tenure, which some people were criticizing us for at some point. We decide what gets published and what revised dissertations get published and then those people get jobs and then get tenure and all that stuff. I just don't think, well, first of all, I don't think we have time. I don't know about you, but I don't have time to go look and see what books we should never digitize, but I don't think it's up to us.
Jennifer Crewe:I think as somebody said, the libraries, people want to keep that stuff around for people to see, but I don't think we decide that. I don't know.
Doug Armato:I mean, over time, we had a project, a digital project, I guess over twenty years ago called the Minnesota Archive Library, basically, where we put everything we could find back in print from 1925 on. And this press has gone through a lot of changes, so it was a real wide array of things. At first, it was confusing to have all these books, you know, reappear. You know, it's like specters from the past. But over time, and it didn't even take that long, scholars and students and users, readers just basically figured out what from that mass was valuable.
Doug Armato:It brought back to life some books which were actually remarkable feats of scholarship and had just been forgotten, and the other one sunk basically right back to the level yeah, of sort they'd had when we started the project.
Lisa Bayer:But they are all still available
Doug Armato:or no? Oddly enough, yes.
Lisa Bayer:Okay, to my point. Anyway, yes. Yeah.
Bill Germano:You talked a few minutes ago about various changes that have affected how books are selected, made, and brought out into the world. And one or two of you have touched on the question of the relation of monograph publishing to tenure decisions. Well, you know, it's like, okay. News to nobody. There are no jobs anymore.
Bill Germano:Tenure track jobs have disappeared. And one consequence of that, as I discovered at a recent conference, there are fabulous people at junior colleges, community colleges, remote satellite campuses, astonishing scholars who are trying to write books or are writing books. And, you know, I'm optimistic for them. But I the question I wanted to ask, and this is just mine, is what do you see as the ideal role for scholarly publishers in relation to tenure decisions? Because this always seems to haunt conversations about what counts as adequate demonstration of scholarly achievement?
Greg Britton:I think you're right to point out that that's a question that in ten years, I'm not sure you would ask a bunch of publishers, That tenure is fast disappearing, and there are serious problems with that. But I think in some ways, it makes publishing a book with the university press all that more precious. And the few people who have shots at those jobs are eager and maybe desperate to get published by the right university press.
Bill Germano:Okay. The the the hardball softball question. What is something that you've learned from another person in this podcast that informs your professional life?
Greg Britton:I can't find this piece of writing, but two over two decades ago, Doug Armato wrote an essay called Think Like a Publisher, which I read as a young editor, and it completely changed how I think about publishing. And I wish I could find that. If you have it, send it again because, I mean, I'd love to see if it holds up. But in my mind, it really changed how I thought about not thinking like an editor, not thinking as some marketing person, but taking this 10,000 foot view of what we actually do. It's really changed how my career went.
Greg Britton:So thank you, Doug.
Jennifer Crewe:Well, I'm gonna say something about that also refers to Doug, but it is not as lofty as what you just said. It is that I was amazed when he went, I think first to Louisiana, am I right, Doug?
Doug Armato:Well, basic, but then Louisiana. Yeah. LSU.
Jennifer Crewe:Okay. But, yeah, basic. But then, you know, I kind of watched him go to all these other university presses after having gone to Columbia College, being at Columbia, and Columbia was not a wonderful place to be at that point. Don't quote me, I'm sure I'm gonna be honest. It was very, it was kind of a strange place, although we both had a mentor that we discovered later there.
Jennifer Crewe:But I learned, you know, I said, oh, there are all these presses all over the world. I mean, all over the country, but all over the world in a sense that you could go to and that you could spend some time at and make a difference and then hop on to something else. Not that I ever followed that, but I always really admired that about you, Doug.
Doug Armato:I was always impressed that you stayed in the same place.
Jennifer Crewe:I know, really. Well, did have a little, what I don't say to people, but which is true, is that I've been here twice. I'm halfway in commercial textbook publishing. Yeah,
Doug Armato:I mean, certainly that moving around. I mean going broke was part of that. I mean living in New York on a publisher's salary.
Jennifer Crewe:Yes, it's another thing. You
Doug Armato:know, I mean it was a pretty easy bit of math to just sort of look at how much money I had remaining, and how long that would last me before I started searching for similar work, and I really loved the work, but searching for similar work in parts of the country that were less expensive to live in.
Jennifer Crewe:True.
Doug Armato:When the business was a little bit more relaxed than it became, one thing I learned from watching Greg was how to be a cutthroat competitor. Greg always had a way of knowing exactly, you know, what he wanted for where he was acquiring books, where he was editing books, and, you know, going after it just a hammer and tongs, and there was no room for gentility. And some of this was in the pre email days. I mean, you know, when we were all communicating with stamps affixed to the upper right corners of envelopes and things just didn't move that fast.
Greg Britton:Typewritten letters.
Bill Germano:Yeah.
Lisa Bayer:Well, will say I've saved all the emails that Doug has sent me and or posters to listserv over the years. I envision this little sort of Harvard Business Press sort of like Doug Armato on management and leadership little book, airport book. Thing he told me that I quoted to our editor in chief again this morning when we were talking about a search that we're having, and this is something I think that speaks to the quandary of the university press at the state flagship institution that is not in New York City, that is not in an urban area and the quandaries of recruitment sometimes, you know, convincing someone they really do want to move to Athens, Georgia or Champaign, Illinois, or Baton Rouge or wherever. And Doug said that at Minnesota, they've had great luck with growing their own. It's stuck in my brain that, you know, sometimes the best candidate is the candidate right in front of you.
Lisa Bayer:There's something very sexy about hiring someone high profile star powered from far, far away, or a more prestigious house, or what have you, but sometimes you have to grow your own. And that has worked so well for us since I really understood what that meant. And the other thing is from Minnesota's Centennial celebration, which is this year. And the article in Publishers Weekly about their anniversary, Doug said something like, you know, ten years ago or something, we just decided we were going to have fun and that this work was going to be fun. And that kind of gets back to what Greg was saying about you have to find the nourishment.
Lisa Bayer:And in spite of all my other sort of grumbles on this podcast, I think you do have to decide that it's going to be fun in a nourishing and energizing way.
Dean Smith:So I was just sitting here listening to you guys about how do we end up in these jobs and how did I end up as a director of a press? I'll say that Greg was very heavily involved in that and teaching me about you need to have an at bat. And I tell this to folks that are interested in becoming of presses at bats. You need to sit around, have that table where there are eight people asking you questions. And I think there was a time, where Greg had an app on his phone where he knew where the directors were going and when these jobs were gonna be coming open.
Dean Smith:And he's like, with a great he had one of the great quotes of all time. They're all fixer upper steam. You know, you need to you got this different forms. Somebody needs siding. Somebody needs
Bill Germano:a new
Dean Smith:in me. And and but the funniest thing ever was so I've had the last few weeks because of the kind of battle with the administration that's been resolved. I went through Steve Combs' correspondence, and there was a note from Doug, and it said, Dean will be a fine addition, comma, I think. So so I've taken that. We won't get into the UPCC defection, but that also taught me a lot too.
Dean Smith:But I love you, and that we went to the same high school and had mister Hyers who looked like Ben Franklin.
Jennifer Crewe:Oh my god. That's amazing.
Doug Armato:It's very true.
Bill Germano:I was going to say there was an easy segue to asking about Doug himself, but we've already sort of begun doing that. And I didn't make a note to myself. Would anyone like to venture anecdote about Doug that hasn't been mentioned?
Greg Britton:In 2004, Doug called me and said, I'm going to the American Association of University Presses, and it's in Vancouver. Are you going? And I said, I think I can go. And he said, great, let's drive there. And we were in I was in St.
Greg Britton:Paul and he in Minneapolis and he picked me up and we drove, but we drove across Canada, the entire length of all the provinces.
Bill Germano:How long did it take? I
Greg Britton:don't remember, it was like weeks and weeks.
Lisa Bayer:That's amazing. No, Doug always drove.
Jennifer Crewe:I remember I always drove to all those conferences.
Bill Germano:You drove.
Doug Armato:Best way to clear your head.
Lisa Bayer:I will just say we've all been part of the AAUP, the AU Press's listserv, AUPL, I don't know how Doug's going to live without that, for decades and decades. Doug, if he weighed in, it was usually very brief, you know, very succinct. On the few occasions when someone has ticked off Doug Armato and he posted his thoughts, it was terrifying, frankly. And also I saved all those as models for for future for for I hope AI doesn't ingest those because we're all in trouble.
Greg Britton:Does not suffer fools gladly. Check.
Lisa Bayer:Not. And and and if Doug if Doug sort of raised a red flag about something, I was fairly certain that I was right there with him. I was very always, you know, the person who says little, but when he does speak, you better pay attention.
Doug Armato:I'll try and use it for the good.
Lisa Bayer:You did.
Jennifer Crewe:Well, sent to Bill and to Doug, our HR guy came by one day and he found this memo in the file that announced all the new people. And this was, I think, as you said, Bill, 1978, I can't remember. This was my first time at Columbia. Among the new people, and of course this was at an era when the Howler Monkeys book sold well. So there a lot of people who were hired, but Bill and Doug and I came on board at Columbia in the same couple of months.
Jennifer Crewe:It was really killer, so I PDFed it. That was really a great thing.
Bill Germano:Are we allowed to say what year was out loud?
Jennifer Crewe:I think it was 'seventy eight,
Bill Germano:I said it. It was 'seventy eight, yeah. 'seventy eight, yeah.
Jennifer Crewe:I think, Bill, you were working on your PhD or your dissertation.
Bill Germano:Yeah. I was.
Jennifer Crewe:And I think, Doug, you were still in college.
Doug Armato:I was. I had just, I think, become permanent in order to to earn that notation, in order to be part of that note. I was hired full time at the Columbia University Press actually about two months before I graduated.
Jennifer Crewe:And I was so much older than you. I was in graduate school.
Doug Armato:Yeah. Oh
Bill Germano:my Unsurprisingly, I remember a lot of the people from 1978 in Columbia because it was my first serious job. Well, I think Doug, you got off the hook really easily. There's nothing here that's actionable. Slightly disappointed in all of you.
Lisa Bayer:Dean has not spoken yet. Are you sitting on something, Dean?
Dean Smith:Just he was the first outside of the Hopkins. I was at Hopkins, went to the Salt Lake meeting and Doug came out of the hotel and we walked to an independent bookstore together. And that was where I got to know him. I just was thankful because I didn't really know anybody else outside of my colleagues at Hopkins. So thank you.
Doug Armato:The bookstore browse is my kind of icebreaker.
Greg Britton:I just want to say, Doug, thank you very much. You've been an amazing colleague for decades and an absolute pleasure to have in our lives. I look forward to seeing what you do next.
Doug Armato:I'm curious myself.
Greg Britton:I think it's going to involve lots of long road trips and time in Hayward.
Doug Armato:Yep, no doubt about it. I really do love this profession and this business. The people that, you know, we we've all worked with together have just been terrific people to get to know. And I still remember when my our godson, Beckett, he's a broker, said to me, let me get this straight. So all day you sit at a desk and you read books.
Doug Armato:And I said, yeah, that's basically what the job is. He says, and then you go home and you read books. And I said, yeah, that's basically what I do. Basically, it's it's just been the perfect career.
Lisa Bayer:Yep. Yep.
Doug Armato:Well, great to be able to enjoy this moment with all of you, even if by digital means.
Bill Germano:Well, on that note, I'd like to thank all of you for taking time for your insights and your stories incriminating otherwise. And Doug, congratulations once again from your colleagues, your friends, and maybe most of all, from your grateful authors. And if you don't know what to do with all that new time on your hands, you can always write a book.