An interesting post here about publication delays.

This is something I am often puzzled about. Why do academic publishers need so long to produce books? My book on the ‘war on terror’, Terror and Territory, which is by far the most contemporary book I’ve ever written, was by far the slowest in production of any I have done. One piece of mine in an edited book, which came out in 2003 was submitted in 1998. I remember being told by the copyeditor that my reference to Foucault and Heidegger to ‘thinkers of this century’ would have to be changed. And the Reading Kant’s Geography book I’ve coedited has been with the press for some time, and we’ve just heard it will be out in June 2011. University presses seem to be the worst offenders.

Journals can be bad too, but I’ve made special efforts with the journal I edit, Society and Space, to reduce the queue. It is now in the region of 6-8 months from acceptance to publication, with online publication often sooner. The publisher is reluctant to have it much shorter given that they are a small operation and time does need to be taken to copy-edit, produce the text and deal with proofs, etc. But this is both much better than it was in the past and compares well with other journals. Special issues are a different matter, since they move at the speed of the slowest paper, and scheduling them is difficult given that they require all or most of an issue. But we can still put the individual papers up online early. Review essays and commentary pieces are often published much quicker.

Delays are by far the only problem with traditional publishing. New technologies pose a number of challenges. My colleague David Campbell wrote an interesting piece for Society and Space on this that is available free to non-subscribers.