At In the Middle, Jeffery Jerome Cohen offers some thoughts on e-books and access.
He raises the idea of short pamphlets for sale at $1-3 through Google books or Amazon. If they can’t host them themselves, and genuinely need that small amount of money to cover costs, it sounds like a good idea to me.
I didn’t get the chance to ask my general question of the whole day. (I didn’t get the chance I’d have liked to ask Nick Srnicek a question either, but I’ll send him that privately.) My question, or more of an observation, is that speculative realism has sometimes been portrayed as a movement away from commentary on texts within philosophy. Look at the blurb for The Speculative Turn, for example:-
It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts… As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself.
What was interesting about the collision of medievalisms and speculative work in yesterday’s conference was the continuation of the commentary on texts. All the participants had provided a package of writings online for people to read in advance (you can find the links here). I have no problem with this – on the contrary, one of the things I most admire in medieval scholarship is its attention to texts. But I thought it was an interesting tension and I’d have been interested in hearing different responses to the question. This goes back to the question I posed in the summer:
Another is the question of access at a historical distance. How can I write about ‘territory’ as a word, concept and practice, in the early modern period, for instance, without the mediation of texts of some sort? They might be works of political theory, they might be treaties or lawbooks, they might be technical manuals of landsurveying or maps, but in some sense they would be textual, and textual strategies would be the way of access. I want to write about something that isn’t itself a text, but the historical approach seems to direct a way of accessing it. I raised similar questions before in relation to Jane Bennett’s book.
I spent yesterday at the Speculative Medievalisms workshop at King’s College, London. I’d left it late to reserve a place, not knowing if I could make it, and it was full. But fortunately a space opened up for me.
It really was good. Very interesting papers and some good questions. While much of the substantive focus was, of course, on the Middle Ages, the theoretical references were wide ranging – Foucault, Agamben, Esposito; Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, Laruelle; Harman and Meillassoux. I particularly enjoyed Nick Srnicek’s talk on financial quantification. As ever there was not enough time for discussion, but I met some interesting people – Kathleen Biddick, Eileen Joy, Nick, and Antoine Bousquet among them.
The theoretical discussions were pretty impressive, and right up to the minute. Anyone who thinks medieval studies is stuck in the past hasn’t been paying attention.
[update 5th April 2012 – more details here]
The latest newsletter of the Association of American Geographers has a piece by Doug Richardson on a new project – the tentatively titled International Encyclopaedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology. It’s planned to be fifteen volumes, 9-10,000 pages, 5 million words. It will also be available online. Entries are substantial, of up to 10,000 words. It will be undertaken over four to five years, edited by a large team, and published by Wiley-Blackwell.
But do we need it? There was the huge International Encyclopaedia of Human Geography published by Elsevier in 2009; a Sage Encyclopedia of smaller scope; there is the long-standing Dictionary of Human Geography, now in its fifth edition; and countless companions, readers, etc. etc. Those are of different lengths and audiences, but the Elsevier one looks like a major competitor to the AAG one. Okay, this one covers geography, and not just human geography, but there are doubtless existing physical geography collections comparable to the human geography ones I’ve just mentioned.
The market has to be university libraries, given the costs of such things. Someone must have done some market research and decided that it would sell sufficiently to cover the doubtless large costs. There is also the question of overlap between entries – having written for a few of these kinds of projects before, I’d struggle to write anything different on the same topics, and, especially for specialist topics, the pool of potential writers gets quite small.
I have very little to say by way of response to Paul’s post below. I would say one thing though. By ‘road bike’ I meant a bike that is not a mountain bike, rather than a motorbike. This bike actually. Very nice of its kind, but not quite as pricey as might be assumed!
This was posted as a comment, but since these don’t show up in readers etc. unless you subscribe specifically to comments, I will post it here.
Hi Stuart,
I might take this opportunity to write a few comments in an attempt to outline/clarify the re.press model a bit and reply to some points in the discussion … (I hope this is the right forum)
It is great that people like Graham and yourself are talking about academic publishing because we are presently experiencing a paradigm shift in the way books are published (and written and read) perhaps only rivaled by that of the invention of the printing press itself and if it is to be shaped by the stakeholders they must be active. What is more, one could argue that the shape that the publishing industry takes could be paradigmatic of many forms of digital interaction and thus doubly important. I am also obviously happy that you are talking about re.press so thanks.
The question of a ‘publishing model’ is mentioned in the discussion and is a much-debated topic in OA circles in general; this is an especially important topic for us because I am not completely sure that re.press’ motivation (and therefore our model) is all that clear. One the one hand, it is true that we are a pretty traditional publisher. We conform to typical academic conventions on selection and review of titles, we produce pdfs and printed books that are similar, if not identical, to that of other publishers (expect we like to think of our books as well designed and this is not that common in academic publishing), etc. However, on the other hand, we are very different and this difference is not simply driven by the fact that we offer our titles as free downloads. The OA or free aspects of our books is completely unconnected to the fact that we also offer print versions. That is, there is no model here designed to drive sales. We consider re.press to a part of the philosophical project/publisher and not a commercial publisher that simply provides services to a writing community in exchange for profit. The presentation of ideas in book form is a key part of the presentation of philosophy itself and as contributors to the philosophic community we contribute in this way; just as Graham Harman runs a blog on ‘Object-Oriented Philosophy’, or Zachary Luke Fraser translates books like The Concept of Model, or Sigi Jottkandt edits ‘S’, etc. This is why the books are free—they already belong to the philosophical community. Obviously re.press is a bit different to these projects for obvious reasons but I suspect very similar things motivate us.
Having said this, I think of re.press as a publisher of ‘books’, and for me, like many others, this still means paper books (at least for now!) and this is why we have books for sale. They are for ‘sale’ because it is very expensive to print and sell books (in fact most of the expense comes from selling the books), especially if you use a POD based model. Given this, our pricing policy (and this is also a broader philosophy) is ‘don’t loose money’. Thus, we have calculated our RRP on break-even basis on the most expensive mode of delivery to market for that item not taking into account any labour or the many other on costs. For example, if a book shop in Hawaii orders the book the equation may be like this: $25(RRP) – $10 (40% retail disc) – $7 (printing) – $8 (postage) = 0. Obviously not all ordering situations are this unfavorable so some money is made and that is great, but it does not ever determine our decisions on what or when to publish. All decisions are made on content and what is ‘manageable’ or ‘sustainable’ given our other commitments.
You can read more about the re.press philosophy with reference to our covers here: http://spunc.com.au/splog/post/the-cult-of-the-book-cover-part-2-by-paul-ashton-and-claire-rafferty/
Anyway, I might address some of your points now …
There is no doubt that the volume of downloads of the Speculative Turn is at least in part due to the popularity of the theme. To be sure, in the initially release it has been downloaded many more times than our Badiou book The Concept of Model and this has probably been our most ‘popular’ book. Whether this is true in the long term is another question. But to some extent how many people access the book is not a major concern for re.press, rather the goal is that anyone who wants to can. Obviously I want many people to access the books because I think that the content is important and I want it for the authors, but ‘conversion’ to the content is not really a goal of mine (it may be for others involved with re.press I don’t know). In general I think that people read philosophy if they have a need, are captured, or hear the command of philosophy but it is the work of others to demonstrate this need or announce the command.
However, despite the success of the Speculative Turn, I don’t share your view regarding the OA model being better suited to collections as opposed to monographs. To be sure, unless the collection has some special qualities I think they are better suited to journal issues and that OA publishing is, or should be, about monographs. I do think that more and more useful reading is done on screen, but if you want it on paper you can print it out, borrow it, or buy a copy just as you would with any other book. My view is that monographs are what are important in philosophical publishing and this is want people really need to engage with if they are serious.
Thus, when you say “downloading a free pdf is perhaps a bit like picking up a book in a store, having a quick look and then putting it back on the shelf. Some will buy it; some will not” I would say yes that is true but that that is fine. I also agree that “Similarly many of these downloaded pdfs will not be read” but again I would say that that is fine. However, I would add just because people buy a book it does not mean it is read either. I don’t really agree with the general idea that because it is easily downloaded it is given less attention. I know when it comes to me I do tend to download a lot of stuff much of which will not be read but anything that I really want to look at I will regardless of the source.
Again, when you say in regard to Harman’s book “I first looked at this as a pdf, and then decided to buy the paper copy, so in my case at least, the model worked” I would say great, yes the model did your for you here as you have a usable codex of a book you want, but it worked for re.press when you downloaded it, and it works for the author if we add ‘and read it’. Don’t get me wrong, if people do buy the book it is great, and if it is one of our books that does make money even better, some return can go to the stakeholders. It does cost a lot of time and money and some of the people who work and write for re.press do not have good paying academic jobs so yes a return can be useful. However, with re.press all of our books combined could not buy a road bike. I don’t want to bore people with the ins and outs of publishing but this is as much about the structure of the industry as it is about content. No doubt you book has broad appeal but if were to be published with a small OA press you would probably be looking as a second hand push bike!! Unfortunately this goes to one of the questions that you raise toward the end of your reply “One thing that has puzzled me, for instance, is why publishers still take so long to produce books.” It is true that books can be put out very quickly these days, however, one of the main reasons that you can add 3-9 months onto the end of a books production cycle is because of the way book marketing is organized. Basically if you want a book marketed and sold into shops and libraries you need to allow at the very minimum of 3 months (and often more – books are seasonal) between the print date and the sale date otherwise they will not be considered by the reps. This is just the way it works… Obviously re.press does not bother with this kind of thing because any reader who wants our book can access it so it does not conform to the timelines and processes of the retail and supply business.
Finally on journals, I am with you, issues are important (and probably should be more important). I think repositories could do a better job than single paper journals.
Cheers
Paul
The text of my Erlangen lecture ‘The Emergence of Territory’ has now been translated into German and is available as a working paper here. My sincere thanks to Henning Füller, Georg Glasz and their colleagues for this work. It must have been a substantial undertaking, since it had to be transcribed first before translation, as this text does not exist in English.
The video (and also, separately, the audio) of the lecture in English can be found in various formats here. (If you want to read the quotes, then I’d suggest the 640×360 one (Stream or Download)
Really interesting piece here from Graham Harman on writing. I’m firmly of the view that academics don’t talk enough about the mechanics of writing, and that they only way that we can work out practices that work best for us is by hearing about a range of other practices. Graham is remarkably generous is sharing thoughts on the way he goes about things. Also interesting that he’s moving away from articles…
