Gazette Q&A Goellner's Long 'Press' Run Ends With Insights, Not Predictions By Mike Field When Jack Goellner arrived at the Johns Hopkins University Press, a Kennedy was in the White House, an Eisenhower was at the helm of Johns Hopkins, and the Press, with 20 staff members and annual sales of $200,000, was considered one of the better university presses in America. Now, a third of a century later, Goellner prepares to retire as director of the Press. The nation has changed, the university is a much different place, but the Hopkins Press, now with 118 staffers and $13 million in annual sales, is still widely recognized as one of the nation's pre-eminent academic publishers. To learn what keeps the Press among the best--and where the future may be taking it--Gazette staff writer Mike Field spoke with Goellner in his Charles Street office. Q: People who aren't familiar with the Press might imagine you have a printing press down in the basement and you're actually making the books here. That obviously is not the case-- A: We have never had manufacturing facilities at this press. Very, very, very few university presses ever had. All of our typesetting, our printing, our binding has always been done by contract. We deal with vendors all over the eastern half of the country for these things. We buy paper in carload lots, which is the cheapest. We buy it from the mills, we supply it to the printers who print our books, but we've never done any printing. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Will that ever change? A: Now it's starting to shift just a little bit. The advent of desktop publishing--which isn't really publishing, it's desktop composition--means that we are now doing some desktop work on some of our journals. There have been enormous changes in the technology of printing, but no, we don't have a printing press in the basement and gradually the word is getting out. I don't encounter that assumption nearly as often as I used to, but we still have people calling up and asking if we will print this for them and print that for them, or how much would you charge to print 1,000 copies of my book? ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Did the Press ever work that way? A: It's the way books were published for most of the early history of university press publishing. A member of the local faculty would write a book and bring it to the press and tell the press that he wanted this book published. The press would then determine how much it would cost to have this book published, and the professor would pay that amount: for the typesetting, the paper, the printing and the binding. And the press would supervise all of this. It would publish the book, and then, as the book sold, it would take a small commission--what now seems like an unbelievably small commission--of about 15 percent to reimburse itself for the expenses it incurred. All the rest would go back to the professor. Today this would be considered vanity publishing, and vanity publishing has a very bad name. But that is the way most university press publishing was done. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Including Hopkins? A: Including Hopkins, for those early years. And some of the very finest books that this press has ever published in its long history were published that way. Just because it was done that way doesn't mean that the books were less than good. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What happened? A: We moved from that into a mode where the Press took more of a role in deciding what it wished to publish and did not wish to publish and of course began putting its own funds into publishing. Now, you know, a decision to publish is really an investment decision because when you say yes, we're going to publish this book, you immediately incur an obligation to spend a great deal of money. And I don't mean on just getting the book manufactured. That amounts to less than 25 percent of the total publishing cost. You're going to be making a lot of investment in this enterprise, and you've got to be able to see a way of recouping that investment. So, at the time university presses, including this press, began to be more discriminating in what they would and would not publish, there developed the idea among academic authors that there was something of a stigma attached to publishing with your own press, that somehow this might send a signal that your book wasn't really good enough to be published elsewhere, therefore, it was published by your own press. And so for some while, in my early years here, part of what our editors had to do was persuade authors that this stigma was imaginary, and it did not really attach. I think it's fair to say now that stigma no longer exists. Certainly we have published the books of some of the most distinguished members of the Johns Hopkins faculty. We published them well, and I don't think that the authors' reputations have been badly served in any way. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Has academic publishing changed in other ways? A: Now, you know, times are really changing. The stock in trade of university presses has always been the scholarly monograph. There are lots of people prophesying the total demise of the scholarly monograph, and certainly, the market for scholarly monographs--the specialized, narrowly focused book that has been the mainstay of university presses--that market is diminished. For example, about 25 years ago the average first printing of a hardcover book at this press was 3,400 copies. Today it is approximately 1,000. We set the print run based on what we expect to be able to sell within a reasonable period. And maybe back then we didn't sell all 3,400 copies, but when we set the print run it was with the expectation of selling them. Now we set it with the expectation of selling a much lesser number. We still may not sell all those, you know, it depends. If you set a print run at 1,000 and you end up selling only 600, you're taking a 40 percent hit. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Why have the sales of monographs dropped so drastically? A: We just don't have standing orders from libraries any longer. Libraries constituted a very, very substantial segment of the university press market. At some presses it was as high as 70 percent of the total market. It was never nearly that high here, but it was bigger than it is now. And even now, it is a very significant part of our total market. Then there is the so-called "twigging" phenomenon where the fields of study in the disciplines became more and more specialized. This subdiscipline would branch off, then that would branch into two other sub-subdisciplines and so on, so that a lot of the books became more and more narrowly focused. There became relatively fewer people in each sub-subdiscipline. The whole demography of higher education contributes to the explanation of what has happened here. And finally, there is the additional factor that library book acquisition budgets have been hurt. Book prices have gone up a lot. Not nearly as rapidly as prices of bread and milk and real estate and all the other things that people spend their money on, but book prices have gone up, so the dollar buys fewer books today. All of these things come together, and the result is that we cannot expect to sell as many copies--remember I'm talking about scholarly monographs now, I'm not talking about books generally. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: What about electronic publishing? Has that affected sales? A: Electronic publishing is going to produce profound changes, I think, in two ways. One, change in the output, the product of the university press. After all, a university press is a business. We are in the business of selling a product_our product happens to be an intellectual product that takes the form of books and journals, but we are in the business of buying and selling. And electronic publishing is inevitably going to change the product. I think as it takes hold--and it has not yet taken hold, that's important to understand--electronic publishing is also going to change the relationship of the university press to the parent institution. This is almost an article of faith with me, but it's not a point of view that is altogether popular among my peers and even some of our own staff here. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: How will that relationship change? A: You see the university press has always positioned itself on the periphery of the university. We do operate in two worlds; we're in the world of higher education, we're also very definitely a part of the American book publishing industry and so we have kind of kept the distance. We don't exist to publish the books of the local faculty. Only about 15 percent of the books we publish come out of the local faculty--maybe not even that. We don't publish the university's newspaper, we don't publish the bulletins or the alumni magazine. We operate with a lot of autonomy; we are simply the university's scholarly publishing arm. What's going to happen, I think, with the advent of electronic publishing, is that the university press--which has always prided itself on its autonomy--is going to be drawn in toward the center of the university. It is going to be engaged in all kinds of collaborative enterprises with the library and with the academic computing center. For instance, our Project Muse [the Press's on-line electronic journals] could not have come into existence without the library and the Press working together. It just would not have been possible. We couldn't have done it alone, and the library couldn't have done it alone, and it would have been equally impossible to move ahead without the cooperation of Academic Computing. I see a lot more of this happening. So when you've got changes in the product and changes in position of the press within the university, it's bound to change the character a little bit of what university presses do. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Q: Would you care to look ahead to the next 33 years? A: Oh boy, no. I can't. And I would not trust anybody who claimed to be able to see that far into the future of scholarly publishing. But I'll make a few easy observations: I do believe that the book as we know it, that is, print on paper between covers, will remain. It is not going to disappear--I believe--and I'm not saying that for reasons of nostalgia or being overcome by warm and fuzzy feelings or anything like that. I think the book will remain because it serves a real purpose. In many ways the book is a very efficient way of transmitting information. Now, that's one easy observation. Another easy observation that I've already made is that electronic publishing is going to change the character of university press publishing and the role of the university press, both within the university and as a part of the publishing industry. The other thing that I see happening with the advent of electronic publishing is a greater distinction made between knowledge and information. There is no doubt that on-line publications, CD ROM, multimedia and interactive materials can be a very very effective way of disseminating information. Databases--a lot of what we now publish in book form--could more efficiently and, I think, more usefully be published on-line or on CD ROM. And they will be in the future. But a lot of books do not lend themselves to this. It's the old concept--these are distillations, they are products of long thought, deep pondering and so on. This is knowledge that has to be conveyed in sustained narrative. I can get corny if you want and call it the distillation of the author's own mind--and it doesn't lend itself well to electronic formats. So I think books will be around. I also think university presses will do more information publishing than they have been doing in the sense of on-line publishing, database publishing and that sort of thing. And I think they will continue to publish books. There is something else to be kept in mind. We at JHU Press are already engaged in electronic publishing. Project Muse is our shining example, but we have done other things: We have published CD ROMs, and we have published floppy disks, and we have examined with careful attention some multimedia proposals. Other presses are doing similar things. MIT has just launched an electronic journal that will not see print on paper--it will be all-electronic. But nobody, so far, has made any money on this. Remember, we're a business. We're in the business of buying and selling. We haven't so far made a nickel off any kind of electronic publication. This will change, obviously, but we cannot simply focus only on that electronic future and ignore what is still our bread and butter, what keeps us in business so that we can move forward with electronic publishing. I am convinced--and I've said this before--that the organization of universities is going to be very different 33 years from now and the role of university presses within the universities is going to be very different. But so will be the role of libraries. And teaching is going to be different and research techniques are going to be different. I would not believe anybody who would pretend to know in what ways these things will change. You just can't know. But if you stick around and pay attention, you'll find out.