[Buddha-l] Conservative and liberal Buddhists

[Margaret Gouin]

On 27 May 2010 15:46, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:

>
> But seriously, folks (if I may quote Joe Walsh, composer of the
> unforgettable lines "I can't complain, but sometimes I still do"), as I
> gather around the water cooler with my academic friends to discuss the
> latest round of budget cuts to the university library, I hear more and more
> people voicing their disgust with academic publishers. More and more we find
> that authors have to do their own copy editing, their own proofreading, and
> even their own marketing for publishers that then sell academic books at
> elevated prices. So many of my friends are saying "Why should I put my work
> out through a publisher, when I could just produce my own pdf version and
> put it on my website?"
>

At the BASR conference in September 2009, there was a panel on academic
publishing with reps from three major publishing houses. Each of them gave a
little presentation on why it was such a good idea to publish through them.
It was almost comical to see the look on their faces when I then asked them
what we needed them for, given that as Richard says the authors do most of
the work these days. It boiled down to distribution, that was the only thing
they could give in their favour: that they had huge distribution networks.
But with the internet, and lists like these, what do we need their
distribution networks for?

The argument for the huge prices is that they have to sell the book at a
high initial price 'in order to gauge demand'. Now this is plain nonsense.
They sell the books at a huge price to try to recover their expenses from
all the academic libraries that are going to rush to buy them--but are they?
with academic budgets being slashed the way they are now? As I recall my
economic theory, high price means low demand; low price may stimulate high
demand. Or high price means everyone pirates your book from Gigapedia. Might
as well self-publish through Lulu.com or something like that. For a
ludicrously small fee you can get an ISBN which seems to guarantee that your
book will be listed on Amazon worldwide--now there's a distribution network!

In the interests of self-disclosure: yes, I'm getting a book published by a
major academic publisher and yes, I'm grateful for the academic 'street
cred' I'll get by being published by them. But given the amount of heartache
I had to go through with the number of copy-editing and typesetting mistakes
they made (two sets of page proofs--this is a major publisher in the field
of
Buddhism that can't typeset even a few Chinese characters? that doesn't even
both to ask before 'correcting' all my Tibetan transliterations that I then
had to correct back again? Sheesh...) I don't think I'd bother again. Not
worth the effort.

Margaret
Independent researcher and academic kvetcher