All About Download

Harvard is once again in the news for something besides losing gargantuan amounts of money, with Harvard University Press’s recent announcement that it will publish a selection of titles digitally through Scribd. Does Harvard’s move (both the losing money part and the going digital part) represent the future of academic publishing?

Today, with the announcement that Harvard University Press will publish 1,000 digitized books on Scribd, the academic world took one more step in its glacially slow march into the digital age.

Over ten years ago, when I first started my graduate work in the humanities, there was already much talk of the looming crisis in academic publishing. Print runs for academic works written by even major scholars in a given discipline are pitifully small—1,000 would be considered decent-sized. The work of junior faculty, who are trying to publish to beef up a CV, means that the runs are smaller still. Read the rest of this entry »