New Research Article: “The Price of University Press Books, 2012–14”

Note from infoDOCKET Founder/Editor Gary Price:
The article linked below is found in the new issue (published earlier this week) of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing (JSP) published by the University of Toronto Press (UTP). It’s a fee-based/paywalled publication.
HOWEVER, for the next month the UTP has made the full text article available at no charge/no registration for infoDOCKET readers. Thank you to UTP for doing this.
Title
The Price of University Press Books, 2012–14
Authors
Albert N. Greco
Fordham University
Alana M. Spendley
Fordham University
Source
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
Vol. 47 No.2 (January 2016)
Abstract

The three previous studies about the suggested retail prices (SRPs) and the new title output of new scholarly books (covering the years 1989–2000; 2000–8; and 2009–11) revealed certain well-defined patterns for books published by university presses and commercial scholarly publishers. During those years, the price for commercial scholarly published books exceeded the SRP for university presses in the humanities, the social sciences, and in the scientific, technical, and medical categories, and commercial presses annually released more than three times the number of scholarly books than university presses did in these major book categories. Were these new title output and pricing trends between 1989 and 2011 also evident in 2012–14? What pricing and marketing theories and practices did commercial scholarly publishers use to enable them to charge higher SRPs than university presses? In a period of economic uncertainty, when far too many university presses face fiscal questions from university trustees and administrators and several presses have been on the verge of closing in recent years, what strategies can university presses utilize to generate more revenues for their books and remain a vitally important part of the entire scholarly publishing ecosystem?

Direct to Full Text Article (HTML and PDF Versions Available)
PDF version runs 18 pages.

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