an obvious problem with traditional publishing

I’m taking a quick break from the book project so that I can go out to a café and quickly look over the proofs of my Virilio article. A few minutes ago, the thought hit me of how absurd (and completely typical) the facts of this case are… This article was written as a conference paper in 2006, read at the conference in 2007, and here we are now in 2009, just getting around to publication. And that’s more or less normal in this business.

No one in particular is to blame. The editor has gone as fast as he can in landing a publisher and reviewing all the essays carefully (he’s done an unusually diligent job). The publisher seems to be going pretty quickly, for all I can tell. But obviously, the system is broken if it takes that long for an article to move from completion to appearance.

Open access can help solve much of this problem. So can streamlining various procedures as both re.press and zerO are doing, each in its own way.

The analogy that keeps coming to mind is that of early recording companies, which with their relatively low costs could afford to take lots of risks on local talent knowing that they’d occasionally turn up gems that would keep the whole business going: Stax, Sun, Chess, etc. What we’ve had instead until now is a situation dominated by a few university presses, and the amount of overhead required to produce every book raised the barrier for entry and put too much power in the hands of the people making the yes-or-no decisions on whether to publish.

If it becomes easier to get a book published, as is obviously becoming the case for all kinds of different reasons, it will certainly be true that more utterly half-baked material gets past the sentries, but it will also shift the focus from the mere fact of having had the manuscript accepted to the inherent quality or interest of the work itself. It won’t be as important anymore to say things like: “Yale University Press is publishing my dissertation.” Some books will capture the interest of the public that would never have had a chance to be accepted under the old system.

And ultimately, this is going to be one of the big threats to the academic world as we have known it, because a surprising amount of academic hierarchy is closely tied to the prestige pecking-order of various publishers. Carefully controlled admission to book publishing, with manuscripts often vetted by the same handful of experts in every field, led to much homogeneity of discourse.

Things will also change once the major market for academic books is no longer academics, as I think is starting to happen… There are so many highly educated people these days working well outside academia who want to read philosophy books. Once philosophy publishing isn’t dominated by and for professors, it will also start to be written less with professors in mind, which presumably means a clearer and more provocative style will be in the offing, less dominated by the technical language and professional caution that is a natural feature of the academy. Philosophy books will start to look more like philosophy blogs, or at least the successful books will.