While university press companies nationwide have suffered from a decrease in revenue resulting from tighter budgets and lower demand, the Johns Hopkins University Press has fared better than most.?
An average drop of 10 percent in university press sales occurred in 2008 compared with 2007, according to a survey issued in January by the American Association of University Presses.?
Kathleen Keane, director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, noted that JHU press had experienced a five to seven percent drop in revenue over the past year.
According to Keane, the drop in sales was disappointing but not surprising, given the current economic climate. She also noted that a gradual decline in library purchases over the past decade has also led to a reduction in sales.?
"It's simply a fact that libraries are less able to purchase books: This is in general, not speaking about the Hopkins library - but in general they are buying fewer books and spending more money on electronic resources," she said.?
A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education also noted that many libraries have begun pressuring publishers to eliminate price increases to make purchases more affordable. The typical increase in book price is about five percent, but some publishers have been considering decreasing this amount for the upcoming year.
According to the Chronicle, some libraries have had to cut their spending on new books by up to 25 percent.
Keane felt that one reason Hopkins has fared better than other university presses is due to its diversified offerings, as well as its sales overseas, which comprise about 15 percent of their total sales.?
"The Hopkins Press has been quite successful in recent years, in part because we're not completely dependent upon books," she said.
"We do have a very strong journals program, and those journals have been available both in print and online for over 10 years, so we have a good number of subscriptions to electronic journals, and that enables us to balance our activities across multiple formats."
Keane also suggested that the JHU press success came as a result of its recent success with two of its books that were popular in the mainstream: biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.?
"Sometimes one press may do better than average just based on happening to have some books that appeal to a broader group of customers," she said.?
Keane said that the JHU Press did not anticipate any drastic restructuring of its business model.
"We're continuing to publish a lot of good books every year; we're just being a little more careful about not overprinting them," she said.
Although JHU press does not anticipate large changes, Keane said it plans to be flexible and respond to market demand, particularly in the emerging market for electronic books.?
"Right now, about 600 of the Hopkins Press books are available in e-book formats from a variety of vendors, and we have also licensed several hundred titles to be made available in the Amazon Kindle format. So, we're really interested to see how well that will go over," she said.?
The Yale University Press, which experienced a seven to eight-percent decline in revenue over the past year, is likewise considering offering more e-books in the future, the Yale Daily News reported.?Mahinder Kingra, marketing manager for Cornell University Press, noted that Cornell's press also planned to increase its e-book offerings as a result of their increased popularity.?
"No one knows exactly what the percentage [of sales] is going to be, but I think that certainly in five years, e-books will be a significant part of our mix of books," he said.?
Kingra stated that the Cornell Press was not planning to make any large changes to its business strategies.
"There might be minor shifts between disciplines or the quantity of books we're doing, but I don't think that it's a wholesale reconsideration," he said.
Kingra felt that the decline in sales was largely due to the downturn in the economy.?
"I think that the short-term fluctuations are because of the general economic crisis that is affecting publishing," he said.?
Kingra also suggested that in the future, university press success might be dependent upon striking a profitable balance between physical books and electronic offerings.
Kingra and Keane both stated that while the number of e-books purchased was likely to increase over the next decade, there would still be a demand for physical books among students, libraries and academic institutions.?
Unlike JHU Press, Kingra noted that Cornell's library sales have remained stable.?
"I think that - and this is probably true for other university presses as well - bookstore orders have been lower in recent years, and that's really probably where we're seeing the biggest drop-off, in retail sales," he said.?
According to Kingra, Cornell has also fared better than the national average in terms of sales.?
As part of an initiative by Daniel Gilman, the first president of the University, the JHU Press was founded in 1878, two years after the founding of the University. JHU Press is America's oldest university press.?JHU Press publishes 60 journals and nearly 200 books per year.
The Press also collaborates with the Sheridan Libraries through Project MUSE, a program that has been providing online access to over 380 scholarly journals since 1995.
Keane remained cautiously optimistic about a rise in sales given the current economic conditions. "I'm not terribly confident of library sales picking up again, but I do think that students and individual readers will for a long time continue to find physical books very helpful," she said.
She cited a recent report from the National Endowment of the Humanities that indicated an increase in book readership in some segments of the population and was hopeful this might help to increase sales.
Keane also felt that the JHU Press would remain at the forefront of the university press industry.
"I think we're very well-positioned," she said. "We're being careful in the current climate, as the whole University is, but I'm fundamentally confident that we're going to survive the recession in good shape."
