Feature Articles

W(h)ither the Scholarly Monograph?
UK Perspectives on the Evolution of the Scholarly Monograph
by David Graves, Regional Sales Manager, YBP/UK

A thoughtful advertising campaign currently running in the trade press in the UK shows a puzzled-looking adolescent girl examining a cased book by suspending the tome by one of its centre leaves and squinting along the exposed spine.  She is surrounded by the sort of detritus found in most modern teenagers' bedrooms.  There is also an Apple computer, a CD player, a television and VCR, and stacks of videocassettes.  The laudable intention of this visual period piece is to highlight the continuing role that the printed page should play in a young person's education.  Unsurprisingly the advertiser (in this case a paper mill) has a vested interest in the future of the book and underlines their commercial 'cri de coeur' with a suitably ironic strapline - If you don't need paper, check if you're awake.

     As in the U.S., the future of the scholarly monograph is a subject of continuing debate in publishing circles here too.  The questions most often debated are: What are the intrinsic benefits of the book and what are the intangible qualities that make the book valuable?  Is the scholarly monograph destined for a slow decline leading to eventual extinction or are the clues to its survival or even renaissance already apparent?

In Defence of the Printed Work

     There is no serious shortage of people willing and able to speak up for 'the book' and their arguments have changed little over the last twenty years - often the case of course when an argument is either undeniable or already defeated.  Today's arguments even pay terminological homage to the interlopers that once apparently threatened to wipe the book off the face of the planet.  At the recent National Acquisitions Group annual conference at Cambridge, one such advocate, Chris Batt, Libraries and Museums Officer from the London Borough of Croydon, told his audience that the book was on balance "the best piece of information technology that has ever been invented".  This is a neat summation of the access and portability arguments that are the backbone of the book's most effective defenses.  He might have added that as inventions go it is also remarkably long-lived in its 'original' form, for although the method of arriving at that form has changed radically, the printed pages of Gutenberg's 42 line Bible of 1455 are entirely consistent with a page of type from a modern monograph.

An Emotional Bond to the Tactile

     When questioned about the intangible benefits of publishing in book form, academic publishers will suddenly become quite passionate about the physical characteristics that comprise a book and will talk quite irrationally (for business people) about 'tactile' pleasures.  Stephen Butcher, Editorial Director of Cassell's academic division points to "an almost sacramental reverence… the care and skills applied to a book's production border on the religious".

     Every book has a distinctive 'feel' and its physical volume and weight can be turned over in the human hands, the pages can be riffled and hence the whole can be assessed very quickly and objectively as to its appeal to the human mind; no computer (today) can replicate the satisfaction of 'laying on of hands'.  Indeed, many argue it is the book alone that lends real credence to some particular event or marks a special occasion.  A book can be given as a present to celebrate an achievement and can be inscribed on the flyleaf with an appropriate personal dedication.

     There is a common bond between those people who work to produce books and those who distribute and collect books for academic use.  The tie that binds them is that what they are doing is more than just checking, preparing and disseminating information, it is much more to do with their role in the creation and presentation of a highly desirable object.  The authors who write the books obtain some real sense of the importance of what they are doing from the appearance of the final volume.  When the oft-quoted problem of dating material being set up in type is mentioned it is often forgotten that the publication of a book is still an event.  The fact that a printed page is irrevocable lends significance and not a little grandeur to that event.

     Sara Wilbourne, publisher at Cork University Press believes that "…the book is revered.  I haven't met a single scholar who does not rely upon access to books…".  Undoubtedly there are serious scholars who have not the slightest inclination, nor as yet a dire need to discover the wealth of information available to them through the Internet.  Likewise, Stephen Butcher thinks "there is a very real danger that the inherent efficiencies of the book are being seriously underestimated" and that "we are using increasingly complex technology to achieve something fairly simple by a more circuitous route".

     Most contributors to the academic publishing process, whether in printed or new media forms, feel that what they are doing is ethical at a time when many individuals and progressive organisations the world over are examining their methods and motives and deciding if they can act more responsibly and achieve something beyond the normal yardsticks of turnover, throughput, consumption or profit.

A Question of Demand

     But beyond questions of status and currency and the mildly romantic attachments many people feel for the book, publishers admit that demand must dictate the crucial decisions of whether to publish in print and/or electronic formats.

     There will be situations where it makes sense to publish only in print.  A publisher with a perceived excellence in (say) commentaries on early medieval manuscripts and a list of three hundred institutions around the world that collect this sort of material is hardly likely to go to the trouble and expense of producing a digital version of an author's recent research on the subject at a cost of £6,000 when they can produce a highly serviceable monograph on the subject for less than half this sum in an edition of 300 copies.

     On the whole, though, it is likely that new media forms will complement the book and that the book in turn will be used to complement material designed from the outset to be showcased on PCs or PDAs.  In this respect the book will find a continuing role for as long as we have PCs and as we know from recent debates the 'masters of the universe' in computer software development cannot agree what form the next generation of personal computing will take or how the information mountains will be delivered to the waiting Mohammeds.

     In fact, one has only to consider the number of books and manuals on computer science itself to see this continuing and indefinite role for the book.  A paperback book is a relatively cheap form of publishing and the means to mass produce books of pure text that can complement sophisticated electronic publishing will be developed still further and allow the spread of the printed word to achieve even greater ascendancy.  The multi-media, all-singing, all-dancing Web pages of tomorrow will be too colourful and too memory-hungry to be able to afford valuable disk space on pure unadulterated text - that information will continue to reside in book form and be collected by academic librarians the world over.

Digitization Can Increase Print Demand

     We have seen in a very real way here in the UK how other media can effect the book, not in a detrimental way but in creating new opportunities for literature in a much wider sense.  Both the state-financed BBC and private TV film producers have been busy over the last two years adapting rafts of so-called classic literature and making it presentable for the small screen in a form that is often almost unrecognisable when compared with the original works.  However these have the effect of producing a veritable bloom in the sales of all the classic literature by that author - Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy being two of the more notable beneficiaries in recent years. There are lessons here for all types of publishers.

     As publishers discover a new publishing 'idea' and map out a role for each of the forward projects in their lists and decide a format for each of their new products, they are relying less on diverting certain types of projects into electronic formats but concentrating instead on developing them that way from the outset.  And while some of the book's intrinsic values can be a tad intangible, the new media product serves its purpose in specific ways and with known destinations in mind in terms of the market and applicability to different groups of end users.  It is not difficult to identify these types of projects and to find the appropriate formats.

     The role of the scholarly monograph itself is unchanged and it fulfills that role today in an increasingly global marketplace where the newer technologies are also competing under the same obvious restrictions placed on them by virtue of language and variable demand.  The scholarly monograph accompanied by the unstoppable march of the English language seems somehow to be able to transcend these physical barriers and to have achieved a degree of desirability that the other newer media can only imitate.