The Corner Office : It's All in the Packaging

As libraries buy more packaged content, Duke University Press Director Steve Cohn hopes to capitalize on the trend with the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection.

November 2008 By Peter Beisser

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●  What part did you play in the development of this project?  
Cohn: A major factor in my thinking about an e-books package was that I very much wanted to maintain differential pricing for libraries and individuals. ...

Duke University Press' book-publishing program, perhaps more than that of any other university press, has been based on the publishing of dual editions. For almost every one of our books, we simultaneously publish cloth editions for the libraries, of very high quality and durability, and relatively inexpensive paperbacks for the trade, and for individual buyers and for courses. We have depended on the cloth sales to libraries to support an affordable paperback price for our cutting-edge books that are mostly sold not to well-established and well-salaried academics, but rather to junior faculty and graduate students, and for course use—all markets where the buyers are very sensitive to price. ...

So, as our cloth sales steadily eroded, with libraries buying paperbacks at what we used to consider the individual price, I wanted to use the e-book program to move the situation back to one where we would be selling a higher-priced "library edition." I now started to think of the library edition as including both an electronic edition that could be used by anybody on the campus computer network plus a clothbound print edition for storing on the library shelves. ... The sales of this new type of library edition could then support our continuation of a book-publishing program that includes inexpensive paperback prices for individual book buyers on just about every book we publish. ...

For that reason, I have tailored our e-book program in such a way that it strongly encourages library purchase of both electronic and print editions. ... We created an offer for buying the two versions together—an offer that we hope is way too good for most libraries to refuse, while still allowing separate purchase of the e-book editions only, if that's what a given library insists on. ...

●  What role will e-books play in the press's future?
Cohn: We'll just have to see. It's very much an experiment, and we know it may need to be modified over time as the results come in, but I do expect we will forever have an e-books program of this sort aimed at library sales. And I expect that we will soon start to think [about] how we can also make our e-books available to individuals, probably in quite different ways. This is not because I am imagining that our print sales will soon vanish. But I do think we need to be ready to adapt as the world changes ....

I think perhaps the better you are at doing things the way you do them now, the harder it is to let go of those ways when times change. We had gotten very good at publishing print books according to a certain model. Perhaps we will not be so good for a while at publishing our books electronically. But I feel that we do need to try these new things. ...

●  How else has DUP evolved since you initially took the reins?
Cohn: When I became the director, it was my sense that our list had little shape or direction. ... I pushed hard for us to be clear on what sorts of books we did and, just as important, did not, want to publish; and what sorts of books we could publish especially well, so that we could legitimately tell an author, "We can publish your book better than anyone else can." ... I think our own particular changing circumstances—as we moved from a medium-sized and fairly mediocre university press toward becoming one of the larger and stronger and most innovative presses—have made for significant changes in how I perform my job. As we have put strong leadership in place in each of the press's nine departments, I have become far less hands-on as a director. In the earlier years of my directorship, I was involved at some level in just about everything that went on at the press. ... But now I work almost entirely with and through our strong set of managers—making sure that they have the infrastructure and resources they need, and that they stay coordinated and focused on our main priorities, but staying out of their daily operations, which they know how to run in a manner [that] I can simply appreciate and encourage. ... Increasingly, even the coordination between departments is happening without ... intervention from me. ... 

Peter Beisser is a regular contributor to Book Business. He previously was the managing editor of several North American Publishing Co. titles and has written extensively about the publishing industry.

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