University Presses and the Digital Universe
Maikowski says while financial setups may vary, what most of these presses share is the fact that the subsidies they may have enjoyed in the past from their parent institutions are under pressure of being reduced in the future.
Changes and challenges
Maikowski has recently noticed some significant changes impacting this segment of the industry. Among the largest he notes are:
• declining sales of print books, especially monographs and scholarly books … to the library marketplace;
• libraries ordering paperback copies of books rather than hardcover copies, and either rebinding them or shelving them as paperbacks;
• high returns in college-adoption sales as students purchase used books or books online, or use library or other shared copies;
• declining print review space allocated to book reviews, resulting in fewer reviews of trade books and higher trade returns from brick-and-mortar channels; and
• the open-access movement and the demand for published content to be made available to consumers for free.