When Alison Mudditt took over as the new director of the University of California Press a little over three years ago, after spending nearly a quarter-century working in the scholarly publishing space for commercial houses like Blackwell and Taylor & Francis, to say she had her work cut out for her would be a tragic understatement
Garrett Kiely
The year 2011 may well go down as the annum of the e-reader. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Sony and Kobo went all-in for holidays to get their e-readers, tablets and apps into as many hands, purses and briefcases as possible. In 2012, we'll see the results of that push, as publishers anticipate the next step in the digital evolution. Book Business interviewed executives across a wide swath of the industry, from giant trade publishers to university presses, educational outfits and upstart indies. We found that while digital is on the march, print is far from dead, and the next bold move in the industry may be maximizing the synergies between the two.
The University of Chicago Press announced an agreement with Amazon Digital Services Inc. that will enable more than eighty academic and scholarly presses that are clients of the Chicago Distribution Center (CDC) to publish electronic books for sale in the Kindle Store.
The University of Chicago Press (UCP) has never had to regard itself as an afterthought. Founded in 1891 as one of the three original divisions of the university, the press has, from the beginning, been squarely in the center of the school’s mission to educate, advocate and innovate—a charge that continues to this day. In addition, it’s of more than passing interest to the press’s leadership that it is entirely self-supporting, even funding a few research grants at the school. “I’m unabashedly proud of the fact that our books are aimed at a shrinking audience and that we make money off them,” says Garrett