$170 for a 200+ page book on the war?

I recently had the pleasure of reading two excellent new books on the Second World War. The first book was a monograph on the development of airpower in the interwar years. The second book was a collection of essays by prominent historians that dealt with various facets of the battle of Normandy.

These books, in my opinion, made a serious contribution to the existing literature on these topics. However, there was one serious problem; the retail price for the books respectively was $170 US (256 pages) and $120 (240 pages). Of course, these prices are prohibitively high even for research libraries. Thus, these books are condemned to an existence in only a handful of libraries around the world. How can this be (and why?)? How can the prices be so high? Well the answer lies mainly in the fact that there isn’t a trade market for these books and as such they’ll never really possess the appeal needed to sell lots of copies. It also helps that there a handful of elite institutions willing to pay exorbitant prices for small single volumes. The real problem is that some publishers realize they can get away charging such high prices per volume because college and university professors need an avenue in which to be published.

It is no suprise that academics are pressed by their institutions and by prestige factors to seek publication for their books. Thus, sometimes the only available route for books that lack wide appeal are publishing houses that will offer little or anything in the way of advances to the authors, and minimal royalties in the event they sell a few hundred books. In exchange, the book will be published and the retail price tag will be startlingly high. No effort will be given to marketing. It’s unlikely an expert editor will have ever given feed back.

Of course, it raises the obvious question, what value is a book if no one is going to read it because the price is prohibitively high? Second, why bother writing the book in the first place? This isn’t a problem unique to military history.

Unfortunately, these publication schemes seem like the trend. Academics must publish or wither on the vine of non-tenure track life. Yet, there must be a better way…

In this day and age creative solutions exist to ensure that the written word will be read: ebooks, self publishing, blogs, and a whole host of other mechanisms serve to ensure that great ideas and insights could reach a wider audience for way less money.

-jd

Tags: Military history, monographs, publishing