Sad chapter for university presses

When Northeastern University Press prints the final books on its 2004 list later this year, the titles will have a dubious distinction: They will be the last ones bearing the university imprint. After 27 years, the respected press is shutting down, a casualty of rising costs and shifting priorities. School officials say they cannot afford subsidies that now stand at $450,000 and could reach $600,000 this year.

"It's not a reflection of the work of the staff or the quality of the list," says spokeswoman Christine Phelan in Boston. "It's solely a financial decision."

Northeastern is not alone. The University of Idaho has announced that it is closing its press July 1, when the deficit will total $385,600. And the University of Georgia Press faces a possible loss of $289,329 in state support, half of its annual state subsidy.

"It's been a rough time," says Peter Givler, executive director of the Association of American University Presses in New York. "In general, the university presses were affected by the same economic forces that have affected everybody else since 2001."

Ms. Phelan traces current budget woes to increases in paper and publishing costs, declines in library spending for new books on highly selective topics, and fewer purchases through general bookstores.

"It's a very dismaying trend," she says.

Yet Mr. Givler sees signs of a turnaround. "I've been hearing that sales are looking up, returns are down, and the slide that many presses were experiencing for a couple years before that has stopped." But state tax collections are still down, he cautions, which affects state university budgets and presses.

Across the country, 95 university presses publish 11,000 books a year. In 2002, these scholarly works generated $444 million in sales. Although they account for a fraction of the 150,000 titles published in the US annually, they create what Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, calls "an impressive cultural entity."

Even so, he says, university presses suffer from stereotypes that they are simply "fossilized recyclers of dissertations."

As one measure of the importance of university press books to broader audiences, Givler notes that in the months following Sept. 11, 2001, three previously published volumes quickly became bestsellers: "The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden, and the Future of Terrorism" (Northeastern); "Taliban" (Yale); and "Twin Towers" (Rutgers).

"It was so unusual that three university press books would be topping the national bestseller list," Givler says. "There is no visible, large, national market for a lot of these very specialized books. But when something comes along - 9/11 being the most dramatic and horrible example - university presses have already published the books about it that people need to read. They're serving the public need for information, not just scholars' need for information."

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