Squeezed out of the book business?

Academic publishers have rarely had it easy, but pressures are growing, as Cork University Press illustrates. Mary Leland reports

'It's a real thriller, that book," says Sara Wilbourne, speaking about a biography of Harry Boland, by David Fitzpatrick, that Cork University Press published two years ago. "It was reprinted three times in as many months, with the bulk of those sales in Ireland. A real thriller." There is a note in her voice of what might have been: of how Cork University Press, which Wilbourne headed until last year, when cuts prompted her resignation, might have survived its self-inflicted misfortunes and maintained its authoritative presence in academic publishing instead of dwindling to what at times has seemed an enterprise alive in name only.

There is still life enough in Cork University Press for its supporters to claim that there is hope for the future - its publishing schedule includes The Honan Chapel: A Golden Vision, whose appearance will be a significant art-history event - but Wilbourne believes CUP may not be the only academic casualty of the current climate in publishing and education.

The last big event of her tenure was the publication of the fourth and fifth volumes in the Field Day Anthology Of Irish Writing, on women's literature, which was made possible only through a partnership with New York University Press. This is something of a surprise to anyone who imagined that publication is the breath of life - or at least of tenure - for university teachers. As John Sutherland, a professor of English at University College London, has put it, academics write books as beavers build dams.

Sutherland was commenting on a warning from Stephen Greenblatt, the noted Renaissance scholar and, at the time, president of the Modern Languages Association, about the perilous state of US academic publishing: the crisis had seen university presses close down almost overnight. And the problem had spread further: in England, despite having been perhaps the first academic press to realise, four or five years ago, that trouble was brewing, Cambridge University Press made many of its staff redundant after losing more than €7 million last year.

As at Cambridge, when difficulties assailed Cork University Press it was the editorial department that felt the sharp edge of the wind, and Wilbourne was effectively left with no function. She is frank about the main cause of the dissolution: for the massive Irish Writing In The Twentieth Century: A Reader, edited by David Pierce, she committed the press to reprinting an extract from Ulysses. James Joyce's estate successfully and expensively contested CUP's use of it. "It was disastrous," says Wilbourne. "The book was actually in the warehouse when it was announced that there was a substantial issue to try. We had to settle with the estate, which was financially very damaging for the press, and although I know we were not unique in having problems with Joyce material it was the lowest point in my career at CUP."

That career began with a degree in classical studies from Leicester University and employment with publishers such as Longman. When she applied to CUP, in 1992, University College Cork's 70-year-old press wanted to become more commercially active, although it was keen to concentrate its production in the humanities, not having the resources to challenge firms such as Elsevier in science.

"We expanded very fast, because there has to be a certain level of production and distribution to ensure a presence in the marketplace. University presses are not for vanity publishing, but they have a role in highlighting both the parent institution and the country of origin, and I think CUP played a major part in making UCC more visible abroad. But there is a myth that this is sustainable; it's not. The sheer complexity of selling now means that a press has to carry a very expensive overhead in terms of sales and marketing. For a press to do justice to its own titles is a costly business."

When UCC scaled back its publishing house last year it made much of the fact that CUP cost €200,000 a year to maintain. Such parsimony seemed risible from a university whose press had brought it international recognition and awards, especially when its financial strains seemed due not so much to narrow operating margins as to that one calamitous error with the Pierce book.

Wilbourne believes that the survival of Irish academic publishing lies in a federal structure. It is an idea strongly supported by Tom Dunne, who, as consultant editor, is now guiding CUP. He says there could be a great future for a syndicate of Irish university presses that relied on the rigorous consultation, research, editing and peer reviewing that give scholarly titles their authority. A syndicate could support the independent editorial decisions of each university but share the costs of marketing and distribution.

"I think this is going to happen," says Dunne. "Negotiations are already going on. The retail environment is hostile to academic publishing: it won't stock a backlist or deal productively with returns, and promotion can be difficult too. What has increased hugely in our field is direct selling: that can turn a press around, especially with a cut in the print run and an increase in the cover price. The game has changed in Ireland, as elsewhere: you can't print off 1,000 copies any more. But you can print 500, at a higher price, and clear them."

But 500 of what? Wilbourne says that if there was any dissent about the press at UCC it was over what it was prepared to publish. "The university has its shining stars, of course, but they might be publishing in fields in which the press did not specialise. Publishing is also a gate-keeping function and doesn't always make you the most popular person on the planet. At CUP we succeeded in establishing a professional publishing unit which generated not only a new standard in design and presentation but also a new awareness of these books, a new perspective."

But if, as Wilbourne says, academic publishing has a responsibility to take risks in order to contribute to the cultural debate - even to the cultural identity - of a country, the cost of supporting scholarship may be too much even for a federal structure. Prof Sutherland quotes the response of Chicago University Press to a departmental request for cut-price books. Refusing the discount, the press said that if every head of every university literature department in the US bought just six new hardbacks a year there would be no crisis.

"There's some truth in that," says Dunne, whose forthcoming titles concentrate on Cork, including an atlas of the city put together by UCC's geography department for Cork's year as European Capital of Culture for 2005. "Teaching staff have got out of the habit of buying, and library purchases are dominated by teaching needs. So we offer quite a substantial discount to staff. It's not an easy time for academic publishing, but there are ways of dealing with it, and I'm not at all pessimistic about the future."