What does the future hold for academic books? Rebecca Lyons introduces The Academic Book of the Future, a two-year project funded by the AHRC in collaboration with the British Library in which a cross-disciplinary team from University College London and King’s College London explores how scholarly work in the Arts and Humanities will be produced, read, shared, and preserved in coming years, and investigates key questions around the changing state and modern contexts of the academic book.
- What is an academic book?
- Who reads them?
- What can technology do to help make academic books more accessible?
- How can we make sure academic books, whether print or electronic, are kept safe, and preserved effectively?
Some of these questions – for instance “what is an academic book?” or “who reads them?” appear deceptively simple. However, the academic book is changing – contexts and readers even more so – and therefore these questions have potentially very complex outcomes. As with all the best research questions, they also suggest a huge network of other sub-questions, some of which this two-year project will be addressing in the hopes of finding some answers.
Anyone who uses academic books will have noticed a change (or several) in recent years in the terrain. There is the obvious expansion in the range of available formats, from traditional hardback and paperback books, to the wide world of digital, including epub, HTML, pdf, and so on. These developments, aligned with others in technology, have had a bearing on the ways in which we physically read academic books and the devices we use to access them, from tablets to laptops, pcs to e-readers, and of course not forgetting the humble hard-copy or print-out.
Image credit: Electronic Book by Tim Noko (Flickr, CC BY-SA)
Consequently, our acts of academic reading have changed. As Andrew Prescott highlights: we can now download academic biographies of long-dead monarchs whilst ‘trundling through the West Wales countryside’ on a bus. Not only this, but with an increasingly urgent and complex set of demands on academics’ time, including admin, research, writing, teaching, and putting together funding bids, the style and level of academic reading itself may have also changed. Geoff Crossick suggests, in his recent HEFCE Monographs and Open Access Project report:
It is felt by many that today’s scholars lack the time to read books thoroughly, and it is feared that the academic skill of ‘deep reading’ may become, or have already become, devalued or lost. The emergence of new technologies for information production and retrieval, the ability readily to download book chapters and journal articles, and changing societal expectations around information being readily and instantaneously available, might be compounding these fears that the monograph, and the academic practices that surround it, are becoming an unloved relic of a bygone age. (p. 22)
The transition into the digital age has also brought with it some pressing questions about the traditional shape, size, and format of academic books. With more and more research taking an interdisciplinary, digitised, and innovative approach, new outputs are being produced by researchers which increasingly trouble the traditional the boundaries and definitions of the traditional arts and humanities monograph. Where, for instance, do blogs fit in? – and more importantly, how are they credited and recognised by the academy – if at all? Michael Piotrowski considers books vs blogs in terms of academic prestige in a previous post on this blog, and in doing so also touches upon some other topical issues with a huge bearing on the academic book in modern academia, namely impact and recognition. In a post-REF world where impact is king, and where departments and researchers are measured by the amount of research they can publish, how are non-traditional outputs weighed and measured in the Arts and Humanities? And what about non-traditional publication methods, such as open access?
It should be obvious from this incredibly brief introduction alone that academic books and their contexts have changed, and are still changing, dramatically. We are barely scratching the surface here. How are libraries and publishers working in these changing modern contexts? What’s happening with academic books in the global south? What about non-English academic books? The Academic Book of the Future Project aims to bring researchers, publishers, librarians, booksellers, and everyone with a stake in the academic book into dialogue with each other in order to get to grips with some of these issues, and to help inform forward steps (including REF 2026). The Project is, at its core, an investigative conversation that uses a wide range of mini-projects and events to prompt meaningful discussion.
The pinnacle of the Project’s activity for 2015 is Academic Book Week (9-16 November 2015). #AcBookWeek is a week-long series of events taking place across the UK and internationally to celebrate the diversity, innovation and influence of academic books, culminating in an Awards Ceremony at the British Library. If you are in any way involved with academic books – whether it is writing them, producing them, selling them, or reading them – we invite you to get involved with this week, and with the wider Project, too. Join in the conversation, and help us to identify – and even shape – the academic book of the future.
Email the Project: Rebecca.lyons@ucl.ac.uk
Tweet the Project: @AcBookFuture
Follow the Project blog: http://academicbookfuture.org/blog/
Project website: http://academicbookfuture.org/
Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.
Rebecca Lyons is the Research Associate on The Academic Book of the Future Project. She is also a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol, exploring fifteenth-century book history and female ownership of Arthurian literature in England during this period, and she keeps her own blog on the Middle Ages and postgraduate study: https://medievalbex.wordpress.com/
Well done on setting out these questions in a way that gives the strongest and clearest expression yet of what the project is hoping to deliver. A couple of observations and thoughts:
1. What is an academic book? Well, I doubt you’ll get a good, clear answer to that! I think there is a classic publisher answer (it’s a book written by an academic that is intended for an academic or specialist audience and that is not expected to sell very well, as distinct from a trade book), but the line is blurred by things like On The Origin Of Species (now a high-selling trade book but surely once a monograph?), Capital in the 21st Century (a case of mistaken identity, perhaps, that should have gone straight on a trade list?), and other works that cross the boundary into non-specialist literature but that have a strong grounding in research (e.g. The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being, which, while clearly a trade book, is written by an academic, and requires a certain level of comfort and familiarity with scientific ideas from its reader). Separately from that publisher ‘economics’ answer, there is a new answer to this question, arising from new modes and models of book authorship and production, that says that the container of the print book has decreasing relevance in an open, online age, where forms and containers don’t matter (and are broken anyway as information gets atomised and dispersed throughout the Web). How real is that? How widespread? The definitional questions are very different, depending on the perspective one adopts.
2. Crossick doesn’t actually conclude that books are an unloved relic of a bygone age. I urge you to read the following paragraphs, where he sets out the evidence that makes a compelling counterpoint to this (as it turns out, rather baseless) assertion. Books still matter, and people still like reading them carefully, deeply, and in a print form. The important question to ask is whether wider trends in knowledge production and consumption that see data, information and ideas as eventually (and perhaps dangerously) inseparable are encroaching on academic life, and if so, what the effects are for quality of thought and insight, both for the current generation of researchers and the next. And whether the entry requirements for an academic career (eg you need to have written a book-length thesis, irrespective of whether you have previously consumed or produced knowledge in that way, as kids these days are decreasingly likely to have) are constructively discouraging young people without the proper skills and motivations from entering academic life (protecting quality within the guild), or whether there are wider risks to research for not moving with the times and finding new entry points for bright young minds more familiar with discovering things in a non-linear, multi-modal or ludic way. How we continue to view books (their relevance, their suitability, their inherent qualities) is a key part of this. We should not be uncritical of the effects of and motivations behind any “epochal” shifts away from the traditional ways of structuring knowledge, particularly in the humanities, where quality of insight (not volume of data) drives debate and thinking forward. But we should also not ignore wider trends towards seeing knowledge being produced, configured and consumed in new and exciting ways that might – might! – make our long-standing notions of “the book” eventually seem quite silly.
Bracing stuff, eh?
Thanks Ben! Some really good thoughts there. I’m inclined to agree with your first point – or perhaps there are several possible answers… What is clear from all this uncertainty is that this is undoubtedly a pertinent and necessary question to ask at this moment in time! (Even if we are only presented with more questions, and no answers.)
I don’t think that Crossick concludes that books are an unloved relic of a bygone age – merely that our reading styles may have (and are still) changing. Being a PhD researcher myself, I’m well aware of the value of the printed book – my heavily glossed and annotated personal library will attest to that! In fact, one of the research strands of this project that I’m most personally interested in is the interactions of academic researchers with their books – are we all still highlighting, underlining, scribbling in our books? – and the interplay of the digital with all this.
Despite the proliferation of new formats for books, as noted here, the basic structure of the book as a linear document has remained unchanged. There were, however,m two significant and related experiments in creating a different type of book in the early 200s, the ACLS Humanities Ebook Project and Gutenberg-e, both inspired by Robert Darnton, who described this new multidimensional, multilayered type of book in his classic New York Review of Books essay titled “The New Age of the Book” (March 1999). I have analyzed the midxed success of one of these projects here: https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/9880vr53k#.VRh6izvF9q4