Let us understand what we are talking about. In this instance, we are talking about scholarly monographs in the liberal arts or social sciences. A monograph is often a rewritten Ph.D. dissertation. The author of the dissertation is writing the biggest thing he has ever written, and having done so, with the inevitable messiness that involves, he goes back a couple of years later and cleans it up to make a monograph. Monographs have very narrow subjects. A monograph sets forth and defends a particular thesis or idea. One might say that a monograph is a blog post, expanded to book length, with more evidence, and less shouting. Doing a bit of rummaging on my shelves, I found: Robert Friedel, _Zipper: an Exploration in Novelty_; Larry Wolff, _Child Abuse in Freud’s Vienna_; Roger Sherman Loomis, _The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol_; and Laurence Wylie, _Village in the Vaucluse_. Books like that. No business employer will ever ask you if you have read such books. The lowest course level at which such books can be assigned is a “dual-level” course, that is, a course which can be taken by juniors or seniors majoring in the subject and first-year graduate students. Such books are also assigned in a liberal arts department’s graduate “core course,” the boot camp of graduate school. Course packets are also assigned at this level, incidentally. The vast majority of undergraduate students, however, are majoring in subjects other than the liberal arts or social sciences, and they never reach either the dual-level courses or the core courses. One might add that there are simply not enough of such courses– of either kind– for any given monograph to have more than a remote chance of being widely assigned. A good core course might have an enrollment of ten or fifteen students; a good dual-level course might have an enrollment of forty. The lucrative area of textbook publishing is down at the freshman and sophomore levels. Student down at that level simply aren’t ready for monographs.

There are about two hundred big academic libraries in the United States which buy monographs as a general thing. College professors could read these books, but in practice, college professors tend to get busy with lower-division undergraduate teaching, and with administration. The people who read these books in the first instance are advanced graduate students, taking five or ten years to get a Ph.D. Advanced graduate students don’t have any money, but at the same time, they work much too hard to have part-time jobs outside the university. A lot of them live on beans– literally. If you have, as an individual, say, two thousand dollars a month to live on, without having to work more than, say, ten hours a week, that is wealth in the graduate student community, and you have to be careful not to flaunt it. An engineer who can find some kind of part-time engineering job, without having to be employed full-time is axiomatically wealthy for this purpose. Advanced graduate students are not very likely to buy books if the university library does not. Advanced graduate students have always photocopied books in the library, as long as there have been photocopiers. Now, of course, they have their little electronic cameras, which create computer data rather than paper. Advanced graduate students do not use course packets very much, incidentally. They get points for going into the library and finding books which their professor did not even know existed. No one else in the university is reading that particular book in that month, so there is no competition for the library’s copy.

There aren’t very many advanced graduate students. A flagship state university, with 20,000 students, 700-800 professors, and two million books in the library might have only about a thousand liberal arts graduate students, perhaps half of those being advanced graduate students, say, in round numbers, one for each professor. So in a sense, each professor has his graduate student, and between them, they are looking at a pile of about three thousand books. It is very much a buyers’ market.

Liberal Arts is the core of the university. A lot of the people in the other parts, the applied, or job-seeking parts, have fine-sounding titles which they don’t really deserve. For example, an MBA is not really a graduate degree, but merely a second bachelor’s degree.

One unacknowledged reality is that academics often have to pay to get their monographs published. It is a secret and shameful transaction, but, nonetheless, it exists. There are two sources of revenue for monograph publishing. One is the author. The other is the university library, buying books under pressure from the author. The university library, as a bureaucracy, is likely to discover that many of its books never get read– by anyone– and periodically tries to cut purchases back when there are funding difficulties. There is no identifiable free market for these kinds of books– as much as anything, the process is driven by the author’s need to prove that he can write a book, and the only way to do that is to write a book.

Having read these posts for a while I am shocked, SHOCKED, at the level of conflation going on between for profit, mass market IP creation, and any sliver of evidence in support of free IP. Can we just agree on the following:
(1) People who create books, songs, music and movies should be able to decide what they want to charge people to consume those items.
(2) Business is like evolution – survival of the fittest. If you think you have a better business model, go out and create (or pay people a lot of money to make) awesome movies, books, and music, and then give it away. See how much money you make. I won’t invest.
(3) Academic publishing is not analogous to pop culture books, movies, music, etc. It is a loss leader (see the post above).
(4) Value creation is only one half of a business silly. Value CAPTURE is the important part. Create all the value you want, if you don’t capture it, you aint in business.

Just to make sure you know, it’s manga, not magna. Though given that you’re in Utah, I’m not entirely certain you didn’t already know that.

It is somewhat sadder that he appears to be right.

In the United States, there are something like sixteen thousand public library branches, something over twenty thousand secondary schools (each with its own library), something like sixty thousand elementary schools (ditto), and a couple of million classrooms (many of which have “book corners”). What this means is that many kind of popular books actually have the same economics as academic books. One can think of the public high school as a kind of university in miniature. Just as the flagship state university has an overwhelming majority of frat boys and sorority girls, who do not read, save under coercion, and a tiny minority of authentic graduate students, the public high school has a tiny minority of bookworms. The bookworms are probably rather less likely to have after-school jobs at McDonalds, less likely to have automobiles, etc. The conventional figures about teenage spending money do not apply to them.

The model of academic publishing actually does describe the market for large sections of “popular literature,” meaning stuff like Harry Potter books. At the lower reaches of the school system, one finds teachers whose prime goal is to get kids to read something, anything, rather than listening to recorded music and watching television. Such teachers will even buy comic books, if that is what it takes (*). The big market is getting a government agency of some kind to buy things. Government agencies pay higher prices than anyone else would, and they don’t tend to pirate things. “The prince expands his own dignity by splashing money around.” The other side of the coin is that the prince tends to become murderous when his dignity is affronted. That is the lesson of the Georgia State case. The State of Georgia’s honor has been insulted, and someone will have to die, most likely a publisher.

Music is different. It was distributed via the shopping mall, rather than via the school. It didn’t have the government subsidy. The music industry was based around kids rebelling against adults rather than kids being constructively guided by adults. There is a fine line between selling kids rapper records and selling them drugs. A book publisher who follows the line of the music industry does so at his peril.

(*) Parenthetically, Japan has a curious “social structure of language.” Japan’s literary culture is Chinese, not only the Kanji ideogram characters, but the whole body of literature and ideas which traveled over them. However, Japanese in its natural state is an Altaic language, its siblings being Korean, Yakut, Evenki, Mongol, Turkish, Finnish, and Magyar (Hungarian). This means that to be fully literate in Japan, you have to develop a command of a “hard” foreign language, one which does not have many common features with your “baby language.” Nowadays, a literate Japanese has to learn English as well, but again, it is the same principle, of having to learn a totally unrelated language. The result of this strain is that Japan invented the Manga, the uber-comic-book.