The Digital Age, or the Age of Information, has made university presses and their mission to produce top quality scholarship more important than ever before. Knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips,...Show moreThe Digital Age, or the Age of Information, has made university presses and their mission to produce top quality scholarship more important than ever before. Knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, it is as easy as pressing a few buttons on your computer, but this ease is not unilaterally aligned with reliability. This is why university content is becoming increasingly more vital. However, limited budgets, changing markets, and a reluctance to embrace digital technologies have resulted in many university presses struggling to stay in operation. The monograph in particular is struggling to turn profits and is beginning to be viewed by portions of the academic community as outdated and a monetary burden for universities. This thesis looks at how university press monographs can survive in this changing climate, in particular by employing digital marketing strategies. It examines three major developing areas of digital marketing (big data, social media use by the press and social media use by the author). It draws on UP case studies to illustrate digital marketing engagement.Show less
Digital technology enables us to access and examine texts in ways that are not possible in printed publications. One of the potential digital enhancements involves making the meaning of texts...Show moreDigital technology enables us to access and examine texts in ways that are not possible in printed publications. One of the potential digital enhancements involves making the meaning of texts machine-readable. This has been referred to as semantic publishing and many scientific publishers have made extensive use of semantic technologies in their publications. Meanwhile, the potential of semantic enhancements for the humanities remains to a great degree unexplored. This thesis examines semantic enhancements in the context of how humanities research is conducted: Which type of humanities publication is best suited for semantic enhancement? Which guidelines should govern how the text is coded? And how can the end-users of the book benefit from the enhancements? These questions are examined through a case study of a single monograph (The Book-hunter in London, 1895) since this is a particularly important form of publication in the humanities. The focus throughout is on the end-user of the enhanced edition.Show less
In this thesis, I have looked at the influence of the internet on academic publishing and, as a consequence, academic culture and practice. I have tried to present a plausible narrative on how...Show moreIn this thesis, I have looked at the influence of the internet on academic publishing and, as a consequence, academic culture and practice. I have tried to present a plausible narrative on how academic work on a daily basis has changed and what consequences there are for the role of books. The efficient digital distribution of journal articles through the digital library have made the article relevant in two new ways: (1) it is now the single most important means of scholarly output, at the cost of books; and (2) it is almost always accessed digitally, often not through the journal title, but directly through a full bibliographical reference search request or as one of the results of a search query on topic, key word or other sort of search entry. The instant availability of almost all peer-reviewed journal articles ever published is a great contribution to the world of science, for obvious reasons. It comes with certain costs to it as well, however. Finding and accessing articles with such ease makes the book a relatively more difficult-to-access item. Especially for a new generation of students, the book seems less relevant. They are presented with articles more than books, and come from a background in which books are less prominent. For scholars, an article is easier to write than a book, but it counts as more when their citation indices are put together. A vicious circle comes into being. As an academic’s publication record becomes more important in order to keep his job, he will choose to write more articles. University libraries focus on presenting the articles efficiently in a digital manner and make the library into a computer workspace instead of a place for searching and reading books. The digital availability of articles leads to less diversity in sources and the older the titles the less they are cited. Publishing companies are faced with lower demand for books and are struggling to make ends meet financially. Every step of this circle in itself doesn’t lead to a catastrophe, but it is the feedback loop that strengthens itself and the aggregate outcome that causes us to be worried about the future of books in academia.Show less
