Introduction: The Academic Book of the Future

Abstract

In early 2014, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) partnered with The British Library to launch a call for teams to run The Academic Book of the Future Project. The Project brief was 'to explore the future of the academic book in the context of Open Access publishing and the digital revolution'. 1 Our team 2 successfully pitched to facilitate a two-pronged approach. We are using the expert services of the Research Information Network and Dr Michael Jubb to undertake a wide-ranging series of focus groups, gathering responses to our research questions, 3 whilst the core Project team are consulting with the communities of practice connected to academic books to evoke responses via more detailed pieces of commissioned research, symposia, workshops and conferences. The mid-point of the Project, Academic Book Week (9-16 November, 2015), 4 will highlight a week-long showcase of this activity, plus other special events from our partners, including the launch of the volume you are now reading. Books matter. They contain knowledge, and knowledge, as the saying goes, is power. Over the centuries, control of the production of texts has been (and in some places still is) manipulated by governments, by religious groups and by those who fought (and those who are still fighting) for their wider, more openly accessible distribution. Books are matter: they are containers, crucibles, confrontations. They can teach, guide, inspire, soothe, and agitate. They can exist physically or digitally. Trying to define what a book is, or could be, is a challenging task: it exists in so many different guises, and is always finding new ways to reinvent itself. Our Project seeks rather to try and curate a map of these many guises, underlining the strength in the diversity of choice available to the author, whilst highlighting the challenges of production, distribution, use and preservation that these choices bring. Academic books, at least in the UK, have a currency as part of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which measures the quality of academic research. There is, therefore, a pressure to understand the map of academic publishing in its entirety. Given that scholarly communication operates on a global stage, with different countries having different (or no) national assessment systems, and that books (physical or digital) circulate in ways that are difficult to track, the Project team acknowledges that as cartographers, the most impact they can have on that map is to log and analyse some key landscape features. Engaging with so many different agents in the academic book circuit has enabled us to appreciate their widespread willingness

The academic eBook ecosystem reinvigorated: A perspective from the USA

“…Frequent news stories about the persistence of print and a stable and possibly shrinking market for direct-to-consumer eBooks obscure the significant digital transformation that monographic publishing is undergoing. Over the last 5 years speculative discussions of what it would mean to go 'beyond the book' such as the Academic Book of the Future initiative (Lyons & Rayner, 2014) have morphed into pilot and prototype projects. These in turn are now entering production in the form of new workflows, new production tools, and a proliferation of technology platforms.…”

The equivalence of books

“…Writing on this subject as part of their contribution to the AHRC-funded Academic Book of the Future project, Lyons and Rayner underline the importance of books: ‘Books matter. They contain knowledge, and knowledge, as the saying goes, is power’ (2016: 2). They also point to the transience of the book as a definable entity: ‘it exists in so many different guises, and is always finding new ways to reinvent itself’ (2016: 2).…”

“…They contain knowledge, and knowledge, as the saying goes, is power’ (2016: 2). They also point to the transience of the book as a definable entity: ‘it exists in so many different guises, and is always finding new ways to reinvent itself’ (2016: 2). This essay does not attempt to provide a conclusive definition of what makes a book and, as such, is in the difficult position of having to assess a set of publications on their affinities to an elusive concept.…”