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title: "Why academic bookstores?"
layout: post
image: 
    feature: header_bookshop.png
---
A famous line from _Jurassic Park_ (1993) is that ‘[y]our scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should’. I felt much the same, today, reading J. M. Hawker’s _Capital Letters: The Economics of Academic Bookselling_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) <[https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376](https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108675376)>. For the aptly named Hawker tells us, the ‘core purpose of both publisher and bookshop is after all, no matter how a mission statement or corporate motto is phrased, to make money’ (55). This is, quite frankly, bullshit, given that many major academic publishers (CUP and OUP for example) are charities and exist solely to serve the public benefit/good, even if their affiliated institutions regard them as revenue, rather than cost, centres. However, it takes Hawker a quite astonishing 77 pages before he really articulates why the reader should care whether or not academic bookshops -- the object of this study -- can function in the contemporary era. Should they function? If so, why?

When Hawker does articulate the benefits, they range from ‘supporting the adoption of open access text, on-site stalls for student purchase of highly recommended text, mitigating the impact of temporarily unavailable text and supplying course leaders with sell-through rates for both successful and unsuccessful material’ (77) to the ability to ‘support conference and local book launches; provide study skills events; support local publishing and writing; create or offer homes to book groups and debating societies; theme stock around local issues, national debates and growth areas of study; support new learners, new writers and researchers; and support staff and retired academics with stock, advice and a friendly, informed ability to listen’ (79). These may be valuable aspects, but I wish they had come sooner in the book as it is quite hard really to care about much of the argument about the difficulties that Hawker outlines for bookshops given that, for most of the book, it is assumed that they should somehow exist, without any justification.

There are also several inaccuracies in this book, which may be the result of timing, but nonetheless I feel these should have been checked more carefully. For instance, it is claimed that the HEFCE open-access ‘policy has led to major shifts in established publisher journal output, moving many UK-based journals to open access availability, but also ushering in the era of “pay to publish” APCs (article processing charges)’ (7). Except that the HEFCE OA is a green policy, not a gold one. It did not usher in an era of gold OA -- this had happened well before this policy was in place in any case -- it ushered in an era of continued subscriptions with green deposit. You could have argued that the Finch report did the ushering, but not the HEFCE policy.

The other problem with the book on its OA arguments (which are mixed -- it seems to quite like the idea of selling print copies of OA textbooks) is that the speculation on the Research England monograph mandate being based on book processing charges (8–9) hasn't come to fruition. Indeed, the recent consultation signals both a green policy as an option and also that trade books will be widely exempted. This makes all the arguments against it in _Capital Letters_ appear somewhat as though they are now aimed at a straw man. I suppose you could argue that it is only because these arguments were made that the eventual policy consultation arrived in its current shape, but I am sceptical.

There's also an error with respect to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which, given the UK-centricity of the book, is not good. On page 10 Hawker claims that the ‘value of the TEF award indicates the monetary value of the tuition fee which the institution can assign to students, and thus the income available to the institution’. In fact, this never came to pass. As I understand it, there’s just a ‘yes/no’ inflationary increase that is allowed for merely having a TEF award and the categories themselves do not correspond to fee levels. Certainly, there is a financial knock-on from TEF in its marketing. But it’s nothing to do with how much institutions are allowed to charge. This makes it hard to swallow arguments that ‘in areas in the UK where tuition fees are governed by TEF, student use of resources – text – has become a metric with a measureable impact on institutional funding’ (12). (I should also note that participation in the TEF has not been strong in the devolved administrations with many key Scottish institutions opting out.)

I read this book from the perspective of OA policy, for my work on the COPIM project. I did learn a lot from this work about the challenges faced by academic bookshops and, eventually, I even saw that there might be some value in their continued operation. It is also an instructive book on the economics of discounting in the academic book industry. I am not receptive to the idea, though, that bookshops should be preserved as sales vehicles just so that intermediaries can make money. That said, there was an instructive passage for me where Hawker cites the Academic, Professional and Specialist Booksellers Group chairman Gareth Hardy as saying ‘[t]he only thing we can’t fight is a free book’. ‘And yet’, writes Hawker, ‘experience shows that in fact, free books may be exactly what the market needs’ (55). Hawker notes that, ‘for academic bookshops the adoption of an open access textbook is not a threat but an opportunity’ (63). While the desire for print persists, I find it hard to disagree, although not from the perspective of running a bookshop.

Photo by [Florencia Viadana on Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/e0cZ_WRHVxw).