Publishing
Lived Places Publishing Announces the Launch of its First University Library Collection
Friends: Please read and share this press release with publishing and librarian colleagues: Lived Places Publishing Press Release
We worked very hard for the past 18 months to launch 12 interdisciplinary collections, sign more than 50 books, and begin publishing titles. In early 2023 we are offering titles in Education Studies, Disability Studies, Black Studies, Asian Studies, and Queer and LGBT+ Studies as we march toward 40 new course readings in 2023, all with a focus on the intersection of identity and place as a teachable context.
And our library collection is DRM-free, with 5% of sales supporting open access, and whole ebook interlibrary loan.
Book Pricing Strategy: Navigating the Complexity of Multiple Markets
How does a niche publisher with an emphasis on educational publishing approach pricing for trade markets? Or pricing for institutional (meaning multi-user) versus consumer (one buyer one user)? In this post from the Lived Places Publishing blog, I offer some starting points to consider with a focus on helping authors understand how publishers operate. Read the full blog post here
Celebrating Milestones: Lived Places Publishing Releases First Title
The first book delivered to the world by a new publisher must set the tone for all that is to follow. The first book must embody the vision and values of the publisher and, most importantly, it must be a damn fine book! From my seat as co-founder and publisher of Lived Places Publishing, I could not be more pleased and proud to introduce our first book: Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND) in UK schools: A parent’s perspective, by Dr Carrie Grant.
2021 In Review: My Four Critical Observations
My writing in 2021 was focused on new product development, publishing, and licensing strategy with an occasional thought piece on the intersection of platforms, business models, and negotiating strategy. This piece is a departure from form in that I would like to share my four most significant observations from 2021 in regard to the higher education publishing, educational technology, and library product and services world.
Observation One: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is not Everywhere
I begin each day scanning news from Outsell, The Scholarly Kitchen, EdSurge, Linked In News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous listservs. Based on these daily feeds and the many new hire announcements I see on Linked In, there is no doubt that much attention has been placed on addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, publishing focus, and library collection development. But most of the “gains” I have seen have been in high-level appointments to corporate senior management teams, senior editorial roles conceived to shape the publishing priorities and agenda, and senior university/library roles with much the same intent as the corporate roles added; that is to influence future hiring, practices, and policies.
I do not personally hold that this is deeply meaningful progress; it is visible andnotable, but it does not necessarily produce change. I believe the progress we should be seeing and celebrating is in the quotidian announcements of new hires into roles well below that of vice president. And, from my very unofficial vantage point, I saw very little change in hiring in 2021. In my daily Linked In feed where promotions and new hires are celebrated, it was business as usual. And by that I mean white people hiring and promoting white people. I hope I am wrong and my “sample” is off. But we will only make progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion when each of us white people and people in power, in our narrow operating space, change our recruiting and hiring practices and make a measurable and specific commitment to hiring for difference. And the difference needs to extend beyond skin color. Have you hired somebody with a disability, visible or invisible? Have you looked for candidates that had to fight through poverty in their youth? Have you recruited anybody that openly and without shame shared their mental health struggles? You will build a better company, a better library, a better publisher, when you build a team that looks like the travelers on any sidewalk in New York City rather than any walkway in the many private universities of the United States.
Observation Two: Print is not Dead
In fact print is thriving. Just ask any publisher with a substantial portion of revenue coming from print publishing. Supply chain woes combined with growing demand have created significant price increases from the printers coupled with delivery delays. Of course publishers that never had a significant print business did not feel the pain of the print shutdown during the pandemic, even as digital sales accelerated. But many trade and consumer publishing houses saw a swing to digital that is now swinging back to a revised but not entirely unfamiliar print/digital mix. What will this mean for print book prices in 2022? Will digital prices rise as a function of the print price (that the print and digital price were ever a function of one another is a legacy of little internal logic beyond publisher revenue forecasting and protection of known revenue). Will the surge in growth in digital textbooks continue apace? Or will libraries and students revert back to print textbook purchasing? I wager, barring another massive shutdown of physical spaces, the distribution of print to digital sales will resettle close to where it was pre-pandemic with a moderate rebalancing toward digital.
Observation Three: Open Access Has Little Room Left for Upstart Entrepreneurs and Innovators
Wiley owns Hindawi and Knowledge Unlatched. Read and Publish/Transformative Agreements are everywhere. I don’t tilt at windmills and there was never much likelihood that open access would find its way free of for-profit publishing except at the margins. But the acceleration and pace of announcements across 2021 signal, from my perspective, a future without author-processing and book-processing charges, and without much funding model innovation. And transformative agreements will create a context in which institutions are striking deals with all the major publishers to assure access to published output and authoring opportunities for their university faculty. How this will play out for economically disadvantaged institutions across the globe, and their faculty, will be a key question. But then the APCs and BPCs were beyond their reach anyway and wavers and discounts are a false balm. Subscribe-to -Open does seem to offer a potentially leveling effect, but still relies on wealthy institutions to underwrite access for the global community. And the model could influence publishing decisions in favor of the funding institutions’ faculties.
Observation Four: Private Equity is Stacked with Cash and Loves Ed Tech
I wonder what teaching principles of micro and macro economics to college undergraduates must feel like today. A glut of cash in the global economy leads to increased demand for scarce resources, which drives up inflation, which leads to interest rate increases. Right? Wrong. Money is cheap and plentiful and the debt issuance markets are working well and there is no sign of central banks tightening significantly the flow of money. Private Equity has been active in education technology for more than half of my time in the industry dating back to 1999, but the pandemic lit a fire. Investment flowing into education is a good thing so long as that investment is deployed by thoughtful product managers building better solutions. I expect the PE acquisitions and combinations will continue and innovation will not necessarily slow down. I am less concerned with the role of private equity in educational technology until the point at which PE makes a decision to sell an asset to an established publishing, library services, or aggregation business and the inevtiable inovation-choking integration effects take shape. And this will be the mark to watch for in 2022 and beyond as the pandemic-induced edtech acquisition boom looks for its exit.
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Lived Places Publishing: Our Founding Mission
Affordable Course Readings, Library-Friendly Access, and Giving Voice to Social Identity in Context and Place
By David Parker, Publisher and Co-Founder
Lived Places Publishing launched in April 2021, guided by the belief that our team of editors and authors can innovate both in terms of content and with regards to access and affordability. Our enterprise is committed to delivering curriculum-ready content that allows students to engage with global author voices exploring the intersection of social identity and place or context. And we are developing a library-first purchasing model that supports unlimited user access without restriction, interlibrary loan, and open access.
What do we mean by the intersection of social identity and place or context? Our co-founder and Black Studies Collection editor Chris McCauley says it best:
“Lived Places Publishing is guided by the belief that story-sharing can both shorten the distance that separates us and increase our collective efforts against thinking and policies that penalize and exclude far too many people for simply being who they are. By “Lived Places” we mean more than geographical or physical locations, but also the social and institutional ones that we have been forced to inhabit and those that we have claimed and embraced.”
During the summer of 2020, when the world was ablaze with awareness, we began asking how the global higher education curriculum is representing the voices at the intersection of location and lived experience. We did in depth analysis of dissertation and theses publishing and course reading lists and syllabi across the social sciences. And we discovered that scholarship is especially focused, through the lens of discipline or interdisciplinary study, on social identity and place. And as we dug deeper into assigned readings and materials we saw that instructors explore these themes with students most often through scholarly readings, journal articles, and their own writing. Our insights empower collection editors to build disciplinary or interdisciplinary collections of course readings that can be assigned weekly, written by academics and activists across the globe who are concerned with the intersection of social identity and lived places and spaces.
With our content vision and mission in place, we turned to the question of pricing, access, equity, and affordability. Every Lived Places title will be available as a single title in print and digital formats at affordable price points. While some students will choose to purchase individual titles, we decided to focus especially on building an annual collection of titles that institutions can purchase for a set price tied to the local budget and economic context. Our model will provide access to every title in the collection at a fraction of the single title price and delivered without digital rights management restrictions and perpetual ownership. In addition, for libraries that wish to support interlibrary loan, the Lived Places collection will include an option to upgrade to single title interlibrary loan rights for all titles held with unlimited access. In other words, unlimited institutional access for the purchasing library and simultaneous single title loan rights to another institution.
We believe in and support open access and open educational resources. And we believe in returning a high royalty to our authors and editors. 35% of each sale will be allocated to royalty and funding for open access. Individual authors will be given the option to choose publishing open access or earning a royalty. Equity, in our view, requires fairness in royalty, support for open publishing, pricing that allows every global institution to purchase and, by extension, support the Lived Places mission to support open access and author royalty.
- We are actively seeking collection editors: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/collections
- We are actively seeking book authors too: https://livedplacespublishing.com/page/call-for-authors
And if you just want to connect and learn more, you can reach me here directly.
And if you want to follow our blog and learn what our collection editors and authors are up to, please subscribe here.
Peace to you,
David Parker, Publisher
P.S. You can also follow our progress on Medium and Substack.
This post was originally published by David Parker on the Lived Places Publishing blog.
IMAGE CREDIT: Michael D Beckwith, used under the Unsplash License