Several sources I’d read recently all praised Michael Burlingame’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. At $125 cover price it was a bit too steep for my budget so I used librarian’s privilege of ordering it for the library where I work and checking it out once it arrived. (A justified purchase as we don’t have much on Lincoln.)
Getting it in I was so glad I didn’t order it. It’s in such bad condition that I can barely read it- it threatens to fall apart and lose pages in your hands. I’ll admit I didn’t read the customer reviews on Amazon.com before purchasing since
1- The critical reviews were super glowing
2- It was a library purchase
3- It’s from Johns Hopkins University Press so you’d expect quality
Several of the reviews are about the “great writing/research:horrible quality” of the book. It was bad enough that I contacted JHUP about a replacement copy and got the same form email that some of the reviewers on Amazon mention, in part (my paraphrasing):
Again, the above is a paraphrase of a much longer and obviously form response that says “Too bad, so sad, go away kid you bother me…”.
I really do “feel the pain” of academic presses but, frankly, this isn’t my problem and if I’d paid my own $125 (or actually closer to $90 through our vendor) I’d be majorly pissed. This thing already has loose pages and after a few borrowings will probably have to be pulled altogether.
Budget cuts is no excuse for poor quality and poorer customer service. My advice to JHUP and other presses is that if you can’t publish the book as a quality binding at an affordable price then either
1- Don’t publish it at all
2- Publish it with a caveat “inferior binding necessitated by cost”
3- Publish it electronically for kindle or even as a subscription database
4- Add to the price and explain why
I appreciate academic press’s contribution to scholasticism and I understand having to pay what non librarians would consider an absurd price for the product. Our library and every other one I’ve worked at routinely pays $200+ for scholarly DVDs that cost less than $1 to burn because we understand we’re paying for performance rights, reimbursement to the researchers and participants, small profit to the companies, etc.; I doubt most libraries that would pay $125 for this two volume series would balk at paying $175 for a well bound 3 volume set of the same material (and if I can get books bound for $50 I know damned well you can), and to add to this don’t expect sympathy poor mouthing to a library when every one of us has to deal with budget cuts.
Otherwise, if you think you’re having problems now wait until word gets out that you’re charging $125 for a two volume series that is shipped to you in worse condition than most of the books I own that are 25 years old and read many times. That will finish you, and perhaps deservedly so.
This being a rant too obscure and focused to generate much interest, I open it to the floor to discuss any aspect of publishing that irks you in general, or academic presses, Lincoln books, kindles, or South Indonesian belly dancing in general, but just had to rant about the ridiculousness of this thing.
