News-Letter

Media Credit: Daniel Litwin The Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, is America's oldest university press.

While university press companies nationwide have suffered from a decrease in revenue resulting from tighter budgets and lower demand, the Johns Hopkins University Press has fared better than most.?

An average drop of 10 percent in university press sales occurred in 2008 compared with 2007, according to a survey issued in January by the American Association of University Presses.?

Kathleen Keane, director of the Johns Hopkins University Press, noted that JHU press had experienced a five to seven percent drop in revenue over the past year.

According to Keane, the drop in sales was disappointing but not surprising, given the current economic climate. She also noted that a gradual decline in library purchases over the past decade has also led to a reduction in sales.?

"It's simply a fact that libraries are less able to purchase books: This is in general, not speaking about the Hopkins library - but in general they are buying fewer books and spending more money on electronic resources," she said.?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education also noted that many libraries have begun pressuring publishers to eliminate price increases to make purchases more affordable. The typical increase in book price is about five percent, but some publishers have been considering decreasing this amount for the upcoming year.

According to the Chronicle, some libraries have had to cut their spending on new books by up to 25 percent.

Keane felt that one reason Hopkins has fared better than other university presses is due to its diversified offerings, as well as its sales overseas, which comprise about 15 percent of their total sales.?

"The Hopkins Press has been quite successful in recent years, in part because we're not completely dependent upon books," she said.

"We do have a very strong journals program, and those journals have been available both in print and online for over 10 years, so we have a good number of subscriptions to electronic journals, and that enables us to balance our activities across multiple formats."

Keane also suggested that the JHU press success came as a result of its recent success with two of its books that were popular in the mainstream: biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin.?

Continued...

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