ABSTRACT

Scholarly communication and academic publishing has herein been described as if it is a unitary world. The publishing industry in the United States divides its activities into a number of categories in which books written by scholars can be located. The publication of a scholarly book must be communicated to all the segmented audiences who are likely to find the book useful or of interest. If a professional-book publisher elects to persuade an author to accept publication of the work as a trade book, that publisher has a major undertaking. The editor's judgment in text publishing is often supported by information about sales patterns of similar books, or previous editions of the same book, that is rarely available to trade editors. Publishers survive by the avoidance of wrong judgments, but they thrive by the performance of sound judgments. Scholarly publishers sometimes operate in a world of subventions and underwriters.