Here was an intriguing subject for a webinar, with the challenging title, The Future of the Book: Timeless or Time-Challenged? What could be more central than considering the role of books, in the age of AI? Such a topic could be all-encompassing, even if restricted to educational books, covering as it does the methodology of learning ever since the invention of printing in the 15th century.
However, despite the title, the discussion was largely restricted to scholarly monographs, and these represent a tiny proportion of all books – they are not typical. They are seen as a worthy cause. As the panellists Jeremy Upton (director of Edinburgh University Library) and Charles Watkinson (head of University of Michigan Press) clearly pointed out, academics are facing increasing pressure because they are allocated less time for research, and they typically do not get tenured appointments any more. Hence, the publish or perish mentality is very evident. It’s challenging for academics, but should we be reading their monographs? At this point, my assessment and the webinar differed somewhat; I’m quite happy for the most part to leave them unread.
For the panellists, reading is a good thing, and monographs are worthy, so we should be reading them. At least, some people should be reading them. And we were shown pictures of people reading contently. Reading per se, in my opinion, is neither good nor bad (it depends what you are reading for) and telling people to read more is a very odd idea. But the webinar strayed into campaigns to get people to do just that (“we are asking people just to read for six minutes a day!”), and scholarly monographs seemed, from the discussion, to form part of this body of material that is good for you to read.
The reality is somewhat different. Academics are desperate to publish, and many monographs, perhaps the majority, were written to be published, not read. The act of publication is the goal; it’s a bit like J L Austin’s Speech Acts; the importance of publishing a monograph isn’t so much in communication, but in the desperate search for academic status. Many monographs are like primary research in medicine: it needs to be done, but (for the most part) there is no need for us all to read it. It simply needs to exist (and, of course, to be validated). Commercial publishers are reluctant to publish theses because they were not written to be evaluated by peers, not read by general readers.
Somehow, the recent OECD Pisa Survey on reading was mentioned (despite widespread criticism of the metric from academia and reported in the press), suggesting that we are losing the ability to read, and that 37% of students prioritise “common sense” over “scientific reasoning” – something, it would appear, that is corrected by reading lots of books (but this is a subject for another post).
In this webinar, boundaries began to slip. Monographs were described as displaying “traceability, transparency, rigour” (I agree with all of those), but also as “icons of truth” [!], as “something we can trust”. This is nonsense. More interesting was Michigan’s attempt to measure the growing use of digital books in the context of AI answering tools such as Perplexity. It seems to me a perfectly valid use of the book to have it available to answer questions via the many AI tools and search engines that provide this service.
There could be a vast discussion about the future of the book, but this wasn’t it. Even restricting the discussion to monographs, I don’t think the webinar addressed the issue of why monograph publishing is essentially subsidised, by funders, or by university presses. Open Access monographs are simply perpetuating that subsidy; it is not a sustainable model. Perhaps an openly accessible publishing platform for monographs, like arXiv for preprints, but making clear that the content is peer-reviewed, is all that is needed. A few of them may become books for a wider audience, but in that case, they would have the benefit of editing, indexing, and the input from a publisher. And they might be books that are treasured, even if not by any means trusted.
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