A couple weeks ago, scholars on Twitter lamented the long timelines of academic publishing. Occasioned by the 2023 publication of a monograph with a preface that revealed the book itself had been largely composed in the 2010s, the general tenor of this conversation s
uggested that book publishing does not meet our current needs. What is the point of publishing if it takes a decade or more to bring an old book into the new world? Like most common-sense, there’s more than a grain of truth here: If we require up-to-the-minute scholarship, the publishing industry, particularly the academic publishing industry, simply cannot meet the need. Hence the whole world of preprints, self-publishing in institutional repositories, blogs, Substacks, Patreons, Medium posts, Twitter threads, and the countless other mechanisms we use to distribute information outside of the pages of the book. Bracketing the frustration authors and readers must feel with glacial timelines, I think the book, especially the scholarly monograph, but even the essay collection, the poetry book, and dare I say the novel, in codex form still serves an important function better than most of the other channels I’ve described. That is, the book provides a record of everything—the research, the conversation, the revision—that has gone into its making. Unlike a newspaper or a blog post, the book arrives belatedly, trailing behind it the legacies of its making and the record of its development over time. In many ways, preserving these legacies, in addition to intervening in an urgent discourse, has long been the function of the book, and in this way publishing books continues to have urgent archival value.
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