Some University Press Facts

General Information

AAUP currently has 125 members. Of those, 95 are university presses affiliated with public and private research universities in the United States and Canada.

There is at least one university press member of AAUP in each of 42 states and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and 4 Canadian provinces.

Collectively, AAUP members publish about 10,000 new books each year. This total includes both cloth and paperback editions. (The U.S. branches of Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press together publish around 4,000.)

AAUP members also publish over 700 scholarly journals, many of them published for scholarly societies. (The U.S. branches of Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press together publish around 200.)

Of the 62 members of the Association of American Universities, 55 (87%) have a university press that is a member of AAUP.

Of the 124 universities with libraries that are members of the Association of Research Libraries, 85 (69%) have a university press that is a member of AAUP.

Of the 151 Carnegie I institutions in the United States, 96 (64%) have a university press that is a member of AAUP.

In the three months following September 11, 2001:
The three best-selling books in the United States were all
published by university presses.
Yale University Press’s Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid
Northeastern University Press’s The New Jackals, by Simon Reeve
Rutgers University Press’s The Twin Towers, by Andrew Gillespie

Sixteen of the twenty-five most purchased titles through Baker and Taylor, a
national distributor to bookstores and libraries, were published by university
presses. See Books for Understanding.

1 book in every 10 new books published in the United States is published by a university press. $1 in every $50 spent to purchase books in the United States is spent on a university press book.

Sources of Revenue

Each year, the AAUP members affiliated with public and private research universities in the United States and Canada (excluding the U.S. branches of Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press) are asked to report their financial operating data to AAUP. The most recent completed survey is for FY 2002 and the preceding three years, to which 66 presses responded.

For 2002, these 66 presses reported $254,000,000 in net sales.

54 of these presses reported receiving a direct operating subsidy from their
parent university. The total amount received was $22,400,000. 12 presses
reported receiving no subsidy. (In-kind subsidies, like free or reduced rent,
payroll and legal services, parking, and so forth, are not included in these figures.)

To maintain confidentiality, the operating data is aggregated and reported in four
sales tiers: presses with sales up to $1.5 million, $1.5 to $3 million, $3 to $6 million,
and over $6 million. For the presses with the smallest sales, Group 1, the subsidy
as a percentage of net sales is a very significant source of revenue, almost 40%;
for the largest presses, Group 4, the subsidy is less that 1%.

The actual figures for 2002 are:
Group 1 39.5%
Group 2 16.4%
Group 3 11.1%
Group 4 0.5%

In 2002 all 66 presses reported receiving additional support from sources outside
the university in the form of title subsides, grants, and endowment income. The
total amount was $20,066,000.

Again, this outside support as a percentage of net sales varies with size, but less
dramatically. The figures for 2002 are:
Group 1 13.2%
Group 2 8.9%
Group 3 5.4%
Group 4 8.3%

In summary, the 66 reporting presses had total operating revenues in 2002 of $296,466,000, of which $254,000,000 (85.7%) came from sales and $42,466,000 (14.3%) from non-publishing sources, of which $22,400,000 (7.6%) came in the form of parent institution support.

Sources of Sales Income

In 2002 the presses reporting their operating data derived, on average, 88.5% of their sales income from domestic sales, and 11.5% from export sales.

No breakdown by type of customer is available for export sales. For domestic sales the reporting presses received sales revenue from these customers:
Chain stores (Barnes & Noble, etc.) 10.0%
General Bookstores (independents) 17.1%
College Bookstores 16.7%
Online Retailers 4.7%
Wholesalers and Jobbers39.2%
Libraries (buying direct) 1.7%
Other Institutions 1.8%
Direct to Consumer 6.4%
Special Sales 1.1%
Remainders 0.8%
Other 0.5%
Total domestic sales by type of customer 100.0%

Virtually all libraries purchase their books from a wholesaler—Baker and Taylor and Blackwells are two of the larger—so some significant portion of the books reported as sold to wholesalers and jobbers are re-purchased by libraries. However, this category of account also includes large jobbers, like Ingram, that resell to bookstores, so it’s impossible to say with any degree of certainty how much of this business is going to libraries. A reasonable guess would be half or a little more.

In summary, what these figures mean is that about 75% of the domestic sales revenue for university press books is coming from individuals buying through a bookstore, online retailer, or direct from the publisher, and about 25% from institutional purchasers, most of them libraries.

First Books

Last winter AAUP sent a survey to its members asking how many new, non-fiction titles they had published in FY 2002, and of those, how many were the author’s first book.

45 presses responded; the smallest had published 4 books, the largest, 208.
The total for all reporting presses was 2,716.

3 presses reported publishing no first books, and 1 press reported that 58%
of its list was made up of first books. However, ranking the presses in order
by total number of books published from smallest to largest, the percentage
of first books published was consistent across the entire range.
24% at the 1st quartile
28% at the median
26% at the mean
27% at the 3rd quartile
22% at the maximum

Our working assumption is that most of these first books are scholarly books.