Melbourne university https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/15/shift-mission-melbourne-university-press-raises-many-issues
There are probably several factors. One is the death of the academic bookstore. (I used to love them back in the day.) There are only a handful of them left. Even university bookstores are discontinuing... books. Stanford's bookstore used to have two locations, now it only has one and of that remaining store's three floors, only one is now devoted to general academic titles, often ephemeral and lightweight. The quality of the selection has absolutely crashed. (The basement is devoted to course textbooks and the main floor to the ever-popular Stanford sweatshirts and coffee mugs. Chinese tour groups love to buy them en-masse and doubtless love to show them off back in China. Very stylish.) Berkeley's bookstore follows the same trend and seems to have pretty much eliminated general academic titles in favor of rival Berkeley sweatshirts and coffee mugs. It isn't clear that Amazon has successfully replaced all of those missing bookstores and taken up the sales slack. So I'd say that if they want to survive financially, university presses need to give some attention to their distribution channels. Libraries would be an obvious option, except that most public libraries are gradually eliminating print books and turning into community centers (and in some cases homeless shelters). Where libraries once were something like free universities for those interested in independent study, libraries today are concentrating on popular fiction and light popular non-fiction titles. Or else they are pulling out bookshelves entirely and putting in couches, performance spaces and crafts demonstrations. They are weeding out their technical and scholarly titles because they don't circulate as often as popular titles. Perhaps part of the problem is that people (even intellectuals!) just aren't reading like they once did. When was the last time you saw somebody actually reading a book? Especially a serious academic title? Now people just stare at their cell-phones, and I'd wager that almost none of them are reading books on the things. Perhaps related to that, university presses need to publish what their market wants to read and purchase, instead of that the professors want to write. That's a big part of the problem right there, most people (even other academics) don't really want to read what the academic presses are publishing. Writing books that nobody reads is basically just a grand way of wanking off and padding one's cv. University Press Books is still alive across the street from the Berkeley campus, but at least half of the new titles it offers seem to have the words "race" and/or "gender" in the title, or else are trendy French literary theory (or something about Nietzsche). I'm not convinced that stuff sells like history, philosophy and the sciences used to, back when people actually studied the more traditional subjects.
