Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries. Edited by Robert Holley. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2015. 185p. $29.95 softcover (ISBN: 978-1-55753-721-8).
Self-publishing has exploded over the last ten years, resulting in an entirely new ecosystem of self-publishing platforms, marketing options, and collection development tools. Major companies such as Amazon provide a relatively easy way for individuals to format and upload writing for public consumption, and the public’s demand for these materials is increasing. This demand has created a new and challenging set of problems for librarians who would like to leverage the growth of self-publishing to improve library collections and services. The essays collected in Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries make a convincing case that academic and public libraries have significant opportunity to participate in this new publishing landscape while making clear that, particularly for academic libraries, the acceptance and active collection of self-published titles is still something of a work in progress.
As editor Robert Holley lays out in the introduction, this volume may be “the first monograph to deal with self-publication and its present and potential impact on libraries” (1). As such, the essays contained within cover a lot of ground, but cluster around three ways for librarians to interact with self-publishing: as collection development/acquisitions specialists, as facilitators for patron publishing, and as publishers themselves. Chapter contributions from both public and academic librarians as well as vendors and authors provide a broad spectrum of perspectives on the challenges and opportunities of self-publishing.
Several chapters contain a brief history or overview of self-publishing, noting its recent growth and the traditional reluctance of librarians to collect self-published work. Multiple authors note that public libraries tend to collect more self-published works than academic libraries and that the term “vanity press” has gone out of favor. References to the “stigma” of self-publishing appear frequently. It is clear that each author is trying to provide context for his or her contribution, but tighter editing of these sections may have reduced some of the repetition, allowing more space for discussing the issues and experiences that were unique.
Within the cluster of essays dealing with self-publishing as a collection development issue, Bob Nardini of ProQuest Books presents a discussion of the challenge of applying traditional vendor services to independent publishers, highlighting the idea that many libraries may avoid collecting self-published books because there is no easy way to discover and acquire them. He imagines a future when vendors are able to create library profiles and bundle self-published titles for purchase in a way that is cost-effective and provides acceptable metadata for institutions. This is an interesting thought experiment, highlighting the fact that there are issues of quality control, scalability, and economy throughout the self-publishing and distribution process, and libraries are not the only institutions struggling to come up with workable solutions. This chapter serves as a useful glimpse into vendor priorities.
In contrast, the following chapter focuses on Ingram Content Group and reads much more like promotional material, including explicit directions for formatting and preparing material for upload to the IngramSpark self-publishing platform. This chapter sticks out in both content and tone, being more of a company overview and guide to getting started using the company’s services than an academic exploration of self-publishing’s impact on libraries. A few paragraphs outlining some of Ingram’s partnerships with libraries eventually connect this section with the larger themes of the book.
Several chapters touch on the role libraries can play to facilitate patron self-publishing. Author Henry Bankhead outlines a successful partnership with e-book publisher Smashwords that allowed the Los Gatos Library to guide local authors through the publishing process and provide library access to their books via OverDrive. Public libraries likely already have a subgroup of patrons eager to write a novel, local history, memoir or family biography, and libraries can help patrons navigate self-publishing platforms and highlight the work of their patrons in the library. The chapters detailing individual author experiences with self-publishing reveal just how many options there are for those looking to self-publish and perhaps unintentionally underscore how much opportunity there is for libraries to guide potential authors through the dizzying maze of platform selection, book design, marketing and distribution.
The book is capped by a brief, yet wide-ranging and thought-provoking, bibliographic essay highlighting some of the recent research on the self-publishing landscape and its impact on libraries. Chapter author Joseph D. Grobelny writes that libraries have lagged behind book publishers and the public when it comes to interest in self-publishing but ends the volume on a positive note, writing that “it is worth taking the longer view that libraries will most likely successfully adapt to the changed publishing environment” (177).
What is missing from this volume is in-depth discussion of academic libraries as publishers and the special considerations that might apply when publishing scholarly content via an open access journal or institutional repository. Two chapters deal with self-publishing as an acquisitions issue in academic libraries, but there are no chapters outlining university library publishing programs or the academic library’s increasing role in the scholarly communication process. While both Donald Beagle and Grobelny mention the growing prominence of institutional repositories in academic libraries, the focus of the book as a whole is squarely on self-publishing through third-party vendors such as Smashwords, IngramSpark, and Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Several authors rightly point out that public libraries are much more active in this area.
Taken in its entirety, Self-Publishing and Collection Development is a wide-angle view of the ways that self-publishing can impact libraries. Chapters vary from resource-rich guides containing practical advice and descriptions of self-publishing experiences to more philosophical explorations of the challenges of discovering and acquiring self-published works. At times this breadth can be a bit disorienting, as chapters jump from collection development to programming development to vendor partnerships. However, this eclecticism means that there is in some sense “something for everyone,” from librarians struggling to locate, acquire and properly catalog self-published materials, to those who are considering self-publishing their own writing.—Rebecca Brody (rbrody@westfield.ma.edu), Westfield State University, Westfield, Massachusetts