SIVACRACY.NET

One of my role models, Henry Jenkins of MIT, writes:

... The current state of academic publishing poses some real challenges for those of us who want to engage with a public beyond the textbook market. For starters, there is the challenge of publication time. It can take as long as two years, sometimes longer, between the time that an academic completes a book and when that book hits the stores. For that reason, few of us are able to engage in meaningful ways with contemporary developments in popular culture. I can't tell you the number of books which were started with the goal of responding to popular media in real time and which ended with the phenomenon under investigation dead and buried by the time the book hit the market. There are certainly some things I will need to update about Convergence Culture on the blog even if the general trends I identified in the book remain valid.

Second, there are real filters that make it extremely hard for academics to get books into commercial bookstores where they might fall into the hands of non-academic readers. Most proposals for academic books on popularculture boldly assert that there is a potential crossover market around their topics but it's hard to figure out how they are going to reach that readership when their books are never going to appear in Borders or Barnes and Nobles or any of the other chain bookstores where the vast majority of books get sold. ...

There is much more to it. Read on.