Thinking about Internet Scale | The Scholarly Kitchen

Those of us who labor in scholarly publishing can be forgiven for thinking that the world is a tiny place. The academic journal, the keystone of our industry, cumulatively brings in about $10 billion a year, not enough to get the CEOs of Uber or Pinterest out of bed in the morning; and the book, the much-despised book, is in retreat everywhere. While librarians continue to insist that there are huge publishers out there, corporations so big that they have a stranglehold on the academic community, if not the world overall, the actual figures for even the largest publishers are not much more than rounding errors for truly big concerns and industries. How is it that healthcare can be 17 percent of the U.S. economy while publishing about healthcare is worth pennies? Let's play the game of Separated at Birth: We will pair Pearson with Apple, Reed Elsevier with Cisco, and John Wiley with Exxon Mobil. Now we can tell what big companies actually look like, and none of them send their kids to the same schools we do.