The State of the University Press

And yet while the opportunities presented by chunking seem vast, the scholarly publishing industry as a whole has yet to come up with a workable revenue-producing plan (and a clear sales and distribution pipeline to support it.) As University of Chicago Press director Garrett Kiely explains, "The big players -- Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Google -- are not actually in the business of selling chapters off individually. If there was a massive push to purchase individual chapters of academic books," he adds, "my guess -- and this is just a guess -- is that they would come to us and say, 'This is what the market is saying; you really need to do this.'"