I've complained in the past about the likes of Brill and their nosebleed pricing. The same could be said about De Gruyter. Many of their titles are priced in the $100-200+ range. I think I understand the rationale, and it probably made sense say...50 years ago. Today, it's just stupid. Much of what they offer are tomes on arcane and obscure subjects that only specialists typically find interesting, so the thought is that the publishing costs must be recouped on a limited publishing run, ergo higher prices. Fine...except there's something called digital--you may have heard of it--that makes that approach both decrepit and self-defeating. That, plus there's centuries of entrenched Continental thinking and ways of doing things, which are simply slow to adapt to current market forces. Frankly, I don't blame them...they are what they are.
But this is where FL needs to take the steering wheel and maybe even knock a few heads and twist a few arms and get these dinosaurs to recognize the current way of the world. I have zero doubt that if these publishers took a more commoditized approach to their Biblical subject matter, they would sell 3-4 up to 6-10 times as many books (depending on how aggressively they axed their prices), which would be good for both them and their author clients...and, of course, their reading customers. BUT FL HAS TO BE THE ONE TO PLACE THE NOSE RING ON THE BULL. For this situation to move beyond status quo, FL is going to have to coerce the publishers to see reason. Hardball style. I don't know exactly what it will take, but I'm sure it will require harping on them incessantly until they finally capitulate...like the widow woman and the unjust judge.
FL did something similar with the Bloomsbury publishing group (Sheffield, T&T Clark, etc.), which has many cerebral Biblical titles, such as the JSOT & JSNTS monographs that are frequently cited in scholarly works. Many of these are pricey individually, but FL offered them in various bundles that offered significant savings. Unfortunately, FL hasn't kept their foot on the pedal for many of these, seeing as recent additions to the Bloomsbury catalog have lingered without garnering sufficient PrePub attention. I see that a primarily FL's fault. Not entirely, but they have let these offerings wither due to lack of energy.
So, I'd like to see FL move those Bloomsbury PrePubs across the goal, and then start focusing on dragging the hoity-toity European prestige publishers into the digital age with creatively- and aggressively-priced options that Logos users can afford.
