Harvard University Press Closes Display Room, Goes Digital

Harvard University Press, whose sales have fallen approximately 10 percent this past year, closed its 61-year-old display room in the Holyoke Center on June 30 after its yearly lease expired at the end of May, according to HUP sales director Susan Donnelly.

Two of the display room's three staffers took the University's early retirement incentive package, Donnelly said, and the third was fired this summer as part of the 275 University-wide layoffs.

Donnelly explained that the display room has always been a net loss for HUP, but it was a cost that they were willing to subsidize until now. She said publishers have been dealt a “double-whammy” by the financial crisis and the transition to digital media.

The display room’s costs consisted of rent and staff salaries, according to Donnelly. In addition to the display room worker who was laid off, HUP fired three staffers in marketing, two in editorial, and one in design—a total of seven layoffs. But HUP is not planning on reducing publishing output, Donnelly emphasized.

The display room had featured a full bookcase of Greek and Latin works from the Loeb Classical Library, as well as other nationally renowned titles.

Brandon K. B. Seah '11 said that “as a poor student,” he enjoyed going to the “Bargain Alcove,” a shelf where damaged books were sold for as little as $4 or $5. He said he would be disappointed if a restaurant or other commercial chain replaces the display room in the Holyoke Center.

“Then it becomes just like any other place in the Square: very commercial, no local flavor,” Seah said. “It would be catering more to the tourists than the students, which kind of defeats the purpose.”

HUP has also recently signed a deal with Scribd, an online startup founded and headed by a young Harvard duo: John R. “Trip” Adler '06 and Jared Friedman, a Harvard dropout who was a Computer Science concentrator in Cabot House. The deal would put nearly 1,000 of HUP’s books online, making them downloadable at costs determined by HUP.

Scribd would take 20 percent of the profits, and HUP 80 percent. Approximately 300 of HUP’s books are already on Scribd’s web site, according to Adler.

“We think it’s exciting to get a big publisher like Harvard involved, especially because we went to school there,” said Adler, a former Biophysics concentrator.

NYU and MIT's University Presses have also already signed on with Scribd. The company started discussing a deal with HUP about a month ago, according to Adler, after HUP started uploading books to the Web site on their own.

Scribd, which attracted the attention of venture capitalists soon after it was launched in March 2007, currently has almost 50 million users, according to Adler. Books purchased through Scribd can be read on electronic devices, including the iPhone and Amazon Kindle.

Scribd is also looking to expand into the classroom—Adler said that the company is currently developing an annotation feature, which will allow users to write notes and highlight text on the virtual books using electronic devices. Hopefully, he said, this will allow material on Scribd to compete with physical textbooks.

“We’re hoping to work with Harvard University Press to make textbooks cheaper so [students] can buy them online rather than buying these expensive thick textbooks,” Adler said.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.