What does it mean when a university press fails? It means not that its authors are not successful or that its press was not run well. Rather it means that its university has abandoned part of its scholarly mission: namely, supporting the publication of books that are the lifeblood of its faculty — and academia.

Essay on closure of University of Missouri Press | Inside Higher Ed

I am not sure the comparison with athletics on the financial side is sound because of the difference in revenue generated and the scope of influence. But from a wider perspective about what we in higher education ought to value, the juxtaposition is apt.

Source: insidehighered.com

As Fitzpatrick observes, our understanding of authorship is, at the present time, caught between two regimes: one a system of knowledge production informed by Enlightenment-era notions of the self, the other is a world of “technologies that lend themselves to the distributed, the collective, the process-oriented, the anonymous, the remix.” As we step into the future increasingly governed by the latter, we move, in some ways, back to an earlier era: a move away from a culture of isolated reading — the individual reader, alone with a book or a screen — towards a more communal engagement, the coffee-house or fireside model of public reading and debate in which literary culture historically originated. Long before print culture, storytelling was not a solitary experience but a group event.

Los Angeles Review of Books - The Read-Write Generation

Reading itself becomes a social, even a political, activity.

Source: lareviewofbooks.org