Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their libraries

https://www.publicbooks.org/publishers-and-scholars-unite/

by theoldlove • 3 years ago

208 149 3 years ago

echelon• 3 years ago

They need to disinvest from new buildings, "lifestyle" dorms, expensive gyms and amenities, and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this).

Tuition inflation is absurd. The goal is to grow learners, not set them back.

Racing04612• 3 years ago

nah, we just need the government to not back student loans and allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy. the system will sort it out from there.

JumpCrisscross• 3 years ago

we just need the government to not back student loans and allow it to be discharged in bankruptcy

Honestly, start with the latter. See what happens. Maybe include a first-loss provision for schools with an endowment.

silenced_trope• 3 years ago

This is what really gets me about loan forgiveness.

I'd be in favor if it was only for people who pursue certain degrees that we need. But going to party schools? Going for the cliche "underwater basket weaving" degree? The money being funneled into building a new pool and rock climbing wall for one of the dorms?

No, no, and no!

julienb_sea• 3 years ago

How is this going to solve anything? Unless the school itself has skin in the loan, currently the only impact of bankruptcy discharge would be on private loan operators (who would probably go under) or on taxpayers who would absorb the loan losses. The schools are getting paid their tuition from the loans immediately, they won't even notice.

rqtwteye2• 3 years ago

Be careful. You may end up with universities where only millionaires take classes. The universities would like this because of money and the millionaires would like it because the proles would keep out of well paid careers. We would be back to how education and science worked a few hundred years ago.

As in health care I don’t think there is a market solution. Government needs to mandate lower prices for them.

throwing_away• 3 years ago

The goal is to grow, not set back.

If you're a university, the goal is to fill up your university with satisfied customers and increase revenue.

If you're a student, the goal is to form social networks that you can later use to help in business.

If you're a politician, the goal is to increase college attendance rates.

If you're a hard-line right winger, the goal is actually to set undesirable groups back, but that's a pretty fringe position.

If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.

whatshisface2• 3 years ago

I went to school to learn what they were teaching in class and I did actually learn it.

EatingWithForks2• 3 years ago

If you just want to learn and grow, you should avoid the university system entirely.

I disagree with this. The university system is really good for exposure, assuming that people who are attending the system actually take advantage of the exposure. e.g. I was able to take dedicated lessons in multiple languages, artistic mediums, theories in various fields, by experts in each field. Many of these experts were presenting their work for free outside of lessons, and often times provided free food and drink to boot! Also, because my institution was larger, we often had scholars travel here to present their various works and even little get-togethers where multiple scholars from multiple fields collaborated and presented work. For free! With free food and drink!

I can't get a single dedicated language instructor for my life nowadays, it's bullshit apps or stuff oriented towards children only. Same if I wanted to learn the basics of, say, a performance art, or painting. The best system I have nowadays for learning is mostly hacker spaces and maker spaces, but they're specialized in what they can teach me and don't often have the kind of dedicated experts "office hours" or anything like that.

dfxm122• 3 years ago

If you're a hard-line right winger, the goal is actually to set undesirable groups back, but that's a pretty fringe position.

Based in recent history, most recently on spending cuts in the proposed house spending bill, this appears to be well within the mainstream of the Republican party.

krapp• 3 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted, every word of your comment is the truth.

The purpose of higher education in the US to create a market for student loan debt and generate revenue for states. The US is a capitalist society, and education is not a right, it's a privilege, and student loan debt is a billion dollar industry. We saw how the states nearly rioted over the possibility of being denied the revenue from student loan interest if it was forgiven. Believing education is about educating people is about as naive as believing hospitals are about healthcare, or houses about shelter. All of it is entirely about profit, debt and tax revenue.

So much of how the US works (or doesn't work) makes perfect sense when you realize this. Education, business, tech, government, the media, pop culture - it's all grift, top to bottom. It's all carnies and frauds and sociopaths working angles and trying to squeeze you just a little harder to wet their lips with one more drop of your lifeblood.

vehemenz• 3 years ago

It's a shame you didn't learn about the teleological fallacy in your philosophy classes when you attended university.

manuelabeledo• 3 years ago

... and sports programs (except for schools well-regarded for this)

Those shouldn't be called "universities", then.

trgn3• 3 years ago

A healthy mind in a healthy body. We should all aspire to it. It's a beautiful thing, to have institutions nurture both athletes and scholars.

AmericanOP• 3 years ago

Parents can't afford to send kids to summer camp so they can save for college which is four years of summer camp.

wolverine8765• 3 years ago

Like many other things now, from healthcare to midtown Manhattan, it's by the wealthy, for the wealthy, of the wealthy.

The wealthy want beautiful new buildings and a good football team, and a high-touch experience for their kids. They are happy to pay administrators lots of money to deliver on those things.

cvccvroomvroom4• 3 years ago

That's not how a university works.

cvccvroomvroom4• 3 years ago

Most universities are on the death march to rebuild Versailles for athletes and whoever else. They can't even bother to build something beautiful like a gothic church with all that ill-got blood money. Instead, it's a construction competition to teardown and replace buildings like bathroom decor.

sheepshear7• 3 years ago

I don't think it's fair to say they've disinvested from libraries.

Most of the information is digitized, which has better reach. Books that cannot be digitized yet due to copyright are held in storage until they enter public domain, and you can request chapter scans in the meantime or even check out the physical book. Separate special collections are kept for items whose physical existence is significant. Libraries are being repurposed as study spaces, which campuses otherwise tend to lack. Reference librarians are available online with extended hours.

The overall trend seems positive.

Similar arguments about presses. Mixed media is the future. Some schools invest in various learning platforms and knowledge hubs, sometimes collaboratively. A building doesn't facilitate such variety very well.

ahi4• 3 years ago

University expenditures on libraries have been stagnant at best for decades. This includes those "various learning platforms and knowledge hubs." The digitization of collections and repurposing of facilities is driven by cost cutting as well as hampered by it. Archival storage is not cheap (the conditions for special collections drive many librarians to drink) and renovating century old stacks into usable people space requires capital expenditures few libraries can scrape together.

At the same time, Elsevier et al take larger and larger bites out of the budget for those digitized collections. The failure to invest in University presses will only exacerbate this in the long term. Attempts to provide an alternative to the for-profit parasites, e.g. open access platforms, wallow in grant funded misery with budgets considered laughable in the private sector.

sheepshear7• 3 years ago

Let's take nanohub.org as an example. It's funded by an NSF grant and everyone can access it for free. A university doesn't need to make any expenditures for their students to benefit from it.

Researchers choose to publish in Elsevier's journals, not for lack of a university press.

tw4l2• 3 years ago

Former academic librarian and archivist here. It's true that university libraries are changing their shape, as you say. More study space, fewer physical collections and book purchases (and, in some areas, universities moving toward sharing their physical collections in remote offsite storage and only calling back materials when requested), and much more investment in electronic resources like journal and database access.

It's a complicated issue, but in general library budgets have been consistently shrinking for years/decades, even as the subscription costs for journal access from big for-profit like Elsevier skyrockets. It's even gotten to the point where universities with endowments larger than many nations' GDPs are struggling to afford publisher prices (see https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-univ...).

Decreasing library budgets plays into this, but at its heart I think that there's a crisis of purpose as well. By not investing in open access publishing infrastructure themselves and not modifying the incentives for faculty review and tenure, universities have put themselves at the mercy of these for-profit publishers and are suffering for it. It's hard to blame faculty who are vying for one of the ever-diminishing tenured spots for publishing their articles in the best journals they can, regardless of whether they'll be behind a paywall, especially when the bar for tenure keeps getting higher and higher.

So we find ourselves in a situation where universities and public funding agencies are paying academics to conduct research and do peer review, then faculty are giving the results to a for-profit publisher, who then sells access to the work right back to them at an astronomical fee.

I'm hopeful if not optimistic that at some point, universities might choose to break out of the cat-and-mouse game they're in by investing in open access publishing and incentivizing their faculty to use it rather than continuing to feed for-profit publishers' wild profits. I've seen some (too limited) action on the first part of that but pretty much none on incentivization part. Certain funding agencies are starting to require open access publication as a condition of some grants, but the change has been slow.

wolverine8765• 3 years ago

For open access journals, why don't professional associations (e.g., of history/physics/etc researchers/professors/etc) organize it, and declare that starting 01 Jan 2026, the Open Journal of Nanoscience will be the prestige publication, and Open Nanoscience Letters will be the second rank (or whatever roles are needed). Would anyone in the professional assocation have reason to object? Would support be widespread?

University presses could handle the implementation (I know, more easily said than done, but they have the expertise). Cost reduction would appeal to university administrations.

People do organize themselves and accomplish things, and with (guaranteed?) savings, (no?) opposition, (wide?) support, this one seems like low-hanging fruit - from my very outside perspective.

sheepshear7• 3 years ago

I think the challenge is that a university press is not interchangeable with a journal.

atrettel3• 3 years ago

I have spent a lot of time in university libraries and the disinvestment is often difficult to see unless you are doing deep research or in the weeds.

I should note that I am writing this response as somebody who is a professional researcher and scientist, not as an undergraduate student who needs to find a few references for a term paper. My needs are quite different than others and the library needs to cater to a wide range of people at all levels of research.

Many universities are in fact repurposing libraries as "study spaces" or as "learning centers". This often means dedicating more space to meeting rooms and desks, etc. To get that space, libraries either put the books in storage or quite frankly sell the books, especially books that are not checked out that often. Many of the technical books that I own are former library books. Moreover, even well-resourced government labs (like DOE national laboratories) are selling their books. I know because I have bought some (albeit through a third party). Putting books in storage is the better option, because at least the books are available, but it removes the ability to browse the shelf for adjacent books (a highly underrated research method) and often requires preparation to request books and then wait for them to arrive in a reading room. That said, it is far better to put the books in storage.

The availability of reference librarians is often greatly overstated. A library like the Library of Congress still has excellent reference librarians who often can perform apparent miracles to find difficult to locate information, but at university libraries, if I ask for a reference librarian, I often end up with an undergraduate assistant who does not really know much and cannot help you if you have a specific question to ask about locating something in a particular collection or how to use certain equipment like microfilm readers. Perhaps the undergrad can help other undergrads out, but when I was in grad school I never found this practice helpful when I needed specific information that I was already having difficulty finding.

To summarize, this trend may benefit some people, but it comes at the expense of in-depth researchers and their needs.

I will end by quibbling with that notion that "most of the information is digitized". The problem is that the Internet is so large that you can easily spend your whole life without ever realizing how shallow it really is in a single subject. Only once you go deep in that subject do you realize how much is not yet digitized in the first place. Yes, much information is digitized, but based on my experience, it is not "most". Some day that may change, but for the time being, physical libraries still play an important role here.

sheepshear7• 3 years ago

With respect, I think I already addressed your quibble. I acknowledged the backlog of materials yet to be digitized and explained how to expedite it on an as-needed basis.

It's no more burdensome than it would be with more library funding. Storage is always necessary because big universities own several times more books than they could ever hope to shelve in their increasingly crowded campuses. Digging deep into a subject's history can require materials that don't exist in sufficient quantities for every interested library to have one, necessitating inter-library loans at a minimum.

FYI Every online library catalog I've seen has a "browse shelf" feature.

And how many times do you need to be shown how to use the microfilm machine?

pfdietz• 3 years ago

Most of the information is digitized, which has better reach.

Previously, when university libraries had books and paper journals, anyone could read them. Now, members of the general public are not licensed to read electronic content there.

So digitization has reduced the reach of the content, not increased it.

sheepshear7• 3 years ago

Many libraries have computers for accessing the catalog, which now includes all the digital media. You make a good argument for why they should if they don't already.

darth_avocado2• 3 years ago

It is so strange that donors and alumni can put pressure on schools to fire coaching staff in athletics programs to make schools perform better. Yet when it comes to the administrative bloat and waste alumni don’t hold their schools to the same standard. Like academic degradation is something no one cares about.

godzillabrennus• 3 years ago

Athletic programs can make serious money for a school

fragmede2• 3 years ago

Serious, directly measurable money for the school. If I graduate with a degree and that degree gets me a career that goes exceedingly well and I become a 10 or 100-millionaire, and donate money for a lab to the university, that's not exactly trackable to that one really good professor. Meanwhile, the coach who won the big game is well known.

UweSchmidt• 3 years ago

Automatic comment whenever univerity athletic programs are brought up. "It makes money", with the implication "..therefore it is all good" not even spelled out.

The original intent was to offer a well-rounded education that includes physical activity. Healthy body healthy mind. Nerds who are also in shape. This concept is lost by creating a pro athlete caste within a school, students more respected for their success on the field than in the classroom. Maybe sports is truly subsidizing academics, but then again if 280 Million are spent on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQIGwxsVv1E, is there enough institutional focus on academics?

Ok correct me if I'm ignorant on this topic but give me more than that oneliner that I've read a couple times before.

manicennui• 3 years ago

Why does this matter if most of the money is going to the sports program and tuition remains unaffordable?

bombcar3• 3 years ago

When you're working as a donor, administrative bloat is who you're working with.

But many big donors only care about how the school does athletically. They don't care about the education side - and in fact, if they could figure a way to ditch that "cost center" they would.

internet101010• 3 years ago

A lot of people misinterpret the term "cost center" mean an area of a business that only spends money (e.g. marketing department) but that isn't what it is at all. Probably because it has the word "cost" in it.

A cost center is simply a vessel through which money moves. Revenue, expenses, inventory, etc. all go through cost centers. Sure, the professors' salaries go through a cost center. So does tuition and royalties from TV networks.

dfxm122• 3 years ago

Sports are very heavily reported on, for many reasons. In some states, a university football coach is the highest paid public sector employee.

Do we really know what else goes on behind closed doors in terms of donor pressure?

callalex• 3 years ago

I applied pressure by refusing to donate, and citing administrative bloat as the reason. I know I’m not alone. I doubt they’ll listen because the absence of dollars is hard to quantify.

scythe• 3 years ago

If you think it's so easy to measure academic bloat, why not go do it? Someone should start an index of wasteful spending by university or something.

darth_avocado2• 3 years ago

Give me the access to the books and I’ll do it.

Pannoniae• 3 years ago

Do I understand this correctly? Since universities pay through their nose for journal and publisher subscriptions, they don't have money to actually publish books themselves. Is that right?

operatingthetan• 3 years ago

Seems like universities have enough power that they could jailbreak themselves from this situation, right?

ahi4• 3 years ago

It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue. Even UC Berkeley's fight with Elsevier was a huge undertaking: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-...

For most, that means collaborating with others. UC system and B1G academic alliance are making moves, but it's herding cats. Even within universities, it's a nightmare of competing interests. How do you convince your faculty to publish through your own press or consortium instead of the higher impact factor journal owned by Elsevier?

tw4l2• 3 years ago

They could! They'd have to also change how faculty review and tenure work, to incentivize faculty to publish in alternative open access journals instead of the top (paywalled) journals in their field. Otherwise, faculty will continue publishing with the for-profit publishers even if there's alternatives available.

ahi4• 3 years ago

Yes, and it's a death spiral since the university presses could, in theory, provide some competition. Can't/Won't invest in alternatives => lower competition for the parasites => higher subscription costs => less resources to invest in alternatives.

Academic libraries and publishing are effectively being privatized and will be dominated by ever more rent-seeking. I don't see this getting turned around unless universities dictate to their faculty where they can publish, i.e. stop subsidizing their competition.

AnimalMuppet2• 3 years ago

I don't think the major universities - the ones that could have publishing houses that matter - are too broke to be able to keep the publishing house running.

posterboy• 3 years ago

This trend is generally true for print. If smaller presses don't go out of business, due to the advantage of newer facilities, they are subsidized or bought out by bigger players.

Finnucane5• 3 years ago

From a bugeting perspective that is not quite how it works. Journal subscriptions come out of the libraries' budgets. I am a production editor at a uni press, and our budget is a separate item that is not affected directly by the library's problems. But we do have our own budget that we are expected to make. There is some endowment money--we have a fund specifically earmarked to help offset production expenses. We use it to subsidize some titles that we want to be able to offer at something like 'trade' prices but would otherwise be too expensive. Otherwise we are expected to cover our expenses through sales and other income streams like subrights. Heck, the university even expects us to pay for maintenance on our building.

specialist• 3 years ago

The production of scholarship is table stakes for any org claiming to be a university.

bell-cot• 3 years ago

In modern America... `sed 's/production of scholarship is table stakes/production of passably-competitive NCAA football and basketball teams is table stakes/'`

cultofmetatron• 3 years ago

Libraries need to change. most people go to the library to use the computers. what if we expanded the role of libraries to be places for autodidacts to learn and practice new skills? imagine a library full of maker equipment. 3d printers, sewing supplies, wood/metal working equipment. the modest government investment would be paid back 10 fold in the amount of innovation an individual would be able to accoplish.

trgn3• 3 years ago

That's already the model for a lot of libraries. They are all "learnings commons" now. Sometimes there are "maker spaces" or whatever attached to it, for tool use. They can be next to each other but don't have to me (who wants to study next to a table saw anyway)

I think libraries are adjusting fine to accommodate these needs. Really, the most important building in any educational institution is still the library, even in 2023. What libraries fail (start failing (?)) at is their archival responsibilities. And apparently, from the article, their publishing responsibilities too.

SketchySeaBeast• 3 years ago

I'm fairly certain that our local library has a 3d printer. They are definitely trying to take on different ways for people to learn and gather information, but wood/metal working equipment seems like it would be a liability nightmare.

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

I think libraries function well in their original purpose. When I visit the library the computers are mostly empty and there are lot of people there - reading and browsing books. I think the death of the book is overhyped by people with a vested interest in technology. (Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in technology)

jkaptur• 3 years ago

My local library is already exactly this. It's great, but they get no credit for it.

i_am_jl• 3 years ago

That's a good description of what my library does these days. Did a big doubletake at the row of printers the first time I saw 'em. They also lease out bigger tools (I borrowed a leaf blower and a string trimmer) and WiFi hotspots. I borrowed an cheap electronic drum kit (which convinced me to buy my own), and I'm on the waitlist for a steel tongue drum.

Finnucane5• 3 years ago

The problem for academic libraries is they hold a lot of material that is not readily available online. There is some effort being made to fix that, but it takes time, effort, and money to get archival material online (I've worked on a couple of these projects myself).

cvccvroomvroom4• 3 years ago

That's not a library, that's a workshop, bucko.

gamepsys2• 3 years ago

I just went through my bookshelf. While there were many authors that were professors, there were few books published by a university press. Are university presses a professors' first choice when it comes to publishing?

allturtles• 3 years ago

University presses have less reach than a popular press, but the flip side of that is that they are willing to publish works only of interest to an academic audience. If you want to reach a wide audience, then, no, you don't want to publish in a university press. However if you want to publish a detailed study on a niche subject, no popular press will want to touch that. That's what the university presses are for. e.g., here's a title I came across at Princeton University Press, "A Velvet Empire: French Informal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century." Just based on the title, there's no way some place like Penguin Random House is going to even look at that manuscript.

The same author may approach different publishers depending on their intended audience. e.g. Daron Acemoglu published "Introduction to Modern Economic Growth" with Princeton but "Why Nations Fail" with Crown (a division of Penguin RandomHouse).

dendrite9• 3 years ago

Another example of a niche collection of books from a university is Duke press' Latin America collection. Someone recommended looking there for information on a question that came up in a discussion, I had no idea it existed as an outsider. https://read.dukeupress.edu/latin-american-studies

beepbooptheory2• 3 years ago

Well, if you go to grad school in humanities, or otherwise have more professional academic pursuits, you slowly end up submitting your home bookshelf to a huge takeover of very plain spines with small font.

Telemakhos• 3 years ago

It really depends on the field. On my shelf, things are pretty much just Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Harvard University Press, Princeton University Press, Routledge or De Gruyters. Oxford is very prestigious in the field of these books, and a professor seeking to publish a book would likely prefer Oxford.

hotnfresh• 3 years ago

Yeah, OUP and Harvard are all over my shelves, among others.

It’s a lot easier than many folks suppose to reach the bottom of what the Internet has on a lot of topics—people toss around phrases like “all the world’s knowledge” and, oh boy, is that ever not true—and IME the next step is very often a few books from university presses.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 3 years ago

The market for university presses is almost entirely other university libraries, potentially other professors, and the exceedingly rare specialist.

But when you need tenure, and you need to get published, they're the 1000x more willing to publish you than one of the major popular presses.

UncleMeat3• 3 years ago

They also do academic reviews in ways that popular presses don't. If you are a history professor, a book published by Penguin isn't going to look as good in your tenure packet as a book published by Oxford.

robotresearcher3• 3 years ago

Plus textbooks. Some of which sell in volume, like SICP mentioned above.

noelwelsh• 3 years ago

Most of my technical books are from a University press. Random examples:

* SICP: MIT Press

* Modern Compiler Implementation in ML: Cambridge University Press

* Creating Symmetry: Princeton University Press (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691161730/cr...)

It really depends on the nature of the book. If it's a first-year undergrad text that is likely to be purchased by thousands of students, a publisher like Addison-Wesley will be interested. If it's solidly mass market applied tech, like "Master Javascript in 32 Seconds" or something, someone like O'Reilly or Manning will probably take it. If it's more niche and technical it's likely to be a University press.

University presses do publish some absolute bangers. Creating Symmetry, for example, is an absolutely beautiful book combining maths and art. MIT has a great series on game design. Cambridge is very strong in machine learning and maths.

IKantRead• 3 years ago

Wow, that's interesting because some of my favorite books are from university presses, often smaller ones (but MIT Press, Cambridge and Princeton are pretty well represented).

I do find that my philosophy and critical theory books are the ones that more heavily come from university presses. In general the humanities tend to have stronger presence in the university presses (largely because books, not papers, are the publication format of choice for those areas).

alephnerd• 3 years ago

They play a critical role in publishing regional authors and documenting folk cultures. Plenty of regional University presses will publish contemporary fiction, poetry, local history, etc.

slyall• 3 years ago

A press can be one way for a smaller University to have an outsized impact. For example I read books about Spaceflight and the University of Nebraska Press has a great series called "Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight" which I have read many of:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/outward-odyssey-a-p...

If you look here they have many other series on all sorts of topics:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/series/

I also often end up read books by other University presses.

I_am_uncreative2• 3 years ago

I'm a PhD Candidate and was very disappointed to find out that my university no longer does printed copies of dissertations. I really wish they did.

robotresearcher3• 3 years ago

You can get it printed and bound yourself for your bookshelf, plus one for your mom and one for your advisor if they are interested. At my grad school we had to arrange that ourselves using the prescribed service, and deliver the finished books to the university. I don't recall it being super expensive.

whatshisface2• 3 years ago

I wonder if we'll live to a time when you have to go to Staples for your diploma...

tkgally2• 3 years ago

Do they put the dissertations online? At the university where I teach, all dissertations are posted as PDFs to a permanent public repository hosted by the university library. (Authors can choose to delay that posting for a few years if they plan to publish the thesis.)

Paper copies of theses are still put in the library as well, with the cost of printing and binding borne the authors.

I_am_uncreative2• 3 years ago

They do! But paper copies do not exist. You can have a paper copy of your dissertation printed, but it is unofficial.

j45• 3 years ago

I wonder how much this is related to incoming revenue changes from books or publications of their own.

onecommentman• 3 years ago

As a point of calibration, a hot melt perfect binding machine for books up to 500 pages, up to 180 books/hour, is around $7000. You know the print cost for laser copies. The “print” aspect, incremental cost and logistics, for a book is pretty modest for any niche interest publications. Speaking here of functional performance of the published content, and not the fetish/status side of the physical book.

My local university press is a hit-and-miss affair. Some books have been real classics, some books have been laughably bad. The university press probably ranks low in institutional power pecking order and so have evolved to operate as little more than a vanity press for certain academic departments. The writing and editing of content proves to be only as good as the academic department pushing its publication. And that is often wanting. In my interest area of local history, my local university press, which should by rights be the top quality publisher, is all over the map in quality, while out-of-state university press books on our local history are uniformly excellent.

WillAdams• 3 years ago

Or, rather than perfect binding, stitch it --- there's probably someone local who does bookbinding, and it's far better than glue.

flerovium• 3 years ago

What is the ongoing cost of the price of ink?

dieselgate• 3 years ago

TIL the difference between "divest" and "disinvest". When seeing the title I didn't think "disinvest" was a "real word" and ironically it is red squiggly underlined on my screen after typing (maybe "dis-invest" is more proper?).

Had only ever heard of universities divesting from {x}

Regardless:

The difference between disinvestment and divestment is nominal and appears to be one of scale. Disinvestment, meaning the sale of shares, can happen in small lots at any time to raise funds without losing control of the asset. Divestment or divestiture, on the other hand, usually refers to the sale of controlling shares. [1]

[1] https://www.ansarada.com/mergers-acquisitions/divestiture

Universities have disinvested from their presses just as much as their libraries

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