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The conviction persists, though history shows it to be a hallucination, that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact, intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume, an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitalism and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them, we get over them. -John Dewey

To be completely candid: in nearly thirty years of working in higher education, I have never been involved with a project that has been so consistently disparaged as the Rice University Press. The original Rice University Press, a traditional print–based operation, was closed in 1996 after losing money for several years. A few of us restarted it as an all digital press ten years later. “All digital” is the term that has attracted the greatest animus. In mostly private exchanges, the editor-in-chief has been called “delusional”; the press itself a “catch basin” and source for cheap scholarship that would otherwise never see the light of a library shelf; non-rigorous and failing at peer review; and most often “naïve.” The threat posed by the new Rice University Press is, in these terms, not the radical switch to a digital platform that automated much of the costly processes of print publishing, but its dilution of intellectual quality and cheapening of the standards of scholarly communication. To be sure, there has been considerable curiosity and instances of very supportive engagement, but the degree of animosity has been startling.

As has the absence of change in publishing techniques: the “crisis” in scholarly publishing was identified as such in the 1990s. High journal costs which drained library budgets, increasing costs for print publishing, decreasing markets, and over-specialization were all recognized as contributing factors to the decline of annual titles, especially in the humanities. These circumstances also lead to an over-reliance on well-known, established scholars at the expense of the incoming generation. Bob Stein, now at the Institute for the Future of the Book, was discussing the possibility of digital publishing in the mid-1970s. We have had thirty years to ponder the consequences of the rise of the machines in higher education. The persistence of traditional, print-based university presses, which continue to lose a great deal of money, many of which are closing down or at some dramatic brink of failure, is frankly unsettling.

This brief paper presents aspects of my experience as a publisher within the larger context of scholarly communication, with some attempt to conjure reasons why the concept of a new digital press, which is often referred to rhetorically as the inevitable future of academic publishing, has been so difficult to instantiate.

Looking back over the past several years, this should not have been surprising. The criticism of the press has been largely played out on what can be termed the “high ground”: this new press will encourage and facilitate slipshod intellectual content. I will address this high-ground approach, but also want to lower the eyepiece to more mundane issues, which include significant staff lay-offs and a new polycentricity, since I believe digital publishing will mark the end of the traditional academic press industry. An analogy I use in part to explain these circumstances and to help remain committed to the enterprise is the rise of Impressionism in Paris in the nineteenth century. The story or narrative of the appearance of and reaction to impressionistic painting is well known and can be cursorily recounted. The aspects that interest me the most are the availability of new technologies at the time; the change of subject matter the technology fostered; the new, distinct style of painting that was adopted, though with considerable variation; and the changes this style had on the concept of time in painting.