Today, with the announcement that Harvard University Press will publish 1,000 digitized books on Scribd, the academic world took one more step in its glacially slow march into the digital age.

Over ten years ago, when I first started my graduate work in the humanities, there was already much talk of the looming crisis in academic publishing. Print runs for academic works written by even major scholars in a given discipline are pitifully small—1,000 would be considered decent-sized. The work of junior faculty, who are trying to publish to beef up a CV, means that the runs are smaller still.�

It's very hard to make money on such small print runs, which result in books with sky-high cover prices and limited availability. All of this has made it harder for scholars to publish and harder for non-specialists to justify the effort and expense of obtaining good, scholarly work. In sum, the present situation benefits nobody—scholars, the public, or the financially strapped publishing houses.

But there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem to moving scholarship online. Scholarly publishers, which are central to the all-important vetting and peer review process, don't do digital, and they look down on anything published in a digital format. And that attitude pervades the academic community: scholars still pursue the peer-reviewed printed book as the ultimate CV trophy and turn their noses up a digital, giving the publishers little incentive to experiment with digital distribution.�

But, as HUP's tiny little 1,000-book foray into the world of digital possibly indicates, academic publishers may be forced into the arms of digital by the same rapidly changing circumstances that are pushing regular book publishers toward outlets like Scribd.

It's widely known that Harvard's endowment has imploded during the financial meltdown, and, like other universities with newly diminished financial prospects, the (relatively) cash-strapped school is making some very painful cost-cutting decisions. I wouldn't be surprised if HUP were feeling serious pressure to improve numbers that are probably quite bad—indeed, I'd be surprised if the publisher was not getting squeezed by the university.

My personal hope is that other cash-strapped publishing houses will bite the bullet, move their entire libraries to digital, and send their authors a complimentary, book-shaped box of tissues to cry into when they contemplate the loss of their name on a hardcover. Even if publishers have to downsize, they could still fill the same crucial vetting function while profitably making scholarship available to anyone who can use Google.

If you want a glimpse at the future of scholarly communication, take a look around the econoblogosphere, which has analyzed the crisis in real-time using Scribd to distribute whitepapers, research reports, slide decks, articles, etc. Two decades ago, it would've taken a discipline many years to produce as much detailed and useful analysis of such a large, complex event as the finance and economics profession has produced in the last ten months.�

Good work has risen to the top nearly instantly; witness the rise of Rortybomb, which went from obscure to regularly cited with a single plug by finance uberblogger Felix Salmon.�Across the Curve, sprang from nowhere to become the place for following the action in the bond market when the credit crisis was at its peak.

Of course, I'm not offering up the collective product of the econoblogosphere as "scholarship," but rather as a model for what scholarly communication could look like in a few years, after the economics of print publishing have finally deteriorated to the point that the academy is forced to adapt.