The halcyon days of academic publishing, if they ever existed, are now days of serious-minded business.

More than ever, the presses are printing works of general interest and encouraging writers to trim the manuscripts they send to press.

Though most large university presses are unsubsidized and not-for-profit, the presses are churning out unprecedented numbers of trade books--books that have high general interest sales.

In the display room at the Harvard University Press (HUP) in the Holyoke Center Arcade, books range from The Kindness of Children, a new book by a former kindergarten teacher, to Postal Communication in China and its Modernization, 1860-1896, an older monograph tucked in the rear corner of the room.

Paul M. Adams, marketing director at HUP, estimates that the press prints twice the number of trade books today than it did when he started working at HUP in 1984.

Although the bottom line has ruled academic publishing for several decades, the drive to publish smaller, more popular books has accelerated recently due to a more competitive publishing market.

Selling Scholarship

Since 1972, HUP has been appealing to "a wider general readership beyond the academy, and establishing a trend that many other university presses were to follow some years later," the press writes on its Web site.

And academics have long been writing books for larger audiences. Former professor of psychology B.F. Skinner popularized the psychological theory of behaviorism in his Walden II, and most of astrophysicist Carl Sagan's later work was geared for popular appeal.

Adams estimates that about one third of total sales comes from trade books, while textbooks, reference books and scholarly monographs make up the majority of the remainder.

Although the shift towards more lucrative books has shored up the press' once-shaky financial foundations, Adams emphasizes that HUP is still focused on scholarly publishing.

"University is our middle name," Adams says. "The publishing philosophy is to do a certain number of worthy academic books that are saleable to the trade, but our mission is to publish good works of scholarship."

Beyond university presses' focus on trade books, a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the weekly publication of the nation's colleges and universities claims that the size of scholarly work is shrinking.

Starr Professor of Classical, Modern Jewish and Hebrew Literature and of Comparative Literature James L. Kugel has felt the pinch.

Kugel's recent work, The Bible As It Was, is in fact an abridged version of the manuscript he originally submitted to HUP.