Miller is more skeptical. “The authors are people who are trying to write for a more general audience, but that audience spans the illiterate to the incredibly erudite. I don’t think the book is only for scholars…But it’s hard for me to judge what an average ignorant person finds hard to understand,” she says. “Some Americans are so ignorant it’s hard to say what the general reader is. The average American these days doesn’t even read.”

And though the book is often touted as what will be this year’s most popular holiday present, it is, admittedly, an expensive gift for the average American—even an intelligent one. Another reviewer, Scott Kaufman, Professor of English at University of California, Irvine, urges other academics to pursue the approachable prose that is, for the most part, proffered by “Literary History.” Yet he, among others, has described its relatively hefty price as “prohibitive,” calling into question its ability to be accessible if it is not affordable. While HU Press’ Sales Director, Susan Donnelly, says the work has been selling well, some believe the major market for the anthology is an institutional, rather than an individual, one.

“I’m sure that the sales of the book will especially be to libraries of various sorts, and most of all to college and university libraries, because that’s basically the biggest single customer base for big doorstop reference works of this kind,” says Lawrence Buell, Professor of American Literature, who contributed an entry on Margaret Fuller and the Transcendentalist Movement. Citing the price as an investment the individual customer would not perhaps make, he explains, “I’m not trying to sound critical of what the book’s attempting here, by any means. There’s definitely a market in the world for good reference works, but it’s typically an institutional market rather than an individual market.”

DIGITIZE

While it remains uncertain whether the intelligent general reader still exists, Americans do seem to be reading—just, perhaps, via new media. In March 2009, Amazon launched the Kindle DX, its latest version of an electronic platform for digital media and e-books. The company reported that for those books available on the Kindle, sales were already at 35% of the same editions in print. And the Google Book Search Project, which has made over 10 million out-of-copyright titles available online, was able to do so at an estimated cost of $5 million, according to “The New York Times.”

In contrast, HU Press’ last fiscal year, which ended in July 2009, was a “perfect storm,” says Donnelly. Sales fell ten percent, according to a report by “The Crimson.” “Last year there was a financial crisis that the entire globe was situated within…And there is a lot of disorder in the world of publishing so we didn’t have such a great year last year,” she says, noting that the price of books in general is rising.

Though HU Press’ fiscal projections for this annual term are optimistic, the question of the viability and accessibility of printed media still lingers, especially when publishers’ outputs are in the form of expensive hardcover copies. “Hardback books are really expensive these days, especially with university and scholarly presses having a hard time meeting their margin,” Gruesz says. “I’ve personally been buying fewer scholarly books for my collection because even the paperback editions are $30-plus, so it’s a bigger question about the price of books in general.”

According to Donnelly, though the theory behind digitizing titles is solid, it is not necessarily realistic for any publishing company at this time.

“We can’t operate at a loss. We need a financial model that allows us to cover our costs. The Press doesn’t have one yet that is online only. If someone else has one that is online only, I don’t know what that is,” she says, pointing to the considerable expenses of publishing a book such as “Literary History,” with its multitude of contributors.

Despite the lofty expenses associated with a project such as “Literary History,” the rewards—scholarly, not monetary—that HU Press reaps warrant the investment. “The reason Harvard University has a press,” Donnelly says, “is to do things that are worthwhile projects in terms of the world of ideas or scholarship…We want to spend our money—what money we have—doing that kind of thing rather than try to publish something that will sell lots of copies and make lots of money. We want to do something positive for the world of ideas.”

According to Donnelly and Waters, there are plans to adapt the work into e-book format, though none have emerged for an online version. However, for Waters and Sollors, the decision to create “Literary History” as a book, first and foremost, was a natural one. According to Kaufman, the obvious reason behind such a move is that the well-respected academics and published authors in the group of contributors are part of a culture that holds printed editions in higher esteem than Internet versions.

Contributors have echoed this sentiment. “The book has a particular life form that remains very important, that hasn’t been completely substituted by the more fleeting Wikipedia-like existence of Internet resources,” says Sollors, who also speculated that print and online editions need not be mutually exclusive. “But let the book live as a book for a bit,” he says.

Yet the editors and the contributors do recognize the benefits of digitization, although they reason that the book needs to be in print for a few years before HU Press can recoup its costs and even begin to consider an online edition.

“My sense is that eventually they should [digitize] if only to make it accessible for the very substantial fraction of the world reading public, including a fair amount of America, that won’t have ready access to the print version,” Buell says, referring particularly to universities in the People’s Republic of China as one example of a potential market which will likely not be able to capitalize on the information in the work because of minimal acquisition budgets. “There would be a case where some virtualization strategy would be well-advised, and maybe [“Literary History”] could be sold for rights that would keep the Harvard Press from going under and would benefit hundreds of thousands,” he explains.

Wisse agrees, suggesting that while she would not herself have thought to put the book online, digitization has tremendous virtues.