What is a Book Series?

This week, on one of my first leisurely walks on the Grand Forks Greenway, I started to ponder the question: what is a book series. I have the good fortune of editing three book series right now and each of them have rather loosely defined characters. The Annual of ASOR features the publication of legacy archaeological projects as well as edited volumes of various forms. The CHAT book series which I co-edit with Rachael Kiddey features mostly edited volumes that somehow, loosely, intersect with the interests of CHAT. Finally, the NDQ Supplement series includes book length manuscripts — fiction, translations, poetry, and non-fiction — that embodies in some ways the spirit of North Dakota Quarterly.

I find this work quite fulfilling and I hope contributes in some way to the various intellectual and academic communities which fostered my development. It has gotten my wondering, though, about what a book series really is in terms of contemporary trends in scholarly publishing. 

As a reader, I don’t really pay much attention to book series per se. In our fragmented media environment, I feel like publishers and even authors have greater opportunities to promote their works across multiple digital platforms. As a result, the book series as a “destination” for a reader discovery is perhaps less significant than it was in the days of paper catalogues or when we relied solely on library purchases to keep us abreast of developments in our fields.

That said, we might recognize value for publishers of certain highly visible series — such as the Cambridge Companion or Oxford Handbook series and the Very Short Introduction series from Oxford University Press or the Elements series from Cambridge. These series seem to have their own promotional infrastructure that amplifies their commercial intent. More academic series, in contrast, seem to represent a shadow structure behind knowledge making today that may have more influence than is evident to the average academic reader. 

In other words, today, the book series might be more important for authors who are looking for editors and publishers sympathetic to their views, approaches, and arguments. I got to wondering how the disconnection between authors and readers serve to obfuscate the workings of academic knowledge making in our fragmented publishing landscape. This is compounded further by practices of disaggregation where individual chapters or contributions to edited volumes circulate separately from the volume in which they appear and this is not only by design (as publishers are seeking to generate revenue by selling chapters or contributions separately from the book) and by practice as authors share digital offprints via various web archiving services.

I’m not sure whether this is a feature, where editors and publishers have found it easy enough to occlude the processes that shape the knowledge we consume as readers, or a bug where traditional forms of knowledge making break down under the opportunities and pressures of digital distribution.