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About Us > Annual Reports

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Annual Report FY 2000-2001

The MIT Press

FY2001 was a busy, productive, turbulent year. Highlights include a record number of new titles released supporting continued growth in frontlist sales; successful completion of the monumental undertaking of building a new warehouse, moving 1.7 million books, and implementing a new inventory management/fulfillment system in partnership with Harvard and Yale; filling several critical positions in the Acquisition Department, including four new senior editors to replace defections; benchmark accomplishments in establishing data warehousing and electronic asset management systems; the launching of our first fee-based e-community, CogNet; the redesign and deployment of our website; the first full year of the implementation of world pricing system; the completion of the process of mounting electronic files for all journals with our hosting partner CatchWord; equity adjustments for about 35% of our staff; a record number of design and publishing awards and prizes; and the worst sales shortfall in Press history.

The financial year ending in June was the worst in recent memory for university press publishing in general. While budgeted shortfall in sales here was not as serious as for most of our sister presses (Yale, Chicago, California, Harvard), book division sales were $1.221 million under budget, the shortfall entirely attributed to domestic backlist sales. Journals net proceeds were about $250K less than expected. Nevertheless, we reported a breakeven on overall operations. No mean feat, especially in light of the warehouse/systems conversion completed during the year, and the other undertakings listed above.

On the positive side, UK/European sales were up 6% overall, exceeding forecast (In fact UK sterling sales were up 20%); subrights income was ahead of budget; and the MIT Press Bookstore sales exceeded forecast.

I think it would be useful here to recount the convergence of several events impacting industry-wide sales, some of which are elements of continuing trends and some particular to this past year.

At $350K, Canadian sales were down 50% from last year. The restructuring of major chains (Chapters and Indigo) forced us to put these customers on hold most of the year because they weren't paying their bills. A similar negative effect happened with Borders, a major chain and one of our major customers, whom we also put on hold for about nine months because we felt their accounting practices in terms of returns and chargebacks and lateness in bill paying left us no alternative but to cut them off until they cleaned up their act. They are buying books again in orderly fashion.

In general, financial stresses and strains that uniquely affect scholarly publishing continue, like the drain on library acquisitions budgets caused by the high cost of scientific, medical and technical journals published by commercial publishers, and the new costs of electronic communications technologies. Furthermore, the continuing growth of interlibrary loans of books, and more recently e-books, does not help sales.

In the textbook arena, students are downloading and printing books that university libraries have put on electronic reserve, free of charge. Campus copy shops are offering penny-a-page deals early in the semester, and turning their backs as students copy entire books. And the used textbook market is more sophisticated than ever. These days, if you go online and type in a title, you'll get seven or eight quotes for it, new and used.

But this last year, almost everybody got hammered from a new direction: the general retail market for books took a nosedive.

Beginning in the mid-1990's, university presses benefited from the explosion of superstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, and web retailers like Amazon.com, all of which were large enough to make room for specialized, scholarly titles. Retailers and distributors greatly expanded their warehouse capacity to feed demand, creating a surge in orders to fill their shelves. Amazon.com, in particular, built four new warehouses in 1999 and added another last year. The Ingram Book Company, the other major distributor, also added new warehouse space and so did BarnesandNoble.com. During FY2001, growth in on-line book sales has flattened and Ingram closed two facilities, in Chino, CA and Denver. In the past year, chains have consolidated, warehouses have closed, and Amazon has fallen on hard times. Finding they've ordered far more books than they can sell, those retailers are returning them to publishers by the crateload.

The Association of American Publishers' preliminary report on industry-wide book sales for 2000 showed sales of adult clothbound books down 11.6% and paperback sales down 7.2%. Sales of university press books also slumped overall, down 2.4%.

In recent years many independent bookstores, which are important channels for sale of scholarly books, have been forced to close by competitive pressure from chains, and that sad trend continues. The American Booksellers Association, the trade association for the independents, reported recently that its membership had dropped by almost 25% in the last year. The smaller chains are also starting to go under; Wallace's and Bibelot are both gone, and the largest chain in Canada, Chapters, is closing stores. Crown Books has filed for bankruptcy. Amazon closed one of its warehouses; Ingram, the largest jobber supplying trade bookstores, closed two of its distribution centers.

All of these recent closings have exacerbated one of the chronic and intractable problems of the publishing industry: the practice by publishers of accepting unsold stock from bookstores and issuing credits against unpaid invoices. "Gone today, here tomorrow," is a bitter publishing joke in the best of times. The number of adult hardcover consumer books returned from bookstores in the first four months of this year rose 11 percent from last year, and the number of adult trade paperbacks rose 13 percent.

During fy2001 the university presses of MIT, Harvard, and Yale completed construction of a new distribution center, named TriLiteral, located in Cumberland, RI. MIT Press and Harvard University Press closed its existing joint warehouse, Uniserv, in Littleton, MA and moved all inventory to the new distribution center. MIT press began shipping from the new facility in April 2001. In the spring of 2002 the three presses will merge their order processing and customer service operations into TriLiteral and will combine orders for their books into single shipments to the same customer accounts.

Highlights from the Book Division

MIT Authors:

Among the noteworthy books by non-MIT people from our scholarly and professional program were:

New hardcover books for trade and general audiences included:

Books published primarily as texts included:

Editors in the Acquisitions Department included: Laurence Cohen (Editor-in-chief; Social Theory, Science & Technology Studies); Roger Conover (Art and Architecture); John Covell and Elizabeth Murry (Economics, Finance, and Business); Clay Morgan (Environmental Studies); Barbara Murphy (Neuroscience); Robert Prior and Douglas Sery (Computer Science); and Tom Stone (Psychology and Linguistics).

Journals

In FY 2001, the Journals program had earned sales of $4.8 million, a 4% increase from last year. The deferred subscription reserve account increased from $1,946,544 to $2.3 million. The year was spent in improving processes for our new fulfillment system and in developing electronic versions of all our journals through a technology partner, CatchWord Ltd. In addition, the division was heavily involved in the launching of our electronic community MIT CogNet, and in supporting its marketing and subscription efforts.

Five new journals were added: Journal of Machine Learning Research, Grey Room, American Journal of Bioethics, Global Environmental Politics, and NBER/Innovation Policy and the Economy (annual). Five journals terminated or left our program mid-year: Assemblage, Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, Journal of Functional and Logic Programming, and Real Estate Economics.

The division ends the year still publishing 38 journals. The others are: Artificial Life, Computational Linguistics, Computer Music Journal, Design Issues, TDR/The Drama Review, Evolutionary Computation, Harvard Design Magazine, International Organization, International Security, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Leonardo/Leonardo Electronic Almanac/Leonardo Music Journal, Linguistic Inquiry, NBER Frontiers in Health Policy Research, NBER Macroeconomics Annual, Markup Languages, NBER Tax Policy and the Economy, Neural Computation, Neurology and Clinical Neurophysiology, October, Perspectives on Science, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, Reflections: The SoL Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, and The Washington Quarterly.

Editorial and Management Boards

Faculty serving on the MIT Press Editorial Board this year were Joshua Cohen, Carol Fleishauer, Rafael A. Bras, Jed Buchwald, Joseph Jacobson, Leslie Pack Kaebling, Nancy Kanwisher, Michael Scott Morton, and Board Chair William Mitchell. Frank Urbanowski and Ann Wolpert served as ex-officio members.

The MIT Press Management Board met twice during the year. Members of the Board were: Ann J. Wolpert (board chair), Mary Curtis, Joseph Esposito, Jack Goellner, William Arms, John Hanley, Stephen Lerman, William Mitchell, Richard Rowe, Jerome Rubin, Richard Schmalensee, Hal Abelson, and Ian Page. Frank Urbanowski served as ex-officio.

Digital Projects Lab (DPL)

The Press's flagship e-community site for the brain and cognitive sciences, CogNet, launched as a fee-based service on October 1st of last year. Through the end of June 2001 we have acquired 47 paid institutional site licenses totaling $62k and an additional $15k in member subscriptions by individuals. This coming fiscal year we plan to upgrade our software toolkit (from the ArsDigita Community System to a Java-based architecture).

The DPL is also involved in a major initiative to digitize the Press's out-of-print book and journal collection. Approximately ~2500 books from the Press's complete published collection of ~6500 titles are now out of print and unavailable. The project is a joint venture with Hewlett Packard Laboratories' Digital Content and Remastering Department. The DPL is currently staffed by a general manager, a senior project manager, one lead programmer/analyst and two junior programmers, and a web designer.

Marketing

The Marketing Department at The MIT Press took on two major projects in the last fiscal year. We built a new web site, in cooperation with the journals department, and we played a major role in the move to the new warehouse and in the implementation of a new order processing system, which also includes a sales analysis and accounting module.

Overall sales were down from last year by 5.1%, due mainly to two factors, one foreign and one domestic. A major bookselling chain in Canada, Chapters, went bankrupt. In previous years, we had done over $300,000 in business with this Chain. In the US, a major wholesaler closed two distribution centers which cut our sales to wholesalers by roughly $900,000 overall. Despite these two major losses, which add up to over $1,200,000, gains were made in other sectors leaving us down in net dollars by $925,100.

Because Chapters is merging with a viable chain and the merger has been approved by the Canadian government, and because we see signs of stabilization in the wholesaler sector in the US, we have projected a modest increase in income for next year. Reports from Domestic Sales, Promotions, International Marketing and Electronic Marketing follow.

Domestic Sales

After the last three years of strong sales led by triple digit growth in our webseller market, sales for FY2000-2001 experienced an abrupt flattening. While front list sales remained strong, back list sales dropped significantly due to the distribution downsizing of a few of our largest customers. In the past year, warehouses for Ingram, amazon.com, and fatbrain.com have closed a total of seven warehouses. In addition to these closures some significant accounts have gone out of business, including Crown, Bibelot, and BigWords.com. Last year we estimated that 50% of the MIT Press books sold online were provided through a wholesaler. It is no surprise that this is the hardest his customer category this fiscal year, down from $5,466,687 to $4,544,589. Wholesalers not only absorb the .com downturn but also the returns of small chains and independents that have gone out of business.

In addition to closing warehouses, most accounts large and small, are adopting a philosophy of "just in time" ordering. For instance, Ingram, who in the past ordered for a 12-16 week ordering cycle has now trimmed this to 6-8 weeks. Most realize overstocking is expensive and are instead increasingly relying on publishers for quicker order turnaround. The importance of recently updating our warehouse operations cannot be overstated. Speed of delivery will become a key component in maintaining favorable status with our accounts and allowing us to more time to effectively capitalize on various forms of publicity that often hit with little lead time to get books to accounts.

Chain stores remain strong with Barnes and Noble adding FatBrain to their company roster. Barnes and Noble’s distribution centers now provide fulfillment for their superstores, their college division, bn.com, and FatBrain.com. After their deal fell through last year with Ingram, Barnes and Noble have put considerable emphasis on distribution self-sufficiency, providing another blow to wholesalers who were heavily relied upon by the chains to fulfill special orders and high level stock. In August, we resumed shipping to Borders after placing them on hold for nine months while we worked out various issues concerning late payments, excessive returns and chargebacks.

Electronic Marketing

With the help of an outside web developer and designer, the Press has developed an all-new web site. Slated to launch in July, the new site brings many new features and upgrades, including an updated graphic design, a modern shopping cart system, and vastly improved searching capabilities. One of the site's most important features is an improved categorization system, allowing for better linking between related books, journals, and digital products.

The new site's open architecture will allow the Press to undertake several system integration projects in the coming year. The site will be linked with our Bookmaster fulfillment system, making possible much quicker order turnaround, and also with the EclipseNet journals fulfillment system, which will allow journals customers to access their subscription information online. The site may also be upgraded to handle real-time e-commerce transactions for e-book order fulfillment.

International Marketing

MIT Press total export sales during FY 01 came in at $5.047M – down 5.5% from previous fiscal year. Total export sales account for approximately 30% of overall book sales for the Press.

Our best results for international sales came out of our London Office/Wiley UK – combined UK and European sales increased to $3.280M up 2.8% over previous fiscal year. It’s been a mixed selling season in the UK seeing sales growth and optimism with the independents, wholesalers, museum and gallery shops, and specialist booksellers – while it was another difficult period for UK chain booksellers such as Waterstone’s and Blackwells due to heavy returns and continuing management problems. Sales in continental Europe are holding steady despite the majority of independent bookseller’s ongoing concern over the high list prices of most imported English-language books. Our European sales are coming almost entirely from the academic independent booksellers.

In the Canadian market, we suffered enormous returns from Chapters, Canada’s largest chain bookseller which was sold last year and recently merged with Canada’s other leading chain Indigo Books, and has now become Chapters-Indigo. Chapters remained on credit hold for most of FY 01 due to not having made a payment to MITP since August 2000. Payment delays and returns of up to 100% by Chapters, were problems felt industry-wide by Canadian and US publishers. The sales that we did acheive in Canada were from the independents and mostly text sales.

The weakened Australian dollar continues to make imported US books expensive and consequently Oz consumers cut back on purchasing books including much needed academic and reference titles. Text sales remain steady due to special pricing considerations to make the books more affordable.

Sales to Japan are slightly down from last fiscal year and perhaps not too worisome at this time – the slight decline due to expected cuts in both private and public university library budgets. In other export markets we experienced sales growth in parts of the Far East, Middle East and sub-Continent but sales to Latin America remain exceedingly challenging except for the significant iincrease in sales to Mexico. All export sales felt the impact of the move to the new warehouse –TriLiteral, by way of delayed order processing and shipments.

Direct Mail

Fiscal 2001 was an extremely active direct mail year, with the production of fourteen subject area catalogs, two special promotions, numerous single book flyers, and two seasonal announcement catalogs. Because of our conversion to Bookmaster, we are currently unable to produce sales reports that fully reflect our direct mail sales for the fourth quarter. We estimate our traceable direct mail sales for FY’01 to be about $179,170. Direct mail’s bottom line continues to be down from previous fiscal years. We believe direct mail sales are hurt primarily by online booksellers, who can offer much quicker delivery than we can, as well as discounts on some titles. Nevertheless, we continue to believe that direct mail remains a highly effective means of promoting MIT Press titles, and of making our professional customers aware of new and backlist books in their specific areas of interest.

Our Cognitive Science catalogs reflected the strongest direct mail sales at $34,432 for the year. This is followed by Economics at $30, 659 and Neuroscience at $23, 646.

Textbook Sales

In fiscal 2001 we mailed thirty direct mail text promotions to over 85,000 U.S. professors in various disciplines. The Fall of 2000 saw the largest direct mail promotion in at least a decade. Highlights included new editions of the best selling texts of Benninga’s Financialing Modeling and Viscusi’s Economics of Regulation and Antitrust. New editions of successful texts are important revenue generators for The Press. At one point, both the first and second editions of Benninga’s text were on our bestseller list. Fall 2000 also featured two major new economics texts in Cabral’s Introduction to Industrial Organization and Ljungqvist and Sargent’s Recursive Macroecomnimc Theory.

Because the warehouse change occurred at the same time that spring direct mail text requests were arriving, we fulfilled text requests from the office. This involved sending out hundreds and hundreds of examination copies. Highlights of the Spring campaigns were Friedman/Essentials of Programming Languages 2E, which we took over from Mcgraw Hill, and Felliesen/Introduction to Computer Programming. Felleisen has recently been adopted at Georgia Tech for a class of 1500 students per semester, one of the largest adoptions ever for one of our textbooks.

Exhibits

The MIT Press exhibited titles at 168 U.S. professional and academic conferences in fiscal 2001, generating $143,784 in onsite sales plus $222, 735 in "mail-in" sales. Total sales generated by U.S. Exhibits in FY 2001: $366,519, an increase of more than $59,000 from fiscal 2000. Overall expenses this year were slightly lower than last year’s.

Here are the year’s top ten U.S. conferences, ranked by sales:

1. Society for Neuroscience, November 5-8, 2000, New Orleans, LA
2. Allied Social Science Association, January 5-7, 2001, New Orleans, LA
3. College Art Association, February 28-March 3, 2001, Chicago, IL
4. Econometric Society World Congress, August 11-16, 2000, Seattle, WA
5. International Society of Molecular Biology, August 20-23, 2000, La Jolla, CA
6. Society for Research in Child Development, April 19-22, 2001, Minneapolis, MN
7. Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology, April 29-May 4, 2001, Fort Lauderdale, FL
8. Super Computing 2000, November 16-19, 2000, Dallas, TX
9. American Association for Artificial Intelligence, August 1-3, 2000, Austin, TX
10. Psychonomic Society, November 16-19, 2000, New Orleans, LA

Advertising

Advertisements for MIT Press books appeared in almost 600 trade and scholarly journals and magazines, as well as conference programs and websites. All of these ads were produced in-house by our Advertising Manager. The continued focus of the advertising program is to implement better target marketing and wider exposure, with an eye to new print and online media, while staying under budget. Major ad campaigns were implemented for Robo sapiens, MIT CogNet, Labored Relations, Culture in Practice, Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, Gateway to Memory, The Wind of the Hundred Days, Clean New World, Karl Blossfeldt, The Elusive Quest for Growth, Writing on Water, and The Invisible Heart.

Advertisements for these books appeared in such publications as American Scientist, Technology Review, The New York Review of Books, Economic Journal, Foreign Affairs, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, New Republic, Lingua Franca, Mother Jones, Whole Earth, The New York Times Book Review, Art in America, and Artforum. Banner ads were placed on the slash.org website.

Artforum. Banner ads were placed on the slash.org website.

Publicity

MIT Press titles received extensive coverage in U.S. newspapers, magazines and journals in fiscal 2001, and a number of MIT Press authors discussed their work on radio and television programs.

This year’s most widely and favorably reviewed title was Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species by Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio. An illustrated look at the current state of robotics, the book presents haunting photographs of humanoid and biomimetic robots along with interviews and profiles of their inventors, most of whom work in labs in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. Robo sapiens was the subject of feature articles and reviews in Wired magazine (cover story, September 2000), Discover magazine, Scientific American (featured review), The Wall Street Journal, Salon.com, The San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Industry Standard, Business 2.0, Psychology Today, ArtByte, Publishers Weekly, and many others. In his Scientific American review, professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge say, "It is very difficult to write clearly and simply about such things and still remain faithful to the underlying technology. Menzel and D’Aluisio accomplish this feat. The interviews and sidebars are consistently intriguing but also show great effort in avoiding the misinterpretations that could come from comparing so many different research enterprises . . . . Menzel’s color photos are beautiful and, for the most part, extremely effective."

Russell Roberts’s The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance also received high-profile coverage. Milton Friedman called the book, which uses the genre of romance fiction to address current economic and business issues, "A page-turning, well-written love story that also teaches an impressive amount of economics." The author discussed the book on television and radio programs including C-SPAN’s Book-TV, NPR’s "Talk of the Nation," and CNBC’s "Today’s Business." Reviews and opinion pieces about the book appeared in Barron’s, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, American Enterprise Magazine (excerpt), National Journal, Reason Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Business Economics, The Daily Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, St. Louis Dispatch, The Irish Times and others. George Will’s widely-syndicated Washington Post column called The Invisible Heart "delightfully didactic." A starred review in Kirkus described it as "radical economic ideas delivered as marvelously inventive fiction." Publishers Weekly’s review called the book a "snappy, well-written novel [that] casts economic polemic in fictional form."

Jagdish Bhagwati’s The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization also received a substantial amount of U.S. coverage. Reviews, news stories, interviews, and opinion pieces appeared in Booklist, Foreign Affairs, Lingua Franca, International Economy Magazine, Business 2.0, The New York Times, Industry Standard (website), International Finance, Barnes & Noble, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Independent, and the India-West newspaper.

Maud Lavin’s Clean New World has so far been reviewed by The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, Design Issues, Metropolis, Artbyte, I.D., Print Magazine, Techdirections, and Afterimage.

Rodolfo Llinas’s I of the Vortex was reviewed by Discover magazine, American Scientist, and the San Francisco Examiner, and excerpted in Cerebrum.

Vaclav Smil’s Feeding the World: A Challenge for the Twenty-First Century received positive reviews in all three of the major U.S. general science publications. Science, The American Scientist, and Scientific American all praised Smil’s book, which explains how we can produce enough food to support the world’s growing population, without irreparably damaging the biosphere. (On the strength of this book and others, Smil is the recipient of this year’s AAAS prize for Public Understanding of Science and Technology, as described in the awards section, below.)

Electronic Promotion

In fiscal 2001, we posted announcements of all new professional and many new trade books to e-mail lists and Usenet groups in relevant fields. We also negotiated links from related websites to our own. And we made extensive use of our own email lists, which contain the email addresses of visitors to our site who have bought books, subscribed to journals, or asked to receive announcements of new titles on particular subjects. Over the past year, we’ve developed robust databases that generate book announcements more quickly, store detailed information more effectively, and report more clearly on electronic promotion activities.

This type of promotion works particularly well for certain kinds of books, and we spent additional time promoting these books, using listserv search engines and exploring the Internet to find appropriate lists and websites. Titles in computer science, robotics, and new media, which often garner hundreds of hits per month as a result of our e-promotion campaigns, represent a large portion of the books in this category. Making Use by John Carroll, for example, received 221 hits in a one-month period, while Introduction to AI Robotics by Robin R. Murphy received 231.

Certain books in other categories also garnered many hits, often from people who receive announcements through our email lists. The Mind Doesn't Work that Way by Jerry Fodor received 185 hits after we sent an announcement to our Philosophy email list, our Cognition, Brain, and Behavior email list, and two listservs. Women Becoming Mathematicians by Margaret A. M. Murray, which received 70 hits in one month, appeared on a number of women’s-studies-related listservs and websites in addition to our History of Science and Technology, Science and Technology, and Gender Studies email lists.

Awards

The Press’s books and authors were honored in a wide variety of contexts and competitions in fiscal 2001, with particular recognition in the categories of design and lifetime achievement. Titles winning multiple design awards include Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen, which won four awards for its elegant design by (former) MIT Press designer Ori Kometani, and Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity by Ulrich Lehmann, which won three awards for its design, also by Ori Kometani. Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape by Jan Albers, The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 by Eve Blau, and Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America by Margaret A. M. Murray each won two design awards.

Two MIT Press authors were presented with Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2001. Vaclav Smil, author of numerous MIT Press titles including Energies, Enriching the Earth, and Feeding the World, received the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology presented in February of 2001 at the association’s annual meeting in San Francisco. This prestigious award "honors working scientists and engineers who make outstanding contributions to the ‘popularization of science." Lewis Branscomb, who has edited several MIT Press titles on science and technology policy, received the Vannevar Bush Award presented in May of 2001 by the National Science Board (NSB) at a Department of State-hosted awards dinner. The award is given for lifetime achievement in science and public service.

Here are some additional highlights from July 2000 through June 2001. For outstanding design, MIT Press books were honored in five different competitions.

Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity by Ulrich Lehmann, in the categories of Scholarly Illustrated & Jackets and Covers, and Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen, in the category of Scholarly Illustrated, were chosen as winners in the AAUP annual Book, Jacket, and Journal competition for excellence in design. The competition took place on January 11 and 12, 2001. The winners were showcased at the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) Annual Meeting in Toronto, June 16-19, and then proceeded on a tour.

Photography in Boston, 1955-1985 edited by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo and Gillian Nagler, along with book designer Jean Wilcox was awarded First Place in the category of Books Over $10 in the New England Museum Association Publications Award presented by the New England Museum Association (NEMA). The book will be exhibited at the NEMA annual conference in Newport, Rhode Island, November 14-16, 2001 and the winners will be announced in the summer issue of NemaNews. Following the conference, all entries are donated to the Boston Public Library.

Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen and Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity by Ulrich Lehmann were chosen as "outstanding examples of book and book cover design" in the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2000 competition presented by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA). The books will be displayed at AIGA’s National Design Center in New York, August 2001. The show will travel nationally and be documented in 365: AIGA Year in Design, AIGA’s annual design compendium. The winners will also exhibit at the Frankfurt International Book Fair, Fall 2001.

Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity by Ulrich Lehmann, and Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America by Margaret A. M. Murray were selected to appear in Print: America's Graphic Design Magazine as part of Print's Regional Design Annual 2001. The books will appear in the section devoted to the Eastern Region of the country in late September, 2001. The designers will receive Certificates of Design Excellence in recognition of their outstanding work.

Each Wild Idea: Writing, Photography, History by Geoffrey Batchen was awarded a BoNE (Best of New England) Award presented by the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Boston. This book was chosen from among 117 books as one of 39 of the best designed books featured at the 2001 BoNE Show on display at MassArt's Bakalar Gallery June 7-July 13, 2001. The 117 books in the show were selected from 800 entries. The following MIT Press books also appeared in the show: The Internet Upheaval: Raising Questions, Seeking Answers in Communications Policy edited by Ingo Vogelsang and Benjamin M. Compaine, Clean New World: Culture, Politics, and Graphic Design by Maud Lavin, Truth from Trash: How Learning Makes Sense by Chris Thornton, Coherence in Thought and Action by Paul Thagard, and Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn.

In addition to winning a design award, Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating a Professional Identity in Post-World War II America by Margaret A. M. Murray received Honorable Mention in the category of History of Science & Technology in the 2000 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Winners in this competition included An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage by Malcolm Macmillan in the category of History of Science & Technology and How Children Learn the Meanings of Words by Paul Bloom in the category of Psychology. The awards were presented at a luncheon ceremony on Tuesday, February 6, 2001 during the P/SP Annual Conference in Washington D.C.

Another double winner, Hands on the Land: A History of the Vermont Landscape by Jan Albers was awarded the 2001 Media Award presented by the National Arbor Day Foundation and one of the Vermont Book Professionals Association (VBPA) Milestone Awards 2000 as one of the Judges' Three Favorite Books, chosen from the Twelve Best Books of Vermont. The Media award recognizes outstanding publications which bring issues relative to the importance of trees and conservation to the public and was presented on April 28, 2001 at the 29th annual National Arbor Day Awards Banquet and Ceremonies in Nebraska City, Nebraska. The VBPA Awards were presented at the VBPA Awards Night held at the Montshire Museum in Norwich, VT June 9, 2001.

The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 by Eve Blau received two awards, recognizing this book’s importance as a representation of both Austrian culture and architecture. The Center for Austrian Studies presented this title with the 2000 Austrian Cultural Institute Prize for the best book on Austrian History announced at the Center’s annual conference on April 5, 2001. The Society of Architectural Historians rewarded Blau’s book with the 2001 Hitchcock Award for excellence in architectural publications. This award was presented at the Society's Annual Meeting on Thursday, April 19, 2001 in Toronto, Ontario.

Another book honored at the Society of Architectural Historian’s Annual Meeting was Mapping Boston by Alex Krieger and David Cobb with Amy Turner. This book received the 2001 Philip C. Johnson Award. As with the Hitchcock Award, this prize is given for excellence in architectural publications.

Two medical awards have been given to MIT Press books. The First Prize for the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) Medical Book Award in the category of Books for Allied Health Professionals was awarded to Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy by Alfred I. Tauber. The William H. Welch Medal for 2001 presented by the American Association for the History of Medicine was awarded to The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine by Shigehisa Kuriyama. The medal is awarded "to the sole author of a book of outstanding scholarly merit in the field of medical history published during the five calendar years preceding the award."

The International Studies Association presented the Press with two awards. The Harold and Margaret Sprout Award for the best book published on the topic of international environmental affairs was presented to Exporting Environmentalism: U.S. Multinational Chemical Corporations in Brazil and Mexico by Ronie Garcia-Johnson by the Environmental Studies Section of the ISA. Domestic Sources of International Environmental Policy: Industry, Environmentalists, and U.S. Power by Elizabeth R. DeSombre received the 2001 Chadwick F. Alger Prize for the best book published in 2000 in the area of international organization. The awards were presented on Thursday, February 22, 2001 at the ISA convention in Chicago.

In economics, The MIT Press received the 43rd Nikkei Prize for Excellent Books in Economic Science for The Spatial Economy by Masahisa Fujita, Paul R. Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables. The award was announced on October 11, 2000 by the Japan Center for Economic Research (JCER).

In photography, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity by Kim Sichel was chosen as a finalist in the 2000 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Awards presented by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation. The winners were announced at The Arts Club in London on Tuesday, February 6, 2001.

The 2001 Lionel Trilling Book Award for the best book by a Columbia University professor was awarded to Jonathan Crary for Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. The awards were presented at Columbia's annual awards ceremony, Monday, April 23, 2001 by the 2001 Academic Awards Committee of Columbia College.

Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio was a winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards (The IPPY Awards) in the category of Science presented by Independent Publisher Magazine. The awards were presented at Book Expo America (BEA) in Chicago, IL June 1-3, 2001.

Finally, the Lewis Mumford Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Technics presented by the Media Ecology Association (MEA) was presented to Remediation: Understanding New Media by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. The award was announced at the MEA's annual convention in New York City, June 15, 2001.

Subsidiary Rights

Our subsidiary rights program has at its core the sale of translation rights to our books. The income generated by the licensing of foreign rights decreased by seven percent since FY00. The number of translation contracts increased from 108 contracts signed during FY00 to 124 during the same period in FY01. The average size of the advances paid against royalties has decreased slightly in most markets, particularly Japan, due to a struggling economy. However, royalty scales remain stable and over time we make up for smaller advances with royalties. The number of translation contracts signed for simplified character editions for distribution in mainland China continues to increase steadily, as do the advances and the royalty scales. Total income from translations remains spread evenly between backlist and frontlist titles. Our strongest disciplines in the translation market are economics and cognitive science.

A significant shift over the last few years has been the increase in income from our reprint program, which includes permission to photocopy and to publish excerpts from our books, as well as the sale of paperback reprints. It is unfortunate that in FY01 The Sciences, one of our best clients for excerpts, was closed down by the New York Academy of Sciences.

In the category of reprint sales, we continue to license selected English language reprints in those markets where we forecast limited income from sales of our own editions. Income from our reprint program increased by eighteen percent since FY00, and constitutes a substantial portion of total subsidiary rights income.

During FY01 income from sales to book clubs increased by seventy-eight percent since FY00. Following a period of consolidation and reorganization in the book club industry, the number of MIT Press titles featured continues to increase gradually. This market is the least predictable for subsidiary rights; it depends both on our publishing list and on the financial formula required by book clubs.

Income from the license of electronic rights during FY01 increased by nineteen percent. This figure is somewhat misleading: We make a distinction between sales of the entire book in electronic form and sales of portions of books for which we receive royalties on the basis of frequency of access. Only the second category is included as subsidiary rights income. Overall, subsidiary rights income in FY01 increased by 6.1 % over FY00.

Subsidiary Rights Income FY99-FY01

*Please note that this total reflects disbursement of royalties due an author who requested payment before the end of the royalty year.

Bookstore

FY01 dollar sales comp. to FY00

MITP portion 418,773 = 53% of sales

Sales

Sales in fiscal year 2001 climbed 6% compared to the previous year to give us the third highest grossing total in our store’s history. Growth areas included a 6% rebound in MIT Press paperback sales, a 2% rise in non-MIT Press items, and a 143% rise in hurt book sales. The large increase in hurt book sales was largely due to the two "loading dock sales" we held this year which themselves grossed about 55k. We also had success in correcting the slide in Press vs. non-Press sales with 53% of sales this year being made on MIT Press books (as opposed to 50% last year). Press hardcover sales dropped for the second year in a row; we will increase our efforts to rectify this trend.

Inventory

One of our goals for this last year was to reduce the amount of stock in the store while maintaining depth and sales. Through more intelligent ordering and more efficient stock handling, we successfully reduced the amount on non-MIT Press inventory by 18% and the amount of MIT Press inventory by 6%.

Expenses

Our second major goal was to reduce the Bookstore’s Expenses without hurting sales. We successfully cut our expenses in all areas. Our overall expenses were 17% less in FY01 than compared to FY00.

Staff

We benefited this year from a relatively stable staff of talented booksellers and look forward to a period of more focused training in the new fiscal year. Also, the newly instituted dual-management system continues to work effectively and efficiently.

Accomplishments

In addition to previously mentioned successes in inventory control and operating expenses, we continued our plan of physical improvements in the store with the installation of a new anti-theft security system, an improved computer infrastructure, and a more efficient redesign of our office and storage areas.

Future Plans

In the new year we intend to continue improvements to the store interior, including a new lighting system, new in-store signage, and better display units. We also plan to increase the street visibility of the store. Further work on the bookstore website is also on the agenda.

-- Frank Urbanowski