Michael Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for the National Academies Press, noted that his publisher offers more than 4,000 books in free, digital form, “and we are not broke.” Jensen — who, when he isn’t thinking about the future of scholarly publishing, is thinking about environmental issues — said that university presses need to acknowledge “an inconvenient truth about book publishing,” namely that its basic structure won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, the jury’s still out whether or not the university presses will listen, or keep beating their head against the wall until it collapses on top of them.