Today, anyone may have a readership for free online (as an ebook or otherwise). The current book contracts are irrationally in favor of publishers. One should not be too driven by concepts of "prestige" that are now purely an artifact of a largely irrelevant past -- unless of course one is being paid big money to assign one's copyright to a publisher.

Publishers know that academics are (and always have been) desperate to "publish" on any terms and are ill equipped to judge what terms a publishing contract should contain. They are exploiting their window of opportunity now with a frenzy.

If a department head makes judgments about the merit of a work based on the name brand of the publisher rather than the intrinsic quality of the work, it must be because they don't care to be bothered to read it, in which case the don't deserve to be department heads at all. Unless of course a work is so awful to begin with that even the author's colleagues can't be bothered to plow their way through it -- increasingly true of too many books "published" today, alas. They are published because most authors don't know, or for professional reasons don't care, that they are giving their assets in the form of their copyrights away on irrational terms. These distortions to the market explain why practically everything is easily published by someone today.

University presses are every bit as motivated to profit as commercial presses are. Their so-called "nonprofit" status only gives most of them a "second city" complex about proving themselves in the sales arena; however, the charters of most university presses (as opposed to Routledge or Greenwood) require publication approval based on peer review. For academic purposes, therefore, a university press that peer screens might serve as a proxy for quality for some (lazy) department heads.

In my experience, Cambridge has almost no publishing quality controls, despite its eminent name brand. It will literally publish anything, meaning, acquire ownership over any intellectual property on grossly extortionate terms to the author. Cambridge either enforces no particular peer review requirement, or its editors are adroit at evading it. (Corruption is, by the way, rampant at most university presses. Editors logroll for authors they want by rigging the review process). So except for the magical 15th century ring of the "Cambridge" name, it has no leg up on other firms. Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Princeton, followed by Cornell, MIT and California are the most reputable name brands, but they too are subject to pressures to publish anything and everything, since the deals authors are willing to give them are so patently in their favor.

Price is a huge concern for the academic author. Many university and smaller presses are pricing outrageously. This is likely to be even more true of the "commercial" imprints, who have truly horrible visions of price gouging specialists for access to reading copies of a work for which they can be forced to pay if they care to be in the field. This is another reason for authors to insist on retaining control over how their copyrights are managed. It is, however, traditional for the publisher to control pricing. So it is hard to get publishers to agree to any author controls over price, much less a right to a reversion should the author be unhappy. Ebooks are cost free to the publisher; thus a publisher has no reason to keep these prices high, other than its own effort to subsidize their other nonprofitable operations by extorting premiums from works that can bear it. Ebook "publication" is in economic reality a license. That means authors should be entitled as in any subsidiary rights license to approval over that form of exploitation and a minimum of 50% of the publisher's net receipts.

Obviously the best way to control one's own copyright today is to self-publish, online. For an academic who only wants to be read, there is no sense to putting a price wall between their work and the reading public. Particularly if, as is often true, the author himself is the only person or entity who is lifting a finger to promote that work. Academic publishing is a perfect example of market failure due to the stickiness of unexamined conventions of the past.

Technology has brought the costs of even print publication far down over the last 30 years. This is why the number of books published each year has escalated greatly. Simultaneously, quality has declined. So print publication is no longer any kind of proxy even for minimal quality.

Academic writers constantly discuss their royalty rate without bothering to note what that rate is calculated on. The only amount it should be calculated on is retail list price. If it is calculated on net, understand what that net amounts to, disallow unilateral costs that should be 100% footed by the publisher into it, and change the royalty rate (by double, for instance) accordingly.

The most important yet difficult term that all authors should be insisting upon these days is a term limit of no more than 7 to 10 years maximum for any entity to be licensed to publish whatever specific products they actually specialize in putting on the market and have a good track record in -- if print books in hardcover and paperback forms, then license them only to do that. All other rights can be (and by law are, except that publishers often plug deceptive broad language into the contract to cheat the author our of his rights) retained to the exclusive ownership and control of the author.

that doesn't make Routledge equal to these presses.

According to actual empirical evidence, Routledge has a stronger reputation among political scientists than Penn State UP.

Most hard-cover books from university presses (other than Cambridge) cost <$40.

No way!

Routledge was so eager to sign up authors that its review process might become less rigorous . . . I decided to go with the university press later because I felt that I would be writing a better book if I worked hard to incorporate the revisions demanded by its three reviewers.

The reviewers for my academic trade book where more thorough in positing revisions than were the reviewers for my university press books. It may be that my first book required more revisions, but my experience with an academic trade press was exceedingly positive.

In the end, review processes vary greatly even within presses. That is my experience.

I'm at a respectable R2 that takes research pretty seriously (3-2 load, good research support, pre-tenure leave). We've denied tenure for lack of productivity recently. One thing no one pays much attention to is what press your book is published with. They'll want it to be well reviewed by external letter writers and in journals, but the name of the press doesn't really matter.

I have no doubt that some rankings-obsessed departments get all worked up about which press a book is published with. But, a) it's not the norm, and b) it's stupid.

the tenure case would be shaky

Any place where a Routledge book leaves your tenure case shaky is a place that is hostile to awarding tenure.

If someone gets a degree from a so-so PhD program and gets a job at a so-so dept they are going to have trouble getting the attention of the top presses.

Do you have any evidence to support this claim? No!

Then their book, being on a less prestigious publisher, is less likely to be reviewed and noticed.

My first book was via a commercial academic publisher, and it received more reviews, and greater scholarly attention, then any of my subsequently published university press books.

But those days are over. I am afraid that at many "serious" departments important people are "too busy" to read an entire book by a tenure candidate -although they won't admit it- and the differing signal of Routledge vs. Princeton will make a big difference.

Note, I am NOT saying that all Princeton or Cambridge books are superior in "quality" to all Routledge books. The placement of a manuscript is itself in part a function of prior advantages/disadvantages. If someone gets a degree from a so-so PhD program and gets a job at a so-so dept they are going to have trouble getting the attention of the top presses. Then their book, being on a less prestigious publisher, is less likely to be reviewed and noticed. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer etc.

None of this means that some books on less prestigious presses are not a greater contribution to knowledge than books on tonier presses or that there is no mobility in the system. Books on less prestigious presses can make an impact. But let's admit that these structural factors and biases are there.

arguments would have benefited from being 30 pages instead of 200

That may be true of your arguments, but real thinkers need 100 to 200 pages to thoroughly expound their ideas.

That would be a great character reference.

Many more places are requiring a book for tenure (where the field is a book field), which means there are many more manuscripts out there, all fighting for many fewer slots among a rapidly dwindling group of academic presses, who are growing less and less interested in publishing specialized monographs. Some folks who were able to place at Cambridge/Princeton/California in the past would be thrilled to get a contract from Routledge now.

Those of you dealing with T&P need to pull your collective heads out of your asses. Please recognize that economic factors beyond our control have killed the model we have traditionally used to judge scholarly productivity. Punishing young scholars because the market is killing academic publishing makes no sense.