University presses are in trouble. They’ve been pushed into a commercial marketplace in which they’re ill-equipped to function. And the returns are killing them. “Because of returns, success can fail. If a book looks promising, stores will order most or all of a first printing; and the publisher will reprint. But there are always more promises made than kept, and not all books fulfill their promise. Then come the returns, and the publisher has all the copies from the new printing and piles from the first one. Last year, an Ivy League press had one month with more than a million dollars in returns. In some months, some presses had more returns than sales. Why are we so involved with returns? How did university presses move so far into the trade marketplace, ever further from their universities?”