RLI 287  18 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2015 supplemented (or supported) by university subsidies to their presses to meet the demands of the academic market. This combined market system began to fail5 when monograph sales flattened in the 1970s and 1980s as the number of monographs purchased by college and university libraries, the greatest share of sales, leveled off amid budget cuts6 ...while the number of monographs published continued to climb. This market instability and a feared decline in scholarly communications contributed to the decision of many agencies and funders, most notably the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others, to begin evaluating alternate modes of scholarly communication such as experiments in electronic publication in the 1990s 7 these began with journals but quickly moved into experiments with book-length works. As the Internet began to coalesce, the digital book came to be seen by many as the future of higher education and scholarship, with early projects focused on digitizing special and hidden collections in research libraries or assessing the financial hurdles to establishing electronic libraries. By the mid-1990s the continued weakness of monograph sales and flattening or declining acceptances for publication began to be termed a crisis in scholarly communications within academic departments, university presses, and scholarly societies. In September 1997 the American Council of Learned Societies, the Association of American University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries cosponsored a conference, “The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis or How Can I Get Tenure If You Won’t Publish My Book?” The conference proceedings describe the weakness of the scholarly monograph within an environment struggling to not only adjust to the existence of the Internet, but also to respond to the network being used to distribute digital copies of works and born-digital sources in ways that did not threaten established academic publishers. The conference was convened in response to specific fears: that the number of books published had leveled off, decline in amount-per-title printed (from 1,000–1,500 to anywhere between 200–400), weakening university support for their presses, and fear that “subventions for publishers from agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities had virtually disappeared.”8 Scholarly societies, including the Modern Language Association (MLA) and American Historical Association (AHA), issued their own warnings to members regarding the crisis by the late 1990s and early 2000s. Their more dire predictions went beyond the soft-sales of monographs and greater publisher selectivity, to the possible damage that fewer published books might do to the academic credentialing and hiring processes, as well as further limiting access to scholarship for students, researchers, and the general reading public. Although technology was first used to digitize older books for preservation and to increase access in the early 1990s, the growing challenges to publication moved some to advocate for experiments in electronic books or to argue that the monograph required a new effective means of online publication to be saved.9 The efforts to create digital manuscripts and electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) quickly expanded into a variety of ventures in e-books, e-presses, and alternative funding strategies for digital monographs including open access initiatives, but many of these initiatives have since stalled due to pushback from publishers and (often midcareer) humanities scholars themselves. As the Internet began to coalesce, the digital book came to be seen by many as the future of higher education and scholarship, with early projects focused on digitizing special and hidden collections in