What links 69 Nobel Laureates since the year 2000, 10 Pulitzer Prizes, winners of the T S Eliot and British Academy Book Prizes and multiple US National Book Awards? What area of publishing generates 12,500 books a year and more than 2,000 journals, employs more than 20,000 people (sustaining many more through the supply chain) and turns over more than £2bn per annum on a mission—rather than profit—focused basis?

Regular readers of the trade press might struggle to name this unsung component of the publishing ecosystem, despite a history stretching back to 1534, a global readership of both paid-for and open content, and an international trade association spanning members from the Pacific island of Guam to Scandinavia. Yet the university press sector is thriving, offering reassuring complexity in an age that privileges brevity and simplicity in its dominant communication channels.

It is perhaps understandable that university presses have tended to fly under the radar, for their role has always been to put the idea first. They serve as both a repository and an incubator of ideas that have shaped the world. Their commitment to rigorous peer review—careful scrutiny by leading scholars—ensures that the words “university press” on the spine of a book are a sign of integrity.

 University press books can inform us about the hot topics of the day, such as Yale’s As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence or Princeton’s Slow Burn: The Hidden Costs of a Warming World; they have helped educate generations of students, exemplified by Manchester’s perennial Beginning Theory and University of Michigan Press’ Academic Writing for Graduate Students; and they can bring new understanding to subjects we thought we understood, such as Bristol’s What Is War for? But, set against the sharp corporate PR of our cousins, university presses appear to be the most naturally reticent part of our industry: no lists of rights deals, staff promotions and awards appear in The Bookseller—there appears to be a near silent earnestness.

University presses inject essential bibliodiversity into an increasingly homogenous sector

It is tempting to consider the quietly effective approach as either a kind of exceptionalism or aloofness, depending on your point of view. Neither is the case. University presses are serious partners to authors but they are also intertwined with the rest of the publishing community. Their work is essential to many trade publishers. The foundation on which non-fiction blockbusters are built is the academic monograph, specialist tomes listed in the comprehensive bibliographies at the end of major new histories, biographies or popular science books. Crossover authors and public intellectuals readily acknowledge their debt to the university press world, as the wonderful Mary Beard has written of my own imprint: “I use and recommend a lot of the texts published by Liverpool University Press. My particular favourite is T P Wiseman’s Death of Caligula.”

University presses enjoy a warm relationship with some of the UK’s great bookshops too, even if our books often lean more towards the specialist than the popular: Gower Street Waterstones, Broad Street Blackwell’s and Cambridge’s Heffers, to name but three, are as likely to display a complete run of the Loeb Classical Library or Translated Texts for Historians as they are the latest celebrity memoir. And it goes without saying that libraries are both key customers and keen collaborators with university presses, the former constrained by budget and the latter by market but both sharing a common mission to support the dissemination of knowledge.

While a chasm has opened up between trade publishers and the largest STEM and data-focused commercial academic publishers in recent years, the university press world provides a continuing point of connection.

University presses are a home for the best of scholarship but also increasingly for poetry, such as the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Tripas by Brandon Som, published by University of Georgia Press. It is by no means unusual for poets to flit between university presses and commercial imprints. Similarly, our sector is willing to take on the reputational and financial risk of translation, with success stories including University of Wisconsin Press’ edition of the Mara-Cassens Literature Prize-winning novel The Summers by Ronya Othmann. Indeed, perhaps the most influential academic book of the 2010s is a university press translation: Harvard’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty. How many publishers would have the vision to see a global bestseller in translating more than 700 pages of sophisticated economic theory from a professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales?

University presses also have a distinctive role in generating new talent: Liverpool’s Trailblazers scheme for early career researchers, California’s FirstGen Scholars Program and Oxford’s recently announced First Book Prize all demonstrate the vital role of university presses in nurturing new talent that may stay within the academic orbit or pursue other publishing futures.

While they retain a core focus on specialist scholarship, incubating new disciplines and curating existing ones, university presses are willing to open up new approaches, find new authors and bring new ideas to a wider audience. In the process, they inject essential bibliodiversity into an increasingly homogenous sector, to the benefit of other publishers, readers and civil society.