Why do UC Press books need to be subsidized? Why doesn’t UC Press just raise the prices of its books?
A portion of UC Press’s publishing program is devoted to specialized scholarship; these books have small print runs and therefore rarely recover their production costs. Other books with complex production specifications, such as those in the arts and sciences, are expensive to produce. UC Press is dedicated to reaching the audiences for which its books are intended; pricing the books for their markets often means that subsidy is required to break even.
