The things that make our heads spin Reference publishers have a lot to answer for these days: the seemingly arbitrary nature of pricing; head-scratching choice of subject matter; slapping "revised" on a book in which the only update is the style of typeface; the list goes on. Having received my MLIS less than a year ago, some might consider me "young" to the profession, but my chronological age is somewhat more advanced. The truth is, I have spent most of my life up to my receding hairline in reference books, forever tilting at the windmills of my own ignorance by reading encyclopedia entries like others read novels. Along the way, I've had ample time to consider some seemingly foolhardy attempts to sell books.

Price tags from outer space

I can't be the only one who has noticed that e-versions of reference books cost more than their print counterparts. Consider Macmillan's four-volume Americans at War: Society, Culture, and the Homefront. Its print price is $415 while the ebook is listed at $530. What, may I ask, are we getting for the extra dollars? Print books involve the physical process of printing on paper, packaging, and shipping, which costs money, while ebooks are composed of nothing more than electrons. So how can a higher charge be justified for something that doesn't entail the use of raw materials? Publishers may argue that ebooks are a big-ticket item, with lots of associated technology expenses, thus the higher price tag. Their biggest upfront cost, regardless of the format, is always the creation of the content itself, i.e., the salaries of the editors, authors, illustrators, and others involved. To add insult to injury, often publishers will cut a "deal" in which the purchaser may have both versions at a "discount," essentially paying twice for the same product. And sometimes the price of an ebook is simply "it depends." At least in some instances, the cost is negotiable, since the purchaser must contact the publisher for "details." All this suggests that publishers are applying lessons learned in Guerrilla Marketing 101. Well, either that or these guys are receiving return-on-investment advice from aliens: I mean little green dudes from the Planet Freakazoid (more on that later).

The sausage factory

German statesman Otto Von Bismarck famously said that "the wise man does not inquire as to how his laws or his sausages are made." I take it the Iron Chancellor was not a big fan of fact-based print materials; otherwise he would have included reference books in his remark. Like so many links of bratwurst, publishers of various persuasions crank out numerous iterations of basically the same book, one after another. Consider, for example, these one-volume resources: Holt's American Heritage Encyclopedia of American History, The Oxford Companion to United States History, The Penguin Encyclopedia of American History, and Houghton Mifflin's The Reader's Companion to American History. Publishers may retort that they all make excellent ready reference sources for all those really tough questions about our nation's past. Riiiiiiiight. Like who's buried in Grant's Tomb? And what year was the War of 1812 fought? Pul-leese! No library needs 1,001 titles on a single topic, so why are publishers sacrificing the lives of trees for stuff that's destined for overstock sales and, eventually, landfill fodder? Sure, competition is a good thing, but enough already!

Strange and stranger

Another mystifying aspect of reference book publishing is just how narrowly focused some of these works are. Other than hepatologists (not to be confused with herpetologists, who are reptile experts), how many people need to peruse the pages of Facts On File's The Encyclopedia of Hepatitis and Other Liver Diseases? And other than herpetologists (not to be confused with hepatologists, who are liver experts), how many people will ever request a copy of the University Press of Florida's Guide and Reference to the Crocodilians, Turtles, and Lizards of Eastern and Central North America? Given their trendspotting prowess, it's only a matter of time before the industry's marketing gurus follow this fashion to its logical conclusion, in which case some imprint will trot out The Complete Illustrated Guide to Lizard Livers of the World. But at least livers and lizards constitute real subjects. How do we account for all those titles that purport to tell us everything we want to know about the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot? Are they being published to educate people or just to make a quick buck from the True Believers? Silly subjects receiving the academic treatment beg questions that never seem to get asked. Please, allow me to pose the query on behalf of Doubting Thomas's everywhere: If there really are extraterrestrials out there, why don't they hover their craft over the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or the Empire State Building? But no, they scout around semiarid regions of the southwestern United States, where the only living things are cactuses and sagebrush and the occasional wanderer who thinks he sees flying saucers with little green dudes from the Planet Freakazoid at the helm. Based on some of the stuff I've seen from some reference book publishers, all I can say is: "Beam me up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life on this planet."

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Michael Bemis is Assistant Librarian with Washington County Library, MN