Peter J. Dougherty, director of Princeton University Press, celebrates the original publication and continued printing of the University of Illinois Press’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication in his Chronicle of Higher Education piece on the future of scholarly publishing.

… university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don’t traffic in hard ideas. They’re too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly.