This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. What makes a book ‘academic’? What spaces, physical and digital, can they be found in? How are they made, bought, and read? These questions are tackled by a cross-section of thirteen experts from the fields of bookselling, publishing, university libraries, and academic research in this volume of essays, which was produced in conjunction with the team from the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project as an accelerated publishing challenge for the first ever Academic Book Week. The topics include campus bookshops and bookselling, the role of national libraries, Open Access, the Research Excellence Framework, and publishing innovation. The approaches explore the realities of the present and venture all the way through to possible futures. There is something here for everyone who is connected to academic books – however these are defined, and whatever shape they are read in.