During recent years, libraries have paid extra attention to the increased price of periodicals and the serious implications it might have on scholarly communication. New modes of periodical publication such as Open Access have also been widely discussed. However, much less attention has been paid to another important sector of scholarly publishing - monographs (scholarly books). Most literatures only mention the low budget for monographs in libraries rather than the problems related to the publishing of monographs and its influences on scholarly communication. This paper focuses on scholarly communication, and takes as its example the field of humanism which greatly relies on monographs, to discuss the causes of problems related to monograph publishing and analyze the influences of these problems on scholarly communication systems.