Publishing art history books has always been fraught with problems: image rights, high quality printing costs, and diminishing opportunities for print publication contracts, to name a few. Yale University Press is, with the help of a Mellon Foundation grant, exploring options to make digital publication a greater possibility for topics in art history. One great boost has come from the move museums are making toward providing high quality images for publication at no cost. The first institution to participate in this was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its partnership with ARTstor in the Images for Academic Publishing venture. Several other major museums have since announced a move in this direction: the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and several others.
Read more about the encouraging shifts in digital art history publishing in this Chronicle article.