I’m working on a “Publisher’s Pledge to the Library Community” that we will release soon. I’ve put out some feelers regarding what people want to see in this pledge, and one concern came up that I feel is too complex in its implications to respond to in a bullet point on the pledge, and that … Read more On Timeliness and Timelessness in Book Publishing
Late Night Library One for the Books Campaign FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE A PLEDGE CAMPAIGN SUPPORTING INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS AND PUBLISHERS PORTLAND, OR, October 22, 2012—Responding to the US Department of Justice vs. Apple case set to go to trial in June of 2013, Late Night Library has announced the One for the Books! campaign in support … Read more Late Night Library One for the Books Campaign
I recently encountered some interesting data on the academic book market, in an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, by Albert N. Greco, Robert, M. Wharton, and Falguni Sen, titled, “The Price of University Press Books: 2009-2011.” According to data from YBP, in 2011, the total number of books … Read more Academic book pricing – Where Library Juice Press stacks up
Phil Davis writes in The Scholarly Kitchen about “The Secret Life of Retracted Articles.” Scientific papers are frequently retracted, officially, by the journal’s publishers and editors if it is found that data was faked or for other reasons that invalidate the article’s conclusions. The problem is that the articles stay around, in libraries, on websites, … Read more The Secret Life of Retracted Articles
Big news in publishing: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Files for Bankruptcy. This doesn’t mean they are going out of business, but it does mean their business and ownership may radically change, and it is a big bellwether for the publishing industry…
Excerpted from Barney Rosset’s obituary: By Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times February 23, 2012 Barney Rosset, the renegade founder of Grove Press who fought groundbreaking legal battles against censorship and introduced American readers to such provocative writers as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, died Tuesday in New York City. He was … Read more Obituary: Barney Rossett, groundbreaking publisher at Grove Press, lived to 89
Rory Litwin: I’m talking with Jennifer Szunko, Clarion Services Director. Jennifer offered to be interviewed for Library Juice to talk about Clarion’s services in doing paid reviews for authors and publishers. Thanks for being willing to do this interview. Jennifer, can you explain a bit about what you do at Clarion, and how it is … Read more Interview with Jennifer Szunko, director of paid-review service Clarion Review
Julie Bosman writes in the New York Times about a logical new development in book publishing: finer quality, fancy print books to compete with e-books. What is not expected about this, to me, is that major publishers are moving in this direction, rather than boutique houses that specialize in it.
We’re intimately familiar with the pressures on public libraries, and worried about closures and reductions of service. Independent bookstores have it worse, for a number of reasons. Indie bookstores’ fortunes decline as online retailers thrive, and as people move from print books to e-readers and non-literary, screen-based reading in general, while public libraries are able … Read more Local Indie Bookstores
Red in black and white: The New Left printing renaissance of the 1960s – and beyond Essay by Lincoln Cushing in Peace Press Graphics 1967-1987: Art in the Pursuit of Social Change, Catalog for a 2011 exhibition at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach. Exhibition curated by Ilee Kaplan and Carol A. … Read more Lincoln Cushing writes on the printing renaissance of the 1960s
Not exactly a library issue, but one which rests on the same ideals. It seems urgent to me that we legalize making video recordings of on-duty police officers. (Only illegal in some states.)
Librarians have responded to the internet and other technologies that have reduced people’s demand for our services in a couple of complementary ways over the past 20 years or so (or more). On the one hand, we have pointed out all of the reasons that libraries are still needed and still heavily used, and on … Read more Turning the Reference Desk into a Reference Bureau
I was in Cambridge, MA last weekend for MiT7: unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition. This conference is put on every two years jointly by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and the MIT Communication Forum. The conference is concerned with new media and new communication technologies and their broad implications. Presenters came to … Read more Thoughts on MiT7
MiT7 was a great conference – intimate, warm, stimulating, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge. There were some brilliant minds at work. I plan to post a few comments on the conference later. For now, here are links to podcasts from the three topical plenary sessions: Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms Archives and Cultural Memory Power and … Read more MiT7 podcasts
Media in Transition 7 (MiT 7), a small conference at MIT, is starting Friday and running ’till Sunday. I will be there; if you will be there too please say hello. Anyone wanting to follow the Twitter hash tag can look for #mit7.
Jason Epstein has a review of John B. Thompson’s Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century in the current New York Review of Books: “Books: Onward to the Digital Revolution.” The book is published by Polity Press and seems to be an important snapshot of the publishing industry in its current (but … Read more Jason Epstein reviews Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century
If you want to buy ebooks from Google Ebooks, you can now find our publications there. Library Juice Press and Litwin Books…
Just a brief item of interest. West Publishing is being forced to pay $2.5 million in damages to two authors who had stopped updating their legal treatise, but were named by West as authors of a new update that contained virtually no new material. Sounds like an example of a business practice that could be … Read more West Publishing to pay 2.5 million in an interesting case of false attribution of authorship
Lincoln Cushing wrote this cool article on old school (mid-20th century) printing technology: Cranking It Out, Old-School Style: Art of the Gestetner”. Lincoln is a librarian who had a previous career doing printing and graphic design for community groups. Every society has its pecking order, and printing is no exception. Equipment matters. At the top … Read more The art of old school (mid 20th century) printing technology
I am always on the lookout for reviews of books that we have published, and am usually gratified to read them. If there is a complaint in the review, it is most often that the book has typos or needed better copy editing. One recent review of one of our books, and I will not … Read more On reviews that say a book was “put together quickly”