Relations between Namibia and its former coloniser, Germany, are impacted by ongoing negotiations about reparations for a brutal and violent past. The 1904-8 genocide that decimated large parts of the indigenous population continues to cast a shadow in…
Category: academic books
Book Review: Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork by Whitney Trettien
In Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork, Whitney Trettien explores how seventeenth-century English publishers cut up and reassembled paper media into radical, bespoke publications, arguing that this ‘bookwork’ contributes to understan…
Democratising publishing or dodgy spammers? What ‘inclusive’ publishers tell us about the state of academic book publishing.
In disciplines where the academic book is the primary means for communicating research and establishing oneself in the field, academics may have a mental shortlist of desirable publishers. However, not everyone can access the most elite or reputable pr…
The Processual Book. How Can We Move Beyond the Printed Codex?
Behind the finalised pages of any academic book lies a range of processes and contributions that led to its creation. Discussing her recent work Living Books, Janneke Adema explores how open online tools have given expression to these procedural aspect…
The benefits of open access books are clear but challenges around funding remain
As part of Academic Book Week 2018, last week Springer Nature hosted an event exploring open access books featuring representatives from the researcher, funder, and publisher communities. Mithu Lucraft reports on the presentations and panel discussions which revealed that the benefits of publishing open access books are clear, with more downloads, citations, and online mentions, in addition to an extended […]
What does the future hold for academic books?
Between August 2014 and September 2016, the Academic Book of the Future Project, initiated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library, explored the current and future status of the traditional academic monograph. Marilyn Deegan, one of the co-investigators on the project and author of the project report, reflects on its findings, welcoming them as an opportunity to open […]
Academic Book Week 2017 at LSE Library
23-28 January 2017 is Academic Book Week, celebrating the value, variety and transformations of the academic book. To mark the occasion, Lucy Lambe outlines how LSE Library is celebrating the week and talks to LSE academics about their favourite scholarly works and how they envisage the future of the academic book. This post originally appeared on LSE Review of Books and […]
Making space for the academic book of the future
Yesterday Steven Hill spoke at the University Press Redux conference in Liverpool on the role of policy in shaping the academic book of the future. This post is a summary of the argument of his talk. While there is much potential for innovation, the uptake seems slow. Even when we see the benefits of innovation, the change in process and […]
What’s the matter with ebooks? In our praise for print, we forget the great virtues of digital formats.
Do print versions still have an advantage over electronic formats? Ebook sales may be reaching a plateau but Dan Cohen argues there may be much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. A huge and growing percentage of ebooks are being sold by indie publishers or authors themselves, and a third of them don’t even have ISBNs, the universal ID used to track most books, […]
Unbundling is Over-rated: On the value of contributing to an edited book
Terry Clague sheds reasonable doubt on the assertion that contributing to edited book chapters is a waste of time. The sole aim of publication isn’t necessarily to maximise citations. If citations are the only measure of academic value then there’s a danger that academic research becomes the X-Factor. Furthermore, edited collections can also aid discovery of new material where new […]