Publishing

Lifespan of a 2nd Print Run...a Couple of Months?

birdie — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:03:32 -0400

Publishers Weekly reports on the additional print-on-demand run for 'Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska’s Political Establishment Upside Down'.

Epicenter Publisher Kent Sturgis expects interest in the book to remain strong "at least through the vice presidential debate set for October 7."

Small Book Publishers Offered New Technology

Bibliofuture — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:43:17 -0400

Hundreds of small, independent publishers will have easier access to digital book technology under a new service offered by Perseus Books Group, the result of agreements between it and more than a half-dozen technology companies, Perseus is expected to announce on Thursday.

The new service, called Constellation, will allow independent publishers to make use of electronic readers, digital book search, print-on-demand and other digital formats at rates negotiated by Perseus on their behalf. Unlike large publishers, small ones typically lack the resources to use digital technology and as a result often bypass it altogether.

Full article in the New York Times.

Epicenter Hustles to Meet Demand for Palin Bio

Bibliofuture — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:39:07 -0400

John McCain surprised most when he chose Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska to be his running mate—and the only book available on Palin is, unsurprisingly, from an equally dark horse publisher: Epicenter Press, which has its primary office in Kenmore, Wash., and publishes books about Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Epicenter published Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned Alaska's Political Establishment Upside Down by Kaylene Johnson in April as a $19.95 hardcover featuring 50 photographs.

Publisher Kent Sturgis said the book had been doing well before the announcement; Epicenter went through its 7,000-copy first printing in less than a month, and then reprinted 3,000 more copies, which were all shipped by early Friday. "I walked in the door [Friday] morning and the first call was from Barnes & Noble; they wanted 15,000 copies," Sturgis said. "I’ve got an e-mail queue here that’s longer than I can see."

Full story at Publisher's Weekly

A league table of journals

Blake — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:59:36 -0400

A league table of journals: The Australian government is revising its research assessment system, and is in the process of setting up ERA, Excellence in Research for Australia. This new system was an early commitment of the Labor Government elected in November of last year, and is replacing the Research Quality Framework (RQF) which the previous Government had started to develop in 2006, and which was intended to carve up AU$600 million in block grant research funding. That system did not reach fruition, despite (and partly because of) being very costly. The new system is designed to benchmark Australian research better within an international context, and is - for the moment - not intended to lead to a ranking-based carve-up of the research funding pot, though that option has been left in for the future.

DIY books turn a page in publishing

Bibliofuture — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 22:49:34 -0400

Marketplace from American Public Media

The novel is not dead. Nor is any other kind of book. Self-publishing technology has empowered wanna-be writers -- no matter how strange their pitch. Cash Peters checks out the DIY crowd at a book expo in LA.

Full story here.

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education

Anonymous Patron — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:25:23 -0400

Ithaka has recently released the full findings from our 2006 surveys of the behavior and attitudes of faculty members and academic librarians. These complementary studies, co-sponsored by JSTOR and by Ithaka’s incubated entities Portico, Aluka, and NITLE, have been of interest to academic librarians and scholarly publishers alike in presentations over the past year, but now we are making the datasets and a detailed white paper available as well.

The faculty study focuses on attitudes and behaviors in the transition to an increasingly electronic information environment, examining perceptions and use of information services in the research and teaching processes. The findings shed light on the relationship between faculty and the library, faculty perceptions and uses of electronic resources, the transition away from print for scholarly journals, faculty publishing preferences, e-books, digital repositories, and the preservation of scholarly journals. The librarian survey complements this study, providing the perspective of librarians on many of these same issues, a process that highlights the similarities and differences between faculty and librarian views of key issues.

We have prepared an in-depth white paper which details our findings and provides analysis and recommendations based on these studies, which may be found on the Ithaka website at http://tinyurl.com/5r5wb6. For those who are interested in investigating our data on their own, we have deposited the raw datasets from these studies with ICPSR, and the faculty and librarian studies are available at http://tinyurl.com/6rm3df and http://tinyurl.com/6hk6lg, respectively.

The 2006 faculty study marked the third triennial research effort in this series, and we have greatly benefited from the reactions and suggestions of the community in response to these studies. We look forward to your questions and comments about these studies.

Author of Librarian Memoir Speaks Out Against Author of Library Fiction

Anonymous Patron — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:26:34 -0400

Librarian and author of memoir "Quiet, Please" speaks out against the author of "The Library Diaries" for publishing her book with Publish America, which he deems "one of the most shameful book producers" around. He also offers to help anyone who wants to publish with a "real" publisher.

A Publishing Primer

Blake — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:12:35 -0400

A Publishing Primer Don't know your French flaps from your headbands? Here's a guide to the arcane terminology of the book world...

Holland: Europe's Liveliest Book Trade

Blake — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:04 -0400

Publishers Weekly: A land of paradoxes, the Netherlands. Book trade concentration is little short of horrific. Depending on who you talk to, and whether Belgian Flanders is included in the calculation, two large groups of somewhat similar dimensions hold either 40% or 60% of the book market, while a third group is half as large as either of the first two. Yet it was one of the country's smallest publishers who recognized the potential of Harry Potter. Jaco Groot of De Harmonie, who buys according to his and wife Elsbeth's hunches, has followed J.K. Rowling ever since, and now has a cool million copies of the HP books in print.

Das Wikipedia - Online Encyclopedia Will Go Into Print

birdie — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 08:56:45 -0400

According to Bertelsmann Lexicon, there are reasons why people will want to see a print version of the German Wikipedia. Guardian UK reports.

With a price tag of €19.95 , €1 from every Wikipedia Lexikon sold will be given to the German chapter of Wikimedia, the non-profit group behind Wikipedia, for the use of its name.

The publication reverses the industry trend towards the internet and away from traditional print. Publishers of the Wikipedia Lexikon insist it is too soon to say farewell to the book format.