Monthly Archive for August, 2010

Book Conference, St. Gallen–Featured Publishing Panel

Published on August 31, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The Digital Sphere: Opportunity for Growth or Existential Threat?

The 2010 Book Conference, held at the University of St. Gallen, 6-8 November will feature a special publishing panel.

About the panel:
Digital technologies are not mere tools applied to stable phenomena. Instead, they are essential factors in the creation of a new space — the digital sphere. Although the digital sphere shares many characteristics with traditional productive and social realms, it also introduces mechanisms and possibilities that make it profoundly distinct.

The digital sphere provides novel opportunities and challenges to the publishing industry, raising key questions about the ways in which publishing and related sectors might be accommodated. The panel serves as a forum for the examination of these possibilities through a consideration of key questions, such as:

Is the book publishing industry in better shape than the music industry, and therefore better equipped to cope with digital downloading?
What does social media mean for book publishing?
Is the ‘long tail’ approach to sales and distribution just fashionable hype, or can it lead to increased profits? If yes, for whom?
Is downloading of greater interest to publishers than Print on Demand?
How big of a problem is piracy? Is it an inevitable fact of life or a profound threat?
And, more generally, what is the publisher’s role in the digital sphere? What is the key to success in this realm?

Comprised of professionals from the publishing industry, the panel will include:

Eric Merkell-Sobota, Springer Science+Business Media
Jochen Gutbrod, Holtzbrink Group
Tom Hall, Lonely Planet
Lucy Küng, Media Management and Transformation Centre, University of Jönköping (Panel Moderator)

Click here for more information on this featured publishing panel, or here for more information on the 2010 Book Conference.

(Image: Anthony Mattox)

Series: Books and Publishing

Published on August 31, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: sticky-even.

We are accepting book proposals for the imprint Books and Publishing.

Common Ground is setting new standards of rigorous academic knowledge creation and scholarly publication.

Unlike other publishers, we’re not interested in the size of potential markets or competition from other books. We’re only interested in the intellectual quality of the work.

If your book is a brilliant contribution to a specialist area of knowledge that only serves a small intellectual community, we still want to publish it. If it is expansive and has a broad appeal, we want to publish it too, but only if it is of the highest intellectual quality.

The art of slow reading

Published on August 30, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

slow-reading-006

From Patrick Kingsley at The Guardian…

If you’re reading this article in print, chances are you’ll only get through half of what I’ve written. And if you’re reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

The problem doesn’t just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students’ reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. More…

Internet may phase out printed Oxford Dictionary

Published on August 30, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

20100829_oxford_146x97 From the Associated Press’s Sylvia Hui in the Washington Post:

It weighs in at more than 130 pounds, but the authoritative guide to the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, may eventually slim down to nothing. Oxford University Press, the publisher, said Sunday so many people prefer to look up words using its online product that it’s uncertain whether the 126-year-old dictionary’s next edition will be printed on paper at all.

The digital version of the Oxford English Dictionary now gets 2 million hits a month from subscribers, who pay $295 a year for the service in the U.S. In contrast, the current printed edition – a 20-volume, 750-pound ($1,165) set published in 1989 – has sold about 30,000 sets in total.

For more…

Behind the Scenes of CMOS 16

Published on August 29, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

An interview with principal reviser Russell David Harper

From The Subversive Copy Editor…

Russell David Harper is the only person on the planet with all of the following qualifications: He has worked as a manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press for more than a dozen years, and he contributed to the fifteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. For nearly three years, he kept a finger on the pulse of CMOS readers by serving as editor of the online Q&A. He is a technology wonk (I’m sorry, Russell, but I looked it up to make sure, and you are a wonk), with experience in typesetting, proofreading, and printing. And for good measure, he’s a polymath, a published author, and a kind and generous and funny person whose patience and reliability under pressure are legendary.

Because of his unmatched experience in Chicago practices and his techie leanings, Russell was decided to be a perfect choice to serve as principal reviser for the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style. As principal reviser, he was responsible for drafting a detailed outline and summary of the new edition and, in cooperation with the Manuscript Editing Department at the University of Chicago Press and the CMOS Board of Advisors, for writing the manuscript itself and serving as its nominal author through all the stages of publication. For the interview…