Archive for the 'Book' Category

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to the Books and Publishing Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of the Books and Publishing Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to Books and Publishing please email:

  1. a brief description of your professional credentials
  2. a list of your areas of interest and expertise
  3. a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Series: Books and Publishing

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

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.

Google to digitise ancient Italian books

Published on March 11, 2010 in Book and News. 0 Comments

italian-books

The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

From BBC News…

Up to one million antiquarian books – including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo – will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.

There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.

The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence. More…

Terms of Digital Book Deal With Google Revised

Published on November 16, 2009 in Book and News. 0 Comments
Denny Chin, a United States District Court judge, is overseeing the Google books case.

Denny Chin, a United States District Court judge, is overseeing the Google books case.

From Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, in The New York Times.

Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google’s vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments.

The settlement, of a 2005 lawsuit over Google’s ambitious plan to digitize books from major American libraries, outlined a plan to create a comprehensive database of in-print and out-of-print works. But the original agreement, primarily between Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, drew much criticism.

The Justice Department and others said Google was potentially violating copyright law, setting itself up to unfairly control access to electronic versions of older books and depriving authors and their heirs of proper compensation.

To read more…

Excerpt: Bruce McCall’s 50 Things to Do with a Book

Published on November 5, 2009 in Book. 0 Comments

From Bruce McCall Vanity Fair

Hotel rooms now provide Gideon Bibles only as pay-per-view TV channels. Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles. The Cassandra Report forecasts that more than fifty warehouses across the U.S., long used as book storage and shipping centers, will shortly be converted to video-game facilities. Rare-book collectors are switching to classic Betamax movie videos of the 1970s and 1980s.

Dire omens indeed, in line with a recent survey that found that more than half of all Americans didn’t read a single book in the previous year—doubtless a conservative figure, because everybody lies about their reading habits. The trend toward a bookless society is gaining almost daily as a TV-besotted, iPhone-bedazzled, time-starved, speed-crazed populace becomes ever less willing to seek information and entertainment by concentrating their minds on endless lines of type.

More….

Books and Publishing Imprint Launched

Published on May 9, 2009 in Book. 0 Comments

Common Ground Publishing has launched a new imprint, Books and Publishing.

You can now submit proposals or completed manuscript submissions of:

  • individually and jointly authored books;
  • edited collections addressing a clear, intellectually challenging theme;
  • collections of papers published in The International Journal of the Book.

Books should be between 30,000 words to 150,000 words in length. They will be published simultaneously in print and electronic formats.

Announcing the winner of the International Award for Excellence

Published on May 6, 2009 in Book. 0 Comments

Congratulations to John W. Warren, the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper Innovation and the Future of e-Books.

Abstract: The technological development and cultural acceptance of e-books today parallels the state of the printed book in the 15th century. E-books are increasingly available from a variety of distributors and retailers, and work on a myriad of devices, but the majority remain simply digitized versions of print books. Some devices or platforms include such tools as word definitions, highlighting, and note taking, but many of these tools simply mimic what students and researchers have traditionally done with printed texts.

This paper examines three examples of innovative e-books in order to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. The first is a history e-text that includes 1,700 primary-source documents—such as Presidential memos, reports, and even audio and video clips—linked from footnotes, providing a treasure trove of research material to readers. The second is a novella in hypertext form. The third example examines digital textbooks that include multimedia, assessment, and other digital tools. Each of these cases demonstrates creative approaches, business models, and methods of review that point to the enhanced, interactive, interlinked future of the e-book.