Well, I’m pleased and surprised that Cornell University Press is finally posting its first book trailer on YouTube. Given that I’m now tenured at an institution whose unofficial motto is “The Sooner, the Better,” I can understand that I was waytoo impatient in wanting things like this there back in 2005!! (It looks like an interesting book, too, for those of us who appreciate White’s legacy…)
And here’s another amazing gift to the LIS practitioner and scholar community: Ted Striphas, of the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana, has put his new book, The Late Age of Print, online for free. Not only is this a fascinating look at the book publication and distribution world as it evolves in this “late age of print:” he’s also blogging about some intriguing ideas, such as reviving the idea of making the right to read constitutionally protected. So this is going straight to my “right to read right now” pile (oh, yes, I’m buying the print copy of the book: we need to support university presses such as Columbia that publish this kind of work!)
A couple of folks in “Digital Collections” were heavily into manga, so I am delighted for their sakes to hear that Marx’s Das Kapital has recently been published in a manga edition in Japan. Once the English version is released, I think I’ll buy it for myself: apparently the manga version is much cuter, and has much more of a plot….
Shifting temporarily out of the “collections” mindset for this semester, now I’m pondering the participative possibilities of ShiftSpace. Yes, it’s not “there” as a tool yet (right now it’s seems like it simply enables screen graffiti as some other things have done in the past), but in terms of the mark-up mindset common in publishing, it could have transformative possibilities in teaching. (I’m thinking of the 5433 class next fall, in particular, when we look at websites….. I would love to have everyone able to “shiftspace” some of the ones we review.)
An intrigung collection in progress of “unpublishable” works at UBU, that might well serve to represent works in Borges’s Library of Babel. But is there such a thing as “unpublishable” today? (An “unsettling” question unlikely to appear on our comprehensive exam any time in the foreseeable future, however.)
And, speaking of diaries, this is Corey Arcangel’s “diary” of his computer’s memory, which I came across via Matt Kirschenbaum’s new book, Mechanisms, which I now have on order from MIT Press. (I was fascinated to see that they have a Google “search inside the book” link right on the site with the book: I wonder what kind of data could be captured from that, and by whom?) Kirschenbaum also has an interesting book blog, which is precisely the way to push an academic book these days, I think. One link from Digital History Hacks, for instance, and you’re on everybody’s syllabus (including mine next year, no doubt!)
I can’t say that I ever miss being a cog in the wheel (or, perhaps more accurately, mostly being a squeaky wheel myself) of university press publishing now, but I do miss having some contact with authors like Jeff Abernathy. I love the way that he doesn’t blame the University of Georgia Press’s marketing department for his book ranking far below another book with the same title (Meat Loaf’s ghost-written autobiography) on Amazon’s sales charts. This is refreshingly unlike, for example, some authors at my old press that I won’t name, but who clearly had what delusions of what Meat Loaf himself calls “Loafdom.” You rock, Dean Abernathy! (Plus, you properly value the importance of being well-represented on WorldCat!)
Although I do have to admit that your press’s marketing department really should have advised you pre-publication of that potential title conflict, as well as the fact that Audie Murphy used it back in 1949 for his autobiography, which then became the movie in which he starred. But, as I’m sure you were told, the important thing is that you got much more attention at MLA than either of them ever did!
Hooray for university press backlists: a blogger from my 5033 class has just cited a snippet from Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics, which recalls to mind that Cornell University Press is now publishing the 25th anniversary edition of his classic On Deconstruction. I’m definitely going to buy this (very affordable!) paperback, but in the meantime, here’s an interview with Culler about the new edition from the online Cornell Chronicle. Thanks for the reminder, 5033 bloggers!
Well, I’m still trying to shake my addiction to the recently-ended 5433 class, but fortunately I will soon have my Competitive Intelligence class AND my Information and the Knowledge Society class with which to get over my heartbreak. The worst thing is that right now I have no one to share hot LIS news with, like the announcement of Google’s knol project, apparently designed as a Wikipedia-killer, according to John Battelle’s SearchBlog. Read more…
With Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, people are speculating about the future of this journalism icon and its associated Dow Jones market data assets. Think it doesn’t matter? Data is crucial to the new media world, and content distribution is crucial to making big money in the information economy. This deal will reshape the financial information landscape over the next few years. Just ask Reuters, Bloomberg, and the New York Times.
