Illinois Press Book Blog

If I had read the following media heat item from Shelf Awareness this morning before my meetings instead of tonight after my meetings, I would have known what to expect when I entered WAMU around noon.

Today on the Diane Rehm Show: Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, authors of Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs, and Lullabies (Little, Brown, $24.99, 9780316040495/0316040495).

That’s right.  I was standing in the same entryway.

Salon reviews The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch.

Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series “Star Trek”: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: “to go,” “to eat,” “to walk,” etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English — the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example — is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.

Crain’s New York Business reports that Amazon recently hosted a group of literary agents to explain how the online behemoth doesn’t plan to destroy the publishing world.

According to one participant, the aim of the meetings, which culminated in a dinner Thursday evening, was for Amazon to “explain itself” to the agent community, whose members fear that e-books could undermine the book-publishing business much the way that digital file-sharing and iTunes upended the music industry.

(Editor’s note: I don’t believe that iTunes is responsible for the decline of the music industry. The $50+ iTunes charge on my credit card bill this past month proves that my kids are purchasing music at a faster rate than I did at a similar age. Now, it’s fine with me if you want to blame music business woes on file-sharing…)

Dear Author,

Have you contemplated asking your father to organize your book tour?

Thank you for your consideration.

Best,
Michael

Inside Higher Ed reports today that Utah State University Press will pursue a new publishing model:

This week comes news that the press will survive — in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free). While both of those changes are significant, key aspects of the press’s identity and mission will not change. It will continue to be a peer-reviewed scholarly publisher, and plans to continue its highly regarded work in fields such as composition studies, folklore, poetry, environmental studies, and the history and culture of the West.

Last Thursday, Kathleen Kornell (UIP copyright czar) and I attended a copyright primer given by Columbia University’s Kenneth Crews and hosted by the University of Illinois Graduate College and University Library. Crews, who is currently the Director of the Copyright Office at Columbia, was on a mission to help faculty and students better understand copyright and manage the rights to their own scholarship. “Who Owns Your Scholarship: Copyright, Publication Agreements, and Good Practice” was part of the CAS/MillerComm Lecture Series, and will be archived here.

The University of Michigan Library announces MPublishing, the new uber-publishing initiative that includes the University of Michigan Press alongside other campus units devoted to scholarly communication.

The focus of MPublishing will be the development of information communities for well-defined audiences.   Key markets will include individual customers such as scholars, researchers, and students, as well as libraries and other institutions. Business models will be developed to best serve the needs of the specific target audiences and will include free access, paid access via online delivery and e-readers, site licenses, print, and other modes of distribution.

The New York Times reports how libraries are lending e-books:

Most digital books in libraries are treated like printed ones: only one borrower can check out an e-book at a time, and for popular titles, patrons must wait in line just as they do for physical books. After two to three weeks, the e-book automatically expires from a reader’s account.

But some publishers worry that the convenience of borrowing books electronically could ultimately cut into sales of print editions.

The Huffington Post has a new books section. How do I convince my colleagues that it’s not up to me to get our books reviewed, but it’s up to my colleagues to review our books?

Authors, please let me know if my “your book is here” correspondences resemble the following, from the New Yorker:

If you already have a blog, make sure you spray-feed your URL in niblets open-face to the skein. We like Reddit bites (they’re better than Delicious), because they max out the wiki snarls of RSS feeds, which means less jamming at the Google scaffold. Then just Digg your uploads in a viral spiral to your social networks via an FB/MS interlink torrent. You may have gotten the blast e-mail from Jason Zepp, your acquiring editor, saying that people who do this sort of thing will go to Hell, but just ignore it.