Illinois Press Book Blog

Inside Higher Ed reports today that our university is boycotting institutional use of the Kindle.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is joining Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison in announcing that it will not make the Kindle available to students until the device has improvements to be better enable blind people to use it.

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…)

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.

October 27, 2009 – Champaign, IL and New York, NY –The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program. 

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009.  Together, participants in this Program aim to create an improved online work environment for faculty and students by bringing complete journal runs from multiple publishers together in one place, to ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and to promote a more cost-effective publishing environment for the scholarly community.

“For the last several years the University of Illinois Press and JSTOR have worked together through the History Cooperative, building strong ties of respect and trust,” said Willis G. Regier, Director of the University of Illinois Press.  “We take this step with the blessings of our colleagues in the University of Illinois Library and with high anticipation for our journals.”

Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011.  This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. University of Illinois Press-published journals available as part of the Program will include American Journal of Psychology, American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of American Ethnic History among others. The journals will also be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

“The University of Illinois Press has been a leader in promoting digital scholarship, innovation, and new publishing collaborations in the humanities,” said Michael Spinella, JSTOR Managing Director. “The Press not only shares our aim to deliver excellent scholarship at good value to libraries, faculty, and students, but brings a spirit of cooperation and a strong desire to support new forms of scholarship using digital technology.  We are thrilled to be working with them to advance scholarship through the Program.”

With the addition of the University of Illinois Press, the current issues of at least forty journals will be available from JSTOR for the 2011 subscription year. Other organizations are being encouraged to join the Program.

Rebecca Simon, Associate Director of University of California Press and Director of Journals + Digital Publishing added, “It is terrific that the University of Illinois Press is joining this effort and bringing their fine portfolio of titles to the Program.  The more like-minded participants we have, the greater the benefits we are able to deliver to libraries and to users.”

For more information, see: http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp

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.

Inside Higher Ed reports that the search for a new director will continue at Northwestern University Press but a key journal will move online.

Beginning next year, the university announced, the press will make its primary journal, TriQuarterly, available only electronically. 

The Guardian explains the Google digital library settlement.

The Wired Campus reports on Google’s announcement that it will allow authors and publishers to use Google Books as a distribution channel for books that they license through Creative Commons. Google sez:

We’ve marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book’s left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup–say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

Michael Clarke at The Scholarly Kitchen explains the differences between Twitter and other social networks, analyzing the advantages of Twitter for sharing your message (the aim of scholarly communicators everywhere).

There may be 250 million people on Facebook, but most people’s personal networks contain at most a few hundred. On Twitter, your posts may get read by any one of over 40 million registered users. For any given user, Facebook effectively consists of less than 500 people. On Twitter, everyone’s potential network exceeds 40 million.

You can follow Illinois here. Our tweets will be much more interesting when our tallest tweeter returns from vacation.