Illinois Press Book Blog

PW Daily reports that the Chicago Tribune may further reduce its pages dedicated to book coverage. This brought to mind a Slate story from early 2007 on newspaper profits.

Writing for The Jewish Press, Menachem Wecker reviews Brett Ashley Kaplan’s Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation in conjunction with Joyce Ellen Weinstein’s art exhibition opening at the Florida Holocaust Museum.

“Many have wondered whether it is appropriate for artists – and particularly artists who did not witness the concentration camps – to represent the Holocaust. . . . Kaplan’s book does not mention Washington, DC-based artist Joyce Ellen Weinstein, but it still proves an invaluable model for contextualizing and analyzing Weinstein’s work.”

Awesome.  In just two days my Goodreads friend count has tripled. At this pace I’ll have 243 friends by the 4th of July. We’re still working out who will be the leader of this group. (Note to friends: you should attach a photo to your profile so I know what you look like.)

Let accidents happen and be more like bees, according to The Digitalist:

[H]uman teams are inherently weak but  . . . nature’s teams (bumble bees, termites etc) display characteristics that we can all learn from. In nature, no one group member takes the lead; they use the right group member for the right task at the right time. They use short, instant messages. Short instant messages create dynamic, mobile teams in a way that long documents do not. They blend large group and small group dynamics, using each for the appropriate circumstances. And nature’s networks are clustered, sending messages through the best ‘connectors’. Social networks and tools can be a great leveller and can enable much of this ’swarm-like’ activity to take place. But we’ll all have to become more like bees to make it work well.

A handful of new books landed on my desk in the past week:

-Enduring Nations: Native Americans in the Midwest edited by R. David Edmunds
(July 14, 2008)
-German Film after Germany: Toward a Transnational Aesthetic by Randall Halle
(July 21, 2008)
-Dudley Buck by N. Lee Orr (July 21, 2008)
-Immortal Sofa poems by Maura Stanton
(July 28, 2008)
-The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance edited by Chad Berry (August 4, 2008)

The publication dates are noted above but all will be available to order within the next week.

OK, I recently joined Shelfari, Goodreads, and Library Thing to see what they’re all about. I’m in the process of adding books to my shelves but do I really need to put The Catcher in the Rye in the books “I’ve read” section? How about The Great Gatsby? To Kill a Mockingbird? What is assumed on these sites? I just remembered that cluster of Graham Greene books I read in the ’80s. Need to add those.

So far I have one friend on Goodreads. Thanks, Stacy.

Inside Higher Ed reports that a few new university press titles will be available soon via Kindle.

Apparently the advance reading copies I send to reviewers have a value that I hadn’t considered.

(PW Daily pointed the way to this New York Observer piece.)

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning that the University of Michigan Press will end its distribution relationship with Pluto Press by the end of this year following controversy over the book Overcoming Zionism.

 . . . you find out about blog posts like this.

My favorite line:

For as books move to the cloud, from digital bundles to network assets, we will not be counting ‘things sold’ but link hits; not things shipped, but pages accessed.

What’s yours?