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A good article from Barbars Fister in Inside Higher Ed.  With everyone dumping on every choice a publisher, author or reader is making, Fister decided to look at what’s going right.  Makes a nice change!  Here’s a snippet:

  • Sales of new hardcover books are up, and reports from the most recent annual book trade event, BEA, are that independent booksellers are doing pretty well on the whole. Much better than in 1931, when there were only around 500 bookstores and most US counties had zero.
  • There are a lot of things I don’t like about Amazon, but they proved to libraries that catalogs can be sexy and fun. Without Amazon proving that people actually like searching for books, I doubt Worldcat.org would ever have been made free to all.
  • The 1.5 million members of LibraryThing who have added over 87 million tags to books they keep track of there. GoodReads is even bigger. That’s a lot of people obsessing over books and reading. Cataloging is a contact sport. Awesome.
  • It’s a lot cheaper for anyone to publish a book for whatever reason they want. For some, that’s terrible news. I think it’s proof that people value their own stories and that people want to engage in imaginative and creative acts. Nothing wrong with that.
  • Scholars have some great ways to get the word out about their scholarship and connect with other scholars, and not just with the usual suspects like blogs or Twitter, but through new and simple publishing options like Pressbooks and Anthologize.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/whats-right-publishing#ixzz1xs2hrq6Q 
Inside Higher Ed 

More in the article.

Found from a tweet by Ted Striphas @striphas

1 COMMENT

  1. “What good news did I forget?”

    I guess Barbara didn’t forget the good news about monetizing all of that content, as we have over the past years… because there largely isn’t any. Though her good points are indeed good for those who want content, those who used to make a living creating and selling content other than scholarly hardbacks aren’t doing so well: Profits are slipping away; ad revenues are dropping; piracy is growing (or at least not shrinking); and consumers expect digital content to be orders of magnitude cheaper than print-based content.

    I suspect the scholarly book market will maintain itself a bit longer than the consumer market, largely due to its own lock-in and traditions that have yet to be broken.

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