Harvard University Press Publicity Blog

Ashes to ashes

Blog post and Flickr set of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book Depository from Sweet Juniper. Most books are headed for the dustbin at some point or another; in mid-80s Detroit they just got there a little faster.

Social networking comes to the book world

We suppose it was just a matter of time before "Web 2.0" caught up with die-hard dead tree adepts such as ourselves--hence Booklicker, "the free social networking site for book addicts." We haven't tried the site yet, but they appear to be shooting for a "racy" vibe, if the pic of a book lover tonguing what appears to be the Bantam Classics edition of Crime and Punishment (and for shame--don't they know about the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation??) is any indication. Anyway, if you're feeling smart and naughty, maybe go over there and give it a shot.

HUP honored with "oddest book title" nod

When we wrote about this contest last year, never in our wildest dreams did we imagine that we would be honored with a nomination the very next year!! Hopes are high for an HUP win in the "oddest book title of the year" contest run each year by British publishing magazine The Bookseller, although Jasper McCutcheon's I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen has a few of us worried about our chances. We're nominated for Catharine MacKinnon's latest essay collection, titled Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. Maybe it's a little early to order the champagne, but one can always browse.

Finally, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out that Are Women Human? is of course a serious book dealing with serious issues--a critique of the transnational status quo that also envisions the transforming possibilities of human rights for women across the globe.

Warehouse technology gone wild

The Guardian Weekend section informs us of a new warehouse being built in West Yorkshire on behalf of the British Library, whose national collection currently eats up about 12.5 kilometers of shelf space each year:

The warehouse is extraordinary because, unlike all those monstrous Tesco and Amazon depositories that litter the fringes of the motorways of the Midlands, it is being meticulously constructed to house things that no one wants. When it is complete next year, this warehouse will be state-of-the-art, containing 262 linear kilometres of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen environment. It will house books, journals and magazines that many of us have forgotten about or have never heard of in the first place.

You can get pretty much anything you want from the British Library--indeed, it is "statutorily obliged" to house one copy of everything that's published in the UK. So far the count is up to "13 million books, 920,000 journal and newspaper titles, 57 million patents, three million sound recordings, not to mention publications that exist only in cyberspace."

Hardcover vs. Paperback

In today's Financial Times, Michael Skapinker uses a recent re-reading of Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself as on occasion to give some thought to his long-established paperback habit, which after 30 years he's beginning to regret.

To highlight or not to highlight

Do you highlight your books? Dog-ear the pages? Even, god forbid, rip the pages out when it's convenient? Who do you think you are, anyway?! That's the reaction of Patrick T. Reardon, at least, in his Chicago Tribune column on "The ethics of handling--and manhandling--a book."

Netflix for books?

Getting some press today is BookSwim, a new company that hopes to do for books what Netflix has done for DVDs. Indeed, the service works in exactly the same way as Netflix--a user creates a list of books online, BookSwim ships them the books of their choice, and when the user is finished, he or she returns the book to BookSwim in a pre-paid envelope.

You're probably thinking what we did when we first heard about this idea. "Borrowing and returning books...hmmm...isn't there a name for places like this? Where they don't even charge you?" But the site's founders think that BookSwim addresses a need that libraries can't fulfill:

"The big complaint is most libraries have working hours--they typically close at 5 p.m.," Siddiqui said. "And someone may have checked out the book you want."

Another at-home service for a world in which traditional forms of buying and selling are increasingly being thrown out the window.

From print to screen?

The New York Times jumps on the "are book reviews dead?" bandwagon today with a rather insightful story on whether or not blogs will ultimately become the main outlet for book reviews and arts coverage in general, with interesting comments from both sides of the aisle (traditional print media and bloggers, respectively).

New on the scene

The excellent website PopMatters has begun a new book blog called Re:Print. Head over for posts on how many of us lie about having read a "classic" and why the media needs to stop flogging the "browsing is dead" story.

Book review campaign heats up

Scott McLemee's Inside Higher Ed column this week addresses the declining fortunes of the nation's newspaper book review sections in the face of industry-wide budget and staff cuts. Taking the San Francisco Chronicle as an example:

Perhaps the most striking example (the case that, for many of us, revealed the shape of things to come) is that of The San Francisco Chronicle. In 2001, the editors decided to shut down its freestanding book supplement--shifting its diminished literary coverage to the back of the paper’s entertainment section. A strong protest went up from readers and bookstore owners in the Bay Area, with its large literary and academic communities.

And so the book section was saved, if on a smaller scale – at least for a while. Last year the section was cut by two pages, then cut again recently. "We used to run something like 15 reviews a week," said its editor, Oscar Villalon, in August. "Now in a good week we run about 10, but we’ve had as few as six."

From a publicist's standpoint, this reduction in coverage is indeed disastrous, as it becomes harder and harder to get people to take notice of a book when the space allotted for book coverage shrinks so drastically.