Leafing through Routledge’s catalogue for Media and Communication I ended up with a long list of books I’d be interested in. I must say though, almost all these books cost at least £80 each, which seems exorbitant. I won’t be buying them myself, and although Routledge is a respected publisher, I’ll be submitting my next book proposal to publishers that sell books at prices people are actually likely to pay. I’m sure Routledge will cry themselves to sleep over this rejection 😉
I did send the list to our librarian, though, and I’m sure the UiB university library will buy many and maybe all of them. I suppose Routledge prices for libraries, not individuals.
Göran Bolin: Cultural Technologies: The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society
We discuss these issues in several of our courses, so a chapter may well be useful on a reading list. And I heard Göran Bolin give an interesting talk at MiT8 earlier this month, so I’d like to learn more about his work.
Mark Andrejevic: Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know
I really enjoyed Andrejevic’s discussion of how we can become estranged from our own use of social media, which I both blogged about and taught last year, and look forwards to reading more of his work.
Applen, JD – Writing for the Web
This might be useful for our web design students. I like how it appears to integrate technical skills like XHTML and CSS with rhetorical communication on the web and how to organise information.
Heidi Campbell – Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds
This doesn’t relate to my own work, but is certainly related to digital culture.
Steven E. Jones – The Emergence of the Digital Humanities
Another useful-looking discussion of the digital humanities. There are a number of these, now, and I’ve no idea if this one is better or worse than the others – the description is quite sparse. But we’re doing digital humanities here and so I’d like to know what’s being written about the field.
The rest of my list won’t be published until after the summer, but lots of the books look interesting:
- Alice Bell, Astrid Ensslin, Hans Rustad – Analyzing Digital Fiction
- Lots of familiar names from scholarship on electronic literature in this collection, which should be very useful.
- Therese Tierny – The Public Space of Social Media: Connected Cultures of the Network Society
- Gerard Goggin (ed) – The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media
- Jeremy Hunsinger og Theresa Senft (eds) – The Routledge Handbook of Social Media
- Thorsten Quandt – Multiplayer: The Social Aspects of Digital Gaming
- Andrew Dewdney, Peter Ride (eds) – Digital Media Handbook 2nd ed
- Jason Farman: The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies
- Mia Consalvo et.al. (eds.) – Sports Videogames
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Geoff Cain
I don’t get this model anymore. $135 for a book of essays that are two years old. Many of the essays can be found elsewhere on the net for free. I understand that academics are desperately impoverished and need all the help they can get, but why should we support such an unsustainable model given that the cost of education (at least in the U.S.) has out-stripped the cost of living AND the cost of healthcare? Good for you for looking for a more reasonable publisher.
Kate Maxwell
Hi Jill!
In full agreement with you on the price of books. Would you mind sharing publishers you will consider publishing with in the future? And your thoughts on open access?
I suppose – selfishly – I’d particularly like to know where you think younger Noway/Scandinavia-based scholars should publish. We don’t have much clout, but I for one would like to support open access (in whatever form that may take) as well as availability. But without compromising on academic integrity (of course), and without sacrificing the respect of learned colleagues.
One final question: what do you think of publishers such as Music Word Media and Punctum Books, both of whom seem to be doing interesting ‘stuff’ in different formats. I’m sure there are others too – would you be willing to name some names?
Thanks in advance for your input – perhaps a further blog post will be needed 😉
PS I have read your post on ‘How to be an open access scholar’ (http://jilltxt.net/?p=3422), but I suppose I’m asking if you have anything you’d like to add to that now that the debates have progressed somewhat.
Jill
I certainly support open access, but I do also see that the publisher does a lot of work on scholarly books – the copyediting, layout, book cover design, proofing, indexing and printing/distribution or e-book distribution is pretty extensive. I think in my last post about open access I wrote that I think books also should be published open access, but I’m not sure about that, especially not now I’m going through the proofs of the second edition of blogging and am constantly reminded of how much work the publishers are putting into that publication. Reasonable pricing is important to me though: I do want my books to be accessible.
I’ve previously published with MIT Press and with Polity Press, and have had great experiences with both. My book Blogging which is published at Politiy Press has a great price, I think, at around $16 it’s certainly accessible, although I do wish they had an electronic version of it as well. While the MIT Press book was a little more (around $30-35 in hardback) it’s a LOT cheaper than the Routledge books and now it’s out in paperback and a Kindle version for $10-12. I don’t know whether MIT Press would often do this, but they have on at least one occasion published a book with a free online version available at the same time. I don’t know whether sales were higher or lower than expected for the print version.
There are some interesting options like Open Humanities Press, which I would certainly consider for things like anthologies in particular.
I also think the publisher you choose is going to depend on your field. MIT Press is very strong on digital media and cultural/humanities-based approaches to technology, but don’t do anything in many other fields. So I would look at other books you think seem a bit like the book you would like to write, consider their prices and accessibility (for instance, is it important to you that your book also be available in kindle format or another digital format?) and base your decision on where to send your manuscript on that. Oh, and since you’re in Norway, definitely check DBH to make sure the publisher is listed as an academic publisher, and you may want to consider sending your manuscript to level 2 publishers first just to get more points. Academia is in many ways a game, after all, and you need to earn points to level up 😉 Remember you can also suggest new publishers for the list of approved “publiseringskanaler” and so long as it’s clearly a peer-reviewed scholarly press or journal it’ll almost certainly be approved.