This is a book about the book. Is this a book? is a question of wide appeal and interest. With the arrival of ebooks, digital narratives and audiobooks, the time is right for a fresh discussion of what is a book. Older definitions that rely solely on print no longer work, and as the boundaries of the book have been broken down, this volume offers a fresh and lively discussion of the form and purpose of the book. How does the audiobook fit into the book family? How is the role of reading changing in the light of digital developments? Does the book still deserve a privileged place in society? The authors present a dynamic model of the book and how it lives on in today's competitive media environment.

This Element explores the politics of literary translation via case studies from the Heinemann African Writers Series and the work of twenty-first-century literary translators in Cameroon. It intervenes in debates concerning multilingualism, race and decolonization, as well as methodological discussion in African literary studies, world literature, comparative literature and translation studies. The task of translating African literary texts has developed according to political and socio-economic contexts. It has contributed to the consecration of a canon of African classics and fuelled polemics around African languages. Yet retranslation remains rare and early translations are frequently criticised. This Element's primary focus on the labour rather than craft or art of translation emphasises the material basis that underpins who gets to translate and how that embodied labour occurs within the process of book production and reception. The arguments draw on close readings, fresh archival material, interviews, and co-production and observation of literary translation workshops.

In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations. With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.

A SPECTATOR AND EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020 'A joy. Each chapter instantly became my favourite' David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas 'Wonderful' Lucy Mangan 'The right book has a neverendingness, and so does the right bookshop.' This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl up with them in bed. Taking us on a journey through comfort reads, street book stalls, mythical libraries, itinerant pedlars, radical pamphleteers, extraordinary bookshop customers and fanatical collectors, Canterbury bookseller Martin Latham uncovers the curious history of our book obsession - and his own. Part cultural history, part literary love letter and part reluctant memoir, this is the tale of one bookseller and many, many books. 'If ferreting through bookshops is your idea of heaven, you'll get the same pleasure from this treasure trove of a book' Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express

This Element examines a watershed moment in the recent history of digital publishing through a case study of the pre-web, serious hypertext periodical, the Eastgate Quarterly Review of Hypertext (1994-1995). Early hypertext writing relied on standalone, mainframe computers and specialized authoring software. With the Web launching as a mass distribution platform, EQRH faced a fast-evolving technological landscape, paired with an emergent gift and open access economy. Its non-linear writing experiments afford key insights into historical, medium-specific authoring practices. Access constraints have left EQRH under-researched and threatened by obsolescence. To address this challenge, this study offers platform-specific analyses of all the EQRH's cross-media materials, including works that have hitherto escaped scholarly attention. It deploys a form of conceptually oral ethno-historiography: the lore of electronic literature. The Element deepens our understanding of the North American publishing industry's history and contributes to the overdue preservation of early digital writing.

Whether you are a faculty member, a librarian, an independent scholar, the junior member of a research team, or a writer outside academia, Handbook for Academic Authors will help you select the right publisher, submit a winning proposal, negotiate a favorable contract, and work with your editor to ensure your research reaches the largest possible audience. The book provides advice on writing for different audiences and managing the mechanics of authorship, including manuscript preparation, acquiring illustrations, proofreading, and indexing. To address the major changes in scholarly publishing over the last decade, the sixth edition has been revised and updated to include discussions about open access and digital publishing, the use of social media as a marketing tool, changes within academia, and concerns of new entrants into academia. Written in a personalized, accessible style, Handbook for Academic Authors offers sound advice and encouragement to a wide range of aspiring academic authors.

A key challenge facing all educators working in practice-based subjects is the need to negotiate tensions between past and present and provide a training that prepares students for fast-changing conditions, while also conveying long-standing principles. This Element therefore investigates how effectively editing and publishing programmes prepare graduates for industry and how well these graduates translate this instruction to the workplace. Taking a global perspective to gauge the state of the discipline, the mixed-methods approach used for this Element comprised two online surveys for educators and graduates, three semi-structured interviews with industry practitioners (scholarly, education and trade) and ethnographic practice (author as educator and practitioner). Three key concepts also framed this Element's enquiry: being, learning and doing. The Element demonstrates how these transitioning but interdependent concepts have the potential to form a holistic practice-led pedagogy for students of editing and publishing programmes.

Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Biography
An extraordinarily frank, honest, and generous book by one of America's most famous and admired women, Personal History is, as its title suggests, a book composed of both personal memoir and history.
It is the story of Graham's parents: the multimillionaire father who left private business and government service to buy and restore the down-and-out Washington Post, and the formidable, self-absorbed mother who was more interested in her political and charity work, and her passionate friendships with men like Thomas Mann and Adlai Stevenson, than in her children.
It is the story of how The Washington Post struggled to succeed -- a fascinating and instructive business history as told from the inside (the paper has been run by Graham herself, her father, her husband, and now her son).
It is the story of Phil Graham -- Kay's brilliant, charismatic husband (he clerked for two Supreme Court justices) -- whose plunge into manic-depression, betrayal, and eventual suicide is movingly and charitably recounted.
Best of all, it is the story of Kay Graham herself. She was brought up in a family of great wealth, yet she learned and understood nothing about money. She is half-Jewish, yet -- incredibly -- remained unaware of it for many years.She describes herself as having been naive and awkward, yet intelligent and energetic. She married a man she worshipped, and he fascinated and educated her, and then, in his illness, turned from her and abused her. This destruction of her confidence and happiness is a drama in itself, followed by the even more intense drama of her new life as the head of a great newspaper and a great company, afamous (and even feared) woman in her own right. Hers is a life that came into its own with a vengeance -- a success story on every level.
Graham's book is populated with a cast of fascinating characters, from fifty years of presidents (and their wives), to Steichen, Brancusi, Felix Frankfurter, Warren Buffett (her great advisor and protector), Robert McNamara, George Schultz (her regular tennis partner), and, of course, the great names from the Post: Woodward, Bernstein, and Graham's editorpartner, Ben Bradlee. She writes of them, and of the most dramatic moments of her stewardship of the Post (including the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the pressmen's strike), with acuity, humor, and good judgment. Her book is about learning by doing, about growing and growing up, about Washington, and about a woman liberated by both circumstance and her own great strengths.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Despite her family's ailing finances, Diana Athill's childhood - spent in a lovely house in Norfolk - was blissful. In 1932, she fell in love with Paul: an undergraduate who tutored her younger brother. Within several years, she had moved to Oxford to study and they were engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. Athill's debut is also her most personal: a dissection of personal tragedy and the struggle to rebuild her life amid severe disappointment and loneliness. Unfolding throughout the Second World War, Instead of a Letter is an inspiring story of love and loss, heartbreak and hope, and a testament to her strength of character - her vivacity, honesty and perspicacity.

'A masterpiece' - Daily Mail 'A fascinating and funny look at what really goes into the making of a book' Sunday Times 'Inject this straight into my veins!' Lucy Mangan 'Engaging, informative, and fascinating!' David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Once upon a time, a writer had an idea. They wrote it down. But what happened next? Join Rebecca Lee, professional word-improver, as she embarks on the fascinating journey to find out how a book gets from author's brain to finished copy. She'll learn the dark arts of ghostwriters, uncover the hidden beauty of typesetting and find out which words end up in books (and why). And along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little-known considerations that make a big impact: ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric grammar and juicy errata slips. Whoops. From foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, Missouri - turn the page to discover how books get made and words get good. Or, at least, better.

This text examines the publishing industry from an international perspective reflecting the growing interdependency of the publishing world.

The path to success as an academic economist is littered with obstacles. Even with excellent research material, one faces issues of running the seminar and conference gauntlet, tempestuous relationships with co-authors, the selection of an appropriate journal outlet, a detailed peer review process and, with it, the ever-present spectre of rejection. This collection tackles the issues confronting the up-and-coming economist. The authors include some of the subject's finest luminaries who offer friendly and invaluable advice as well as providing a more light-hearted look at the publication process. Some articles have become classics in their own right. They vary from an examination of seminal (and originally rejected) articles by leading economists to an analysis of why referees are not adequately paid. The tools of both economic theory and econometrics are applied to uncover some home truths and, as a result, these papers provide new insights into the nature of economic discourse.

The Oxford-based Central and East European Publishing Project was a remarkable initiative to support embattled Central and East European publishers and journals, and to punch holes through the cultural iron curtain by encouraging translations and a 'common market of the mind' between East and West. The nine years of its existence straddle the largest watershed in European history since 1945, and the Project's history - told here by some of its leading participants - illuminates the nature of the recent changes in Central and Eastern Europe. In a vivid personal account, Timothy Garton Ash recalls the work of the Project, ranging from smuggling in subsidies to underground journals and samizdat publishers in the pre-1989 period to supporting high-quality translations and East-West workshops in the period after 1989. Also included are an Introduction in which Ralf Dahrendorf, Chairman of the Project, reflects on the importance of both publishing and foundations for a healthy civil society; an annotated catalogue of the Project's work, prepared by Elizabeth Winter; and a detailed and original report by Richard Davy on the state of publishing in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, with suggestions for further Western help.

This Element explores the papacy's engagement in authorial publishing in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. The opening discussion demonstrates that throughout the medieval period, papal involvement in the publication of new works was a phenomenon, which surged in the eleventh century. The efforts by four authors to use their papal connexions in the interests of publicity are examined as case studies. The first two are St Jerome and Arator, late antique writers who became highly influential partly due to their declaration that their literary projects enjoyed papal sanction. Appreciation of their publication strategies sets the scene for a comparison with two eleventh-century authors, Fulcoius of Beauvais and St Anselm. This Element argues that papal involvement in publication constituted a powerful promotional technique. It is a hermeneutic that brings insights into both the aspirations and concerns of medieval authors. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

During the 1820s, British society saw transformations in technology, mobility, and consumerism that accelerated the spread of information. This timely study reveals how bestselling literature, popular theatre, and periodical journalism self-consciously experimented with new media. It presents an age preoccupied with improvisation and speculation - a mode of behaviour that dominated financial and literary markets, generating reflections on risk, agency, and the importance of public opinion. Print and Performance in the 1820s interprets a rich constellation of fictional texts and theatrical productions that gained popularity among middle-class metropolitan audiences through experiments with intersecting fantasy worlds and acutely described real worlds. Providing new contexts for figures such as Byron and Scott, and recovering the work of lesser-known contemporaries including Charles Mathews' character impersonations and the performances of celebrity improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci, Angela Esterhammer explores the era's influential representations of the way identity is constructed, performed, and perceived.

Publishing is in crisis. Publishing has always been in crisis, but today s version, fuelled by the digital boom, has some frightening symptoms. Trade publishers see their mid-lists hollowed, academic customers face budgetary pressures from higher education spending cuts, and educational publishers encounter increased competition across their markets. But over the centuries, forced change has been the norm for publishers. Somehow, they continue to adapt.

This ground-breaking study, the first of its kind, outlines a theory of publishing that allows publishing houses to focus on their core competencies in difficult times while building a broader notion of what they are capable of. Tracing the history of publishing from the press works of fifteenth-century Germany to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley, via Venice, Beijing, Paris and London, The Content Machine offers a new understanding of media and literature, analysing their many connections to technology and history. In answer to those who insist that publishing has no future in a digital age, this book gives a rejuvenated identity to this ever-changing industry and demonstrates how it can survive and thrive in a period of unprecedented challenges."

Publishing Scholarly Editions offers new intellectual tools for publishing digital editions that bring readers closer to the experimental practices of literature, editing, and reading. After the Introduction (Section 1), Sections 2 and 3 frame intentionality and data analysis as intersubjective, interrelated, and illustrative of experience-as-experimentation. These ideas are demonstrated in two editorial exhibitions of nineteenth-century works: Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, and the anti-slavery anthology The Bow in the Cloud, edited by Mary Anne Rawson. Section 4 uses pragmatism to rethink editorial principles and data modelling, arguing for a broader conception of the edition rooted in data collections and multimedia experience. The Conclusion (Section 5) draws attention to the challenges of publishing digital editions, and why digital editions have failed to be supported by the publishing industry. If publications are conceived as pragmatic inventions based on reliable, open-access data collections, then editing can embrace the critical, aesthetic, and experimental affordances of editions of experience.

In today's modern age where information is constantly being shared, intellectual property and protection remains a crucial aspect in economic development. Open access has emerged as a cutting-edge tool that allows writers and authors to share their work freely while still holding protection and security over it. With technology playing a crucial role in economic growth, open access practices could be a key contributor in the innovation and development of information and public policy. What researchers need is a comprehensive approach to the concept of open access practice, its foundations, and current status. Building Equitable Access to Knowledge Through Open Access Repositories provides emerging research exploring the theoretical and practical aspects of open access publishing practices in the digital age and applications within scientific and academic research. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as copyright protection, social justice, and European Copyright Framework, this book is ideally designed for researchers, scientists, policymakers, librarians, IT specialists, authors, publishers, academicians, and students seeking current research on the advancement of intellectual property rights in today's technologically driven world.

This study focuses on the spread of print in colonial India towards the middle and end of the nineteenth century. Till the first half of the century, much of the print production in the subcontinent emanated from presidency cities such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, along with centres of missionary production such as Serampore. But with the growing socialization of print and the entry of local entrepreneurs into the field, print began to spread from the metropole to the provinces, from large cities to mofussil towns. This Element will look at this phenomenon in eastern India, and survey how printing spread from Calcutta to centres such as Hooghly-Chinsurah, Murshidabad, Burdwan, Rangpur etc. The study will particularly consider the rise of periodicals and newspapers in the mofussil, and asses their contribution to a nascent public sphere.