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You sold a book…
Book News: A push for free textbooks
For this week’s addition to the library school book news project we’re stepping a bit outside the usual trade book publishing focus here at The Butterflies & Aliens Library. But in the big business that is publishing, textbook publishing is the biggest. So as a bibliophile and a student, any push to make textbooks free is going to get my attention…
Book News: Sensitivity Readers in Publishing
For this week’s contribution to the library school book news project, I wanted to share a CBC article exploring the rise of “sensitivity readers” in publishing. It relates to many of the topics that have come up in the course, including representation and diversity in publishing, the fine line between editing and self-censorship, and the not-so-fine and much muddier line between censorship versus serving your audience… which may or may not be the same as catering to the market…
Solarpunk
Following up on my recent post about Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the “solarpunk” subgenre to which these two novellas belong. This is what I found…
Book News: The bookstore is the most recession-proof business in America for 2023
This week in our library school book news project, the topics touched on, among other things, the role of bookstores within the larger publishing ecosystem. Given our close connections with localn independent bookstores in particular here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, this was a particularly interesting topic to dig into…
Book Mail: Life Beyond Us
Just wanted to do a quick share of one of the Butterflies & Aliens Library’s latest acquisitions, Life Beyond Us, edited by Julie Nováková, Lucas K. Law, and Susan Forest, and published by Laksa Media Group in partnership with the European Astrobiology Institute…
Book News: Open Access!
For our book news project, the topic of this week’s class was scholarly publishing, but for me the real revelations were about open access books – in other words, books being shared for free because the author and publisher think they should be shared…
The Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers
Thought we needed to break up all the book news with something more “traditionally” Butterflies & Aliens, so wanted to quickly share a favourite new read… the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers…
Book News: Markus Dohle’s Big Flop
With this week’s books news assignment topic looking at trade publishing, I came across this article that does a bit of a deep dive into the aftermath of the proposed merger of ‘Big Five’ publishing giants Penguin Random House (PRH) and Simon & Schuster (S&S)…
Book News: Some alternatives to “big media”
So rather than going into a deep dive into the many problems in new media industries and news, for this week’s book news assignment I figured I’d kind of not actually quite follow the assignment and just throw some options out for publishing alternatives to the conglomerates and chains and monster media corporations…
The best of intentions… SSAC2022 Days 17 through 25!
So I’m going to guess that #NonDenominationalAdventInJanuary will probably turn out to be a one-time thing. We started out this time with the best of intentions but suddenly it’s the end of the month and, well, here we are…
Book News: The Viability of E-Books and the Survivability of Print
So my main selection for this week’s book news article – on the topic of “the digital turn” in publishing – goes full on scholarly rather than mass market news, with an excellent snapshot of the state of print versus ebook, published in the midst of the pandemic…
