Some implications of "digital" for scholarly writing and publishing

Category: publishing

More about the Failure of the Book

Reading Time: 3 minutes
The Biblia Pauperum, the “Bible of the Poor”, printed in the lower Rhine region or Low countries, c1460. An example of whole-page illustration, where the image, a woodcut, replaces the text entirely. Within a few years, integrated text and illustrations

Will Octopus transform scholarly communication?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Octopus is a new platform for scholarly research: somewhat like a preprint server, with instant publication, but Instead of a full article, a researcher posts just a component of an article: a problem statement, …

Who reads scholarly book reviews?

Reading Time: 4 minutes
The TLS: around 35 book reviews every week

It is a commonplace that nobody reads any more – the Web has put a stop to all that. I googled “Has the Internet destroyed reading?” and got 378 million hits, including (among …

Why are the Oxford Very Short Introductions so successful?

Reading Time: 5 minutes

What makes the Oxford Very Short Introductions series such a stunning success? With over eight million copies sold, they have been honoured by articles in the mainstream media: Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker devoted a not-so-short article in 2017 to …

Can online conferences improve on their live equvalents?

Reading Time: 2 minutes
The STM Frankfurt Conference 2019. In case you’ve forgotten what real (non-virtual) conferences were like: small screens, big heads in front of you.

Simon Inger, in an interesting post on Scholarly Kitchen (July 7, 2020), makes a tantalising suggestion: an online …

Serendipity as a rule for life

Reading Time: 3 minutes
The spectacular foyer of Waterstones Bookshop, Cambridge. Each book on the wall has a handwritten recommendation.

Many years ago, at the start of my career in publishing, an old hand told me what, in his opinion, was the only marketing principle …

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