The Product and Pricing of Scholarly Books

Author(s):  
Albert N. Greco

Scholarly book publishing and printing has a long tradition, starting with Oxford University Press (1478) and Cambridge University Press (1584). The American colonies, and later the United States, lived in the shadow of these two great presses. While many of the US presses today are quite large, with global operations, they were, in the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, far from the professional operations of today. This chapter gives an introduction to book history in the United Kingdom and the United States with an emphasis on university presses and competition from commercial publishers for authors, readers, and sales. It provides a review of substantive market drivers, revenues, new title output, and production costs. A sample book contract and profit and loss statement (for a hardcover and digital book) are presented and analyzed.

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.


Author(s):  
Peter Scott

From an international perspective, the inter-war car industry was a British success story. Britain ranked only second to the United States as the world’s leading producer of, and market for, automobiles, owing to a relatively strong domestic market by European standards. However, while consumers’ expenditure was high, it was not deep—car ownership per capita in 1938 being around a third of US levels. This chapter examines why the British automobile sector failed to take off into mass market diffusion. A number of important factors are highlighted, including lower British wages relative to the United States; punitive vehicle and petrol taxation; and the high unit production costs incurred in serving a market too small to justify Fordist mass production. However, a more fundamental reason was the low priority given to car ownership in a relatively small, densely populated, and highly urbanized island nation with well-developed public transport networks.


Author(s):  
Frederick J. Diedrich ◽  
Christine T. Wood ◽  
Thomas J. Ayres

Consumer products currently sold in the United States often come with extensive safety information, but the presentation of large amounts of such material was not always the case. We reviewed federally mandated hazard labeling as it evolved during the 20th century by documenting changes in labeling requirements for home-use products prescribed by federal statutes. Our review indicated that during the course of the 20th century, there was a dramatic change in the presence, prevalence and specificity of hazard warning requirements. In the early years, Congress concentrated on truth in labeling of contents and quality. This labeling identified hazardous agents in some products. However, as the century progressed, Congress gradually added requirements that could include descriptions of the mechanisms, consequences, and means for avoidance of such hazards. Moreover, the 1960's and especially the 1970's brought a dramatic expansion in the number and types of products required to bear hazard labels.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Spero Simeon Zachary Paravantes

While trying to understand and explain the origins and dynamics of Anglo-American foreign policy in the pre and early years of the Cold War, the role thatperception played in the design and implementation of foreign policy became acentral focus. From this point came the realization of a general lack of emphasisand research into the ways in which the British government managed to convincethe United States government to assume support for worldwide British strategicobjectives. How this support was achieved is the central theme of this dissertation.This work attempts to provide a new analysis of the role that the British played in the dramatic shift in American foreign policy from 1946 to 1950. Toachieve this shift (which also included support of British strategic interests in theEastern Mediterranean) this dissertation argues that the British used Greece, first asa way to draw the United States further into European affairs, and then as a way toanchor the United States in Europe, achieving a guarantee of security of theEastern Mediterranean and of Western Europe.To support these hypotheses, this work uses mainly the British andAmerican documents relating to Greece from 1946 to 1950 in an attempt to clearlyexplain how these nations made and implemented policy towards Greece duringthis crucial period in history. In so doing it also tries to explain how Americanforeign policy in general changed from its pre-war focus on non-intervention, to the American foreign policy to which the world has become accustomed since 1950. To answer these questions, I, like the occupying (and later intervening)powers did, must use Greece as an example. In this, I hope that I may be forgivensince unlike them, I intend not to make of it one. My objectives for doing so lie notin justifying policy, but rather in explaining it. This study would appear to havespecial relevance now, not only for the current financial crisis which has placedGreece once again in world headlines, but also for the legacy of the Second WorldWar and the post-war strife the country experienced which is still playing out todaywith examples like the Distomo massacre, German war reparations and on-goingsocial, academic and political strife over the legacy of the Greek Civil War.


2021 ◽  
pp. ASN.2020101511
Author(s):  
Rebecca Thorsness ◽  
Shailender Swaminathan ◽  
Yoojin Lee ◽  
Benjamin D. Sommers ◽  
Rajnish Mehrotra ◽  
...  

BackgroundLow-income individuals without health insurance have limited access to health care. Medicaid expansions may reduce kidney failure incidence by improving access to chronic disease care.MethodsUsing a difference-in-differences analysis, we examined the association between Medicaid expansion status under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and the kidney failure incidence rate among all nonelderly adults, aged 19–64 years, in the United States, from 2012 through 2018. We compared changes in kidney failure incidence in states that implemented Medicaid expansions with concurrent changes in nonexpansion states during pre-expansion, early postexpansion (years 2 and 3 postexpansion), and later postexpansion (years 4 and 5 postexpansion).ResultsThe unadjusted kidney failure incidence rate increased in the early years of the study period in both expansion and nonexpansion states before stabilizing. After adjustment for population sociodemographic characteristics, Medicaid expansion status was associated with 2.20 fewer incident cases of kidney failure per million adults per quarter in the early postexpansion period (95% CI, −3.89 to −0.51) compared with nonexpansion status, a 3.07% relative reduction (95% CI, −5.43% to −0.72%). In the later postexpansion period, Medicaid expansion status was not associated with a statistically significant change in kidney failure incidence (−0.56 cases per million per quarter; 95% CI, −2.71 to 1.58) compared with nonexpansion status and the pre-expansion time period.ConclusionsThe ACA Medicaid expansion was associated with an initial reduction in kidney failure incidence among the entire, nonelderly, adult population in the United States; but the changes did not persist in the later postexpansion period. Further study is needed to determine the long-term association between Medicaid expansion and changes in kidney failure incidence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1-1
Author(s):  
John J. Swab

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Fire insurance maps produced by the American firm the Sanborn Map Company have long served as cartographic guides to understanding the history of urban America. Primarily used by cultural and historical geographers, historians, historic preservationists, and environmental consultants; historians of cartography have little explored the history of this company. While this scholarship has addressed various facets of Sanborn’s history (Ristow, 1968), no scholarly piece has explored the lived experience of being a Sanborn surveyor. This lack of scholarship comes not from any significant oversight but rather from the fact that the contributions of most Sanborn surveyors were anonymous and little recorded on the maps themselves. Moreover, the company itself has done little to save its own history, thus little is known of their individual stories and experiences. The exception to this is perhaps the most famous Sanborn surveyor of all: Daniel Carter Beard.</p><p>Over the course of his nine-decade life, Daniel Carter Beard held several prominent positions including the co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America and the lead illustrator for many of Mark Twain’s novels. However, he got his start as a surveyor for the Sanborn Map Company in the 1870s, just a few years after its founding. His papers, housed at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, includes a variety of ephemera from his time with the Sanborn Map Company.</p><p>Trained in civil engineering, Beard got his start as a surveyor for the Cincinnati (Ohio) Office of Platting Commission, creating the first official plat map for the city. He was hired by Sanborn in 1874 and served as a surveyor until 1878, traveling extensively over the eastern half of the United States, parlaying his skills into creating fire insurance maps for Sanborn. Thus, this paper speaks to two main themes. The first theme traces the route of Beard during his early years with the company across the eastern half of the United States, documenting both the places he visited and the challenges he faced as a Sanborn surveyor. The second theme, interwoven through the paper, is an analysis of the innerworkings of Sanborn’s administrative structure and its relationship with the larger fire insurance market during the 1870s. Altogether, these documents present unique insight into the organization of the Sanborn Map Company and how it produced its maps during the second-half of the 19th century.</p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerry L. Holechek

Increasing world human population, declining reserves of cheaply extracted fossil fuels, scarcity of supplies of fresh water and climatic instability will put tremendous pressure on world rangelands as the 21st century progresses. It is expected that the human population of the world will increase by 40% by 2050 but fossil fuel and reserves of fresh water will be drastically reduced. Avoiding food shortages and famine could be a major world challenge within the next 10 years. Under these conditions, major changes in policies relating to economic growth and use of natural resources seem essential. Stabilisation of the human population, development of clean and renewable energy, enhanced supplies of water and its quality, increased livestock production, and changed land-use policies, that minimise agricultural land losses to development and fragmentation, will all be needed to avoid declining living conditions at the global level. The health and productivity of rangelands will need to receive much more emphasis as they are a primary source of vital ecosystem services and products essential to human life. Changes in tax policies by developed, affluent countries, such as the United States, Australia and Canada, are needed that emphasise saving and conservation as opposed to excessive material consumption and land development. Extreme levels of debt and chronic deficits in trade by the United States and European Union countries need to be moderated to avoid a devastating collision of debt, depletion of natural resources, and environmental degradation. Over the next 10 years, livestock producers of the rangelands will benefit from a major increase in demand and prices for meat. Rapidly increasing demand for meat in China and other Asian countries is driving this trend. Rangeland managers, however, will also likely encounter greater climatic, financial, biological and political risks. Higher interest rates, higher production costs and higher annual variability in forage resources are major challenges that will confront rangeland managers in the years ahead. Under these conditions, a low risk approach to livestock production from rangelands is recommended that involves conservative stocking, use of highly adapted livestock, and application of behavioural knowledge of livestock to efficiently use forage resources.


Author(s):  
Katherine McFarland Bruce

Chapter Four continues the comparison of contemporary Pride parades from the previous chapter, focusing on the differences between the various expressions of Pride across the United States. While pursuing a common model of cultural change, each parade promotes visibility, support, and celebration using symbols and messages adapted to their local cultural contexts. When the level of tolerance varies, so too does the expression of identities defying the heteronormative cultural code. Additionally, through their variation Pride parades deal differently with the three identified issues – visibility, support, celebration - that began in the phenomenon’s early years. With still unsettled debates, Pride parades wrestle with provocative displays, commercialization, and maintaining a sense of purpose amid the festivity.


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