Our Billion-Dollar Donation to the Publishing Industry

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“Bundle of Sticks” and the Value of Interdependence: Building a Tools and Services Collective

In this article, we raise questions about how bundling and independence show up in the scholarly publishing industry today, both for large conglomerates and for smaller commercial and nonprofit players. We then contemplate what interdependence might look like and how it might help to transform academic publishing. We end with findings from the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project (2019-2022) and its Collaborative Frameworks Working Group regarding a set of initial steps that we believe publishers, tools, and service providers might take together towards developing a collective publishing framework for open source, values-aligned tools and services.

Small publishing houses in Argentina. Their dynamism and limitations within the publishing industry

The goal of this article is to analyze the market insertion that small Argentine publishing houses underwent between the late twentieth century and 2015. We take into account the sector’s evolution in the country, the worldwide concentration of the publishing market, and the business strategies these firms adopted, from a historical standpoint. Sources are institutional and periodical publications, oral sources obtained through interviews with key actors, statistical sources, repository information, and secondary literature. Some comparisons with other Latin American countries are also presented. The conclusions highlight elements such as the publishing houses´accumulated historical experience, business strategies, speed of adaptation to digital and multimedia formats, production focused on specific areas or topics, and the leveraging of a minimal and flexible structure, many times in unfavorable circumstances, as key factors that allow a correct understanding of the complexities of the business of publishing for small and medium enterprises in Argentina.

CAIT: A Predictive Tool for Supporting the Book Market Operation Using Social Networks

A new predictive support tool for the publishing industry is presented in this note. It consists of a combined model of Artificial Intelligence techniques (CAIT) that seeks the most optimal prediction of the number of book copies, finding out which is the best segmentation of the book market, using data from the networks social and the web. Predicted sales appear to be more accurate, applying machine learning techniques such as clustering (in this specific case, KMeans) rather than using current publishing industry expert’s segmentation. This identification has important implications for the publishing sector since the forecast will adjust more to the behavior of the stakeholders than to the skills or knowledge acquired by the experts, which is a certain way that may not be sufficient and/or variable throughout the period.

Doctors, Drugs, and Danger

Scholarship on young adult (YA) literature has long attended to the interrelationship of power, ideology, and narrative. Drawing on this scholarship, we examined a nonfiction text about the opiate epidemic. Using critical comparative content analysis (CCCA), our study examined differences in Dreamland (the original version) and Dreamland (the young adult adaptation) to better understand the changing nature of textual representation when youth become the imagined audience. We found that in the youth adaptation of Dreamland, the implied youth reader is (a) provided less information about the opiate epidemic, which is also delivered in a simpler structure; (b) kept at a greater rhetorical distance from people who might be deemed unsavory, and (c) given a more optimistic view of the opiate epidemic in terms of progress achieved rather than action needed. The youth adaptation of Dreamland, therefore, positions youth as needing simplicity, protection, and a sense of optimism. Our analysis demonstrates how the implied youth reader is a textual byproduct of discourses of adolescence/ts. As youth adaptations continue their prominence in the YA marketplace, scholars and teachers should critically engage how youth are positioned as readers and thinkers by the YA publishing industry. Next steps involve additional studies that focus on the implied (youth) reader through CCCA and studies that involve middle and secondary education students, the real readers of these texts. This study is supplemented by an interview with Sam Quinones, the author of the original version of Dreamland.

Publishing and Society: A Comparative Analysis of Bourdieu's Field Theory and Paradigm of External Analysis using the Case of the Book Publishing Industry in China

The publishing industry has a long history of development as an integral part of people's social life. This essay provides a preliminary exploration of the special status of the publishing industry in sociological research through a comparative analysis of Bourdieu's field theory and the Marxist-oriented external analysis paradigm. It critically assesses the Chinese publishing industry, with its strong political and complex historical background, by analyzing the external relations and field characteristics of the Chinese publishing industry. Due to the social peculiarities of China's socialist system coexisting with the market economy system, the state of political influence intersecting with social class influence is also taken into account in the analysis.

Impact of recycling sustainability on organizational performance

This is empirical research focusing on the impact of recycling sustainability on Organizational performance in Nigeria. To achieve the objective of this study, a sample of 10 publishing houses in four major cities in Delta State was adopted, and these cities include Asaba, Warri, Sapele, and Oghara. Given that Nigeria is the regional publishing powerhouse in West Africa with newspaper publications selling in the whole region, likewise, textbook publishers in Nigeria dominate the regional market. The industry contributes about 10% of the GDP and is one of the fastest-growing in the manufacturing sector. Unfortunately, Nigeria does not produce most of the raw materials for publishing. All paper materials used in Nigeria are imported, and the costs are rising with the reliability of the sources dwindling. In addition, the publishing industry in Nigeria is faced with a high rate of waste and returns. The study focused on the impact of adopting recycling sustainability as a possible solution to the dwindling raw materials, increasing costs, and high rate of returns. It used a stratified random sampling approach and a descriptive research design.

Academic Integrity and Audiobooks

Audiobooks offer increased accessibility and new ways of engaging with scholarly texts. Although the development of academic audiobooks is in a relatively early stage, one significant issue that is yet to receive appropriate attention is the presentation of referenced materials in audio form. Presently, this is approached on a case-by-case basis with no centralized industry standards, and so protocols are either set by individual publishers or negotiated between rights-holders and narrators. Narrators usually adopt one of four options for dealing with notes or other referencing tools: complete omission; addition of audio effects to differentiate the reading of references from the primary narrative; reading the reference notes at the end of a chapter or the book; or including with the audiobook files an optional PDF download with reference details. These options give consideration to aesthetic issues, but it is uncertain whether they do justice to questions of academic integrity. The purpose of this article is to encourage scholarly dialogue and a conversation between the audio publishing industry and academia on this issue, and to begin working towards a ‘best practice’ framework that satisfies questions of both aesthetic experience and academic integrity.