Understanding and Incorporating the Contradictions around the Book

This article sets out to critically examine how the idea of what a book can be is changing in relation to the growth of digitally social communities and the writers and readers who congregate in these spaces, and to identify how this connectivity is altering the balance of power between the traditional industry and those who choose to write and share their work in a global village. By offering a succinct consideration of the role of social media, citizen authors, communities, gender, and genre, it can potentially help publishers determine if they need to alter the way they provide access to the industry, conventionally through the hierarchical author–agent–publisher gatekeeping system, in order to take advantage of new authors who are writing in digital communities and building a following there.

The Infinite Pleasure of Reading

Irene Vallejo11 has perfectly demonstrated the accuracy of Nuccio Ordine’s thesis on the usefulness of the useless. In a screenobsessed world that often destroys our serenity and the pleasure to be found in slowness, this wonderful author has found a direct line to the relevance of the ancient world and, by extension, to the world of books and many of the things they do to make life worth living. Kant distinguished between what has a price – and what has dignity.

Publishers and Others Who Publish

The objective of the article is to deconstruct the notion of publisher through the lens of the episteme of professionalism and provide a statistical overview of mainstream and marginal book publishers in Latvia. The statistical overview is based on an alternative, experimental approach, in which publishers are grouped by the legal register they are registered in as juridical persons and the output of each group is analysed. This approach is selected to profile publishers in a context where economic indicators or other means by which to analyse publishers are not available. The results provide an insight into the diversity of those who publish books in Latvia as well as give an overview of the characteristics and patterns of their publishing practices.

What Were the Processes and Outcomes of Offering Shared Reading as an Intervention for Veterans in Prison?

The charity Reading Force encourages Forces families to read together in order to build social, emotional, and mental well-being and offset the impact of the changes and separations routine in military life. They distribute reading scrapbooks and free books and encourage families to work on them together. It was suggested that a version of the project might usefully be developed for veterans in prison, whose families experience many of the same issues. Scrapbook Dads was developed for veterans housed in the Endeavour Wing at Parc Prison, South Wales. The materials were adapted for use by prisoners and their families. They had just been distributed when the pandemic struck, visiting and social/educational activities were cancelled, and the prison went into lockdown. With the materials readily available, the project was heavily used by prison staff to seek to maintain prisoner morale and support family connectivity. This paper charts the process, comments on what was learned, and makes recommendations for how shared reading can be used in prisons in future.

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.

The Remarkable Rise of the Audiobook

This article provides a brief account of the rise of audiobooks, from the early uses of audiobooks to make books available to the visually impaired, to the rise of Audible and the recent surge in audiobooks. It shows how the strong growth of audiobook output and sales since 2011 has been linked to a clear shift in formats: whereas CDs had been the dominant medium for audiobooks between 2003 and 2010, digital downloads became increasingly important from 2011 onwards. By 2017, digital downloads accounted for nearly 90 per cent of audiobook sales.