By . The survey, conducted by CampusBooks.com and released in July, showed that four in 10 students said they had been assigned an eBook for a college course, meaning non-print books have yet to crack the 50 percent threshold in higher education. More...
By Avi Wolfman-Arent. There’s big news today in the race to offer same-day book delivery. Barnes & Noble announced it would team up with Google Shopping Express to offer same-day delivery in select cities. The move appears to take aim at Amazon, with which both companies compete and which already has same-day service in 10 cities. More...
By Jennifer Howard. At almost any gathering of academic publishers or librarians, you’ll hear someone float the idea—sometimes phrased as a question—that the model for publishing scholarly monographs is broken. Two sets of ideas aired at the Association of American University Presses’ annual meeting, held here this week, don’t say the model is damaged beyond repair. But the proposals, both from groups outside the university-press community, suggest that it needs to be retrofitted, at the least. More...
By Charlie Tyson. José Ferreras was 11 when his grandfather died on Thanksgiving Day. A few weeks before, Ferreras had fallen into an argument with the older man, who was sick with Parkinson’s. He didn’t have a chance to apologize.
“This man, he was the only male figure that I truly had in my life,” Ferreras said. “My father was never around, and I was never really close with my brothers or my cousins, so I just really had my grandfather.”
Now 19, Ferreras is a creative writing major at Southern Vermont College, a 500-student liberal arts institution in Bennington that enrolls many low-income and first-generation students. Read more...
By Vincent DeFrancesco. The Chronicle Book Club is back this summer, reading The Student Loan Mess: How Good Intentions Created a Trillion-Dollar Problem, by Joel and Eric Best. The book is highly readable look at the student-debt bubble, a subject no doubt of personal interest to many of you. You can get a sense of the book by reading this blog post the authors wrote in March. More...
By Ilan Stavans. Books are no longer books, at least not what was meant by book a generation ago: an extensive work made of letters that build sentences shaped into paragraphs, written on pages glued together and bound in covers. That, at least, still describes the yellowish copy I bought in 1985, on the New York City streets, of Fahrenheit 451, which sits tightly in my personal library. More...
By Oronte. I welcome back poet Sean Singer, whose previous review at the blog was here. --Churm
Abide. Jake Adam York. Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.
Review by Sean Singer. Read more...
By Joshua Kim. One perk of writing book reviews is that people suddenly want to send you free books.By Jennifer Howard. A lament for a dead child, written by her mother in pencil on the endpaper of an 1843 copy of The Poetical Works of Mrs. Felicia Hemans. A sewing needle, thread still attached, inserted in the back of an 1860 edition of The Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macauley. Bittersweet annotations in an 1891 copy of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems (left), in which the book’s owner recalls times spent reading it with her lost beloved: “You read this, July 1st, Sunday, the day you said—‘goodbye,’ sitting in the great armchair in the Infirmary parlor—O friend of mine!”
Those traces of long-gone readers live on, preserved in the books themselves, in the stacks of the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library. More...
By Joshua Kim. It has been a couple of months since we last checked in on the books that we’ve been reading./https%3A%2F%2Fprofilepics.canalblog.com%2Fprofilepics%2F1%2F0%2F1076071.jpg)
