Wednesday, December 15, 2010

HEB at ALA Midwinter

HEB will be attending the 2011 ALA Midwinter meeting in San Diego, CA, from January 7 to 10. With over 3,000 titles, one million pages and over 80,000 images now online, HEB continues to grow across all humanities disciplines. HEB now has almost 650 institutional subscribers and is averaging over 7.5 million hits per year.

HEB directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto will be attending the meeting and will also be available at Booth 1246. Please e-mail us to set up a meeting or come by during exhibit hours.

For meeting details and registration, please visit ALA’s website.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2010

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 16th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5.5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection, which now has over 2,800 titles.

Attention focused on nationalism, race, gender, war, urbanism and media. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remained in first place. Perennial bestseller Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge) moved up to second place from fifth, while Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press) slipped only one notch from second to third place.


Verso had two books in the top ten with City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles joining Imagined Communities. University presses accounted for five of the ten titles, with two from Princeton University Press and one each from University of California Press, NYU Press and Oxford University Press.


In addition to Verso, commercial presses in the top ten included Pantheon, Schocken and Routledge.

Considering the changing nature of humanistic scholarship, it is interesting to note that many of these titles are older works: Imagined Communities is a revised edition (2006) of a work originally published in 1983. Of the remaining nine titles, seven are ten or more years old, with two from the 1980s and four from the 1990s.

And here’s the list:



  1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983, 2006)
  2. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
  3. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press, 2006)
  4. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
  5. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986)
  6. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990)
  7. Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005)
  8. Fogel, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (University of California Press, 2000)
  9. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)

    Wednesday, November 10, 2010

    XML Title Review and Updates

    HEB’s XML specifications have undergone a number of revisions since the launch of the collection in 2002, and ongoing technical development at the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library (SPO), which disseminates the HEB collection online, have also affected formatting and functionality of our XML titles over the years. Therefore, to ensure our books meet our most recent—and replicable — standards, HEB decided to undertake an extensive review and overhaul of all previously published XML titles according to our updated and standardized XML Tools, Functions, and Capabilities.



    The XML Title List includes 78 live as of September 2010 and an additional 18 XML titles currently either in production or in development.



    The review process itself took place in May and June 2010, and resulting corrections were completed in November 2010. The findings of this review are of value not only to users of the HEB collection but also to those publishers already using, or contemplating deploying, an XML production workflow.


    Based on our review, broken external links proved to be the most widespread problem afflicting previously published XML titles. In order to address this, HEB contacted the titles’ originating presses (and in some cases, authors directly) regarding obsolete URLs. All updates we received were incorporated along with any other revisions stemming from straightforward tagging oversights in the XML file itself (though very few titles required further non-URL-related fixes).


    HEB had also selected four titles for implementing pop-up divisions, a recently added feature allowing for the display of any “additional materials” in pop-up windows.


    There were also a number of revisions to be addressed by SPO, associated with remote processing or the hosting environment rather than with the XML source files and therefore requiring a separate approach. For the most part, these are a result of overarching functionality issues affecting titles across the board rather than being specific to any particular book(s), and the revision process is therefore ongoing.


    In all, twelve titles have been re-released with updates and corrections as part of this effort to improve site functionality and reader experience. Additional titles will reflect improvements once the current cycle of development work at SPO is complete. For further information, please contact ngielen@hebook.org.

    Wednesday, October 27, 2010

    New Titles Forthcoming January 2011

    HEB’s eighth round of new titles is forthcoming in January 2011. This includes 543 electronic books covering a wide range of disciplines and fields. Among the most prominent new additions are another 141 titles in Film and Media Studies, 46 more in Philosophy, 57 in Central and Eastern European Studies, 41 in Music and Musicology, 33 in Jewish Studies, as well as 29 more in Bibliography and 30 in Linguistics and Literature. 

    With these new additions HEB will retain its core concentrations in History and expand strong collections in Women’s Studies (254 titles total), Literature (138), Music and Musicology (127), Latin American Studies (114), Middle Eastern (112) and Mediterranean-Byzantine Studies (67), and Methods and Theory (84), among other fields across the Humanities.

    In all, this brings the HEB collection to nearly 3,335 titles, with nearly 1.2 million pages and 90,000 images, in three full-text formats (page-image, text, PDF), fully cross-searchable, with hyperlinks to online reviews in the major journals and complete MARC records.

    Click here to download the forthcoming list as an Excel spreadsheet sortable by author, title, or ISBN.


    Tuesday, October 19, 2010

    HEB Publishes White Paper 3

    HEB announces the publication of its third white paper, Handheld E-Book Readers and Scholarship: Report and Reader Survey, written by Nina Gielen, HEB Editor for Digital Content and Production. This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by HEB in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers. 

    Scholarly content generally involves extensive networking and cross-referencing between individual works through various channels, including bibliographical citation and subsequent analysis and discussion. Through past experience with its online collection, HEB had already determined that a web-based platform lends itself well to presenting this type of material, but was interested in exploring which key elements would need to be replicated in the handheld edition in order to maintain the same level of functionality, as well as what specific factors from either print or digital publishing would have to be taken into account. As sample content, HEB selected six titles from its own online collection, three in a page-image format with existing OCR-derived text and three encoded as XML files, and had these converted by an outside vendor with minimal editorial intervention into both MOBI (prc) and ePub files.

    The white paper reports on two phases of the study: an in-house evaluation of various e-book readers by HEB staff, and a reader survey. The white paper also includes an overview of the process of converting titles for handheld e-readers, including conversion costs. 

    HEB’s initial findings indicate that titles formatted for then-existing handheld devices are not yet adequate for scholarly use in terms of replicating either the benefits of online collections — cross-searchability, archiving, multifarious interactive components — nor certain aspects of print editions that users reported missing, such as being able to mark up and rapidly skim text. A turnaround is underway once a common and more robust format optimized for handheld readers is determined and devices themselves continue to evolve, adding improved display options and better and more intuitive web-access, searching and other interactive use of content.

    For reports on the white paper, see Digital Koans (September 6, 2010) and  The Chronicle of Higher Education

    The white paper is available free online in either HTML or searchable, downloadable PDF and in print for a modest fee.

    Wednesday, September 8, 2010

    The English Institute Goes Born-Digital

    HEB announces the publication of a new born-digital, XML title: On Periodization, edited by Virginia Jackson of Tufts University and published by The English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This partnership between HEB and the English Institute is especially important: it represents our first born-digital title in literary studies and the Institute’s first venture into publishing the multimedia that reflect the growing importance of the digital in literary analysis. 

    This book is the latest in the series of English Institute publications. For seven decades, The English Institute has been a major resource for developments in criticism, theory, and scholarship, while honoring traditional fields of interest and modes of literary analysis. This volume presents selected papers from the 2008 annual English Institute conference, held at Harvard University. It includes the work of seven scholars from among papers presented at the conference. Previous volumes — already offered in our English Institute series — include many of the most important literary critics of the past three generations. According to English Institute Trustee William Germano, “This collaboration is a terrific opportunity for us. With digital access, hyperlinks, and audio and visual enhancements, our new series brings the English Institute into the electronic present.” 

    The English Institute and HEB are already at work on the next born-digital title in the series, which will present papers from the 2009 conference. This new, born-digital series is edited by Meredith L. McGill of Rutgers University.

    HEB is pleased to be hosting this distinguished series and to be The English Institute’s partner in this continuing collaboration. See a complete list of our XML titles.

    Monday, August 23, 2010

    Highest Praise for Litchfield, Florence Ducal Capital

    R. Burr Litchfield’s Florence Ducal Capital has received another rave review. Laurie Nussdorfer, analyzing the book in the latest issue of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, writes, “If there were a book ideally suited to appear in a digital edition, it is this magisterial study of the social geography of Florence in the first century of the Medici grand dukes.… The E-Book partners brilliantly with Litchfield’s online gazetteer… [a] magnificent resource.… The book’s real value…is to provide a model for how to analyze and visualize a society in transition. As such, Litchfield’s example will hopefully inspire similar studies of other urban communities and ultimately foster a genuinely comparative history of urban change.”

    We could not agree more. This title is both born-digital and open-access. See a complete list of our XML titles.

    Monday, August 16, 2010

    Scott Palmer Surveys the Digital Humanities

    In the latest News Net (May/June 2010, 50.3) of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Scott Palmer’s “Academic Publishing in the Digital Age” surveys the current landscape of digital humanities: JSTOR, MUSE, the JSAH, the university presses and the “digital transition,” various e-book platforms and e-readers, including the Kindle and iPad. He examines the Institute for the Future of the Book, George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, Web 2 and 3 capabilities, the impact of mega-corporations like Microsoft, Apple and Google, and the efforts of government and private foundations, including NEH, MacArthur, Mellon and ACLS. Among the “impressive” multimedia projects he cites is ACLS Humanities E-Book’s XML series

    Prof. Palmer then devotes many of his final remarks to the importance of a new digital literacy among humanists themselves and the opportunities and challenges that this new fluency carry for the academy. “We should be prepared to be buffeted by continuing whirlwinds of change,” he concludes. 

    Scott Palmer comes to the topic with first-hand knowledge and experience: he is the author of HEB’s XML multimedia version of Dictatorship of the Air (Cambridge UP, HEB e-book, 2007) and now serves as editor-in-chief of The Russian Front website. 

    Friday, August 6, 2010

    Who’s Reading HEB



    While we do not track individual users or sessions, every month we compile statistics on the breakdown of our subscribers by FTE size, by Carnegie classification, by more general type of institutions, and by country. These numbers offer some interesting information on our readership, where it is concentrated geographically, and at what types of schools. received another rave review. 

    HEB currently has 633 institutional subscribers with a combined FTE of 5,335,916, according to the latest figures available. Of these 633 institutions nearly three-quarters (463, or 73.1%) are at college and universities, and these have a combined FTE enrollment of just over 3.5 million. The second-highest concentration of institutional subscribers is among the 125 non-U.S. schools for a combined FTE of just over 1.7 million, or 19.4% of the total. After that the next-highest grouping is among secondary schools (28, or 4.42%) with a total enrollment of 19,308.The latter tend to be the traditional prep schools where the humanities continue to hold a central place in the curriculum.

    If we look at the classifications by type of institution, an interesting pattern begins to emerge. As one might expect, the largest concentration by FTE (1.7 million) is among the 80 Extensive schools: the highest level research institutions offering doctoral degrees. (32 Intensive schools provided 5% of the total or an FTE of 438,205). Yet the highest number of schools (113) is among the Master’s I designation: the smaller public and some private baccalaureate colleges that also grant Masters degrees. The next largest in numbers (89) is currently among institutions granting Associate’s degrees. Though small in FTE (460,772 total), the number of these schools is significant, since it appears to indicate (borne out by direct anecdotal information) that schools are using HEB for collection development to stretch acquisitions dollars or to serve new constituencies and accrediting criteria. In the middle stand the three levels of baccalaureate institutions, the various levels of traditional liberal arts colleges (113 schools in all or 17.8%), for a combined FTE of 190,152. In the past, many of these schools, we were told, acquired HEB not so much for its content (many of these titles are already in their print collections), as for HEB’s exemplary nature as a highly peer-reviewed digital collection. While quality remains key, these liberal arts libraries are also now leading a trend in acquisitions away from print and toward the digital.

    Returning to those 125 non-US schools, subscribers are spread across the globe in 29 countries. As one might expect, Anglophone nations predominate, with the United Kingdom (30), Canada (25), Australia (12), and Ireland (7) together accounting for 59% of non-US institutions and a combined FTE of 1.26 million. All the continents are included. China, where HEB has begun a new initiative, has 8 institutional subscribers. In India HEB is currently in the middle of several large-scale, college consortial trials.

    FTE is no guarantee that anyone at an institution is reading online or using HEB, yet our usage stats bear out the general picture: from 2008 to 2009 hits across the entire collection, then about 2300 titles, rose almost 54%, from 3.3 million to 5.1 million, while the total number of subscribing institutions (and FTE) stayed fairly stable, rising about 3%. This means that the collection continues to be more and more intensively used and embedded in online catalogs and course syllabi. In further HEB News posts, we’ll continue to report regularly on the top titles being used in the collection. 

    Wednesday, July 7, 2010

    New and Improved Site Features

    Thanks to ongoing structural improvements on our website provided by the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, our readers will now notice several overall upgrades in interface and performance. These include multiple viewing sizes, the improvement of image quality—most especially in books with numerous grayscale illustrations—and a smoother and more consistent page transition. We’ve also added many new online reviews to new and previously added titles.

    Readers will also note new features and improvements in our library of XML titles, including many new links to related scholarship within HEB; newly formatted page-break indicators in print-derived XML books (in direct response to reader feedback); and improved pop-up functionality.

    These join the improved functionalities added over the past two years: page-viewing options that now include page-image, PDF, and text views (allowing citation copy-and-paste within Fair-Use guidelines); the ability to print and download up to three pages at a time; and the addition of numerous publisher series. All in all we think these changes make our site even more user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to navigate. We welcome your continued comments and suggestions for further improvements.

    Wednesday, May 12, 2010

    Pohlandt-McCormick, “I Saw a Nightmare...”: Doing Violence to Memory, new on HEB


    Helena Pohlandt-McCormick
    New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. HEB 2010.

    The Soweto uprising was both a tragic and heroic event in the history of South Africa. Tragic, because of the violence associated with it; heroic, because of the way it grew out of the oppression of the past and marked a decisive step towards a democratic future. This electronic book has two identities. On the one hand it provides a comprehensive, though by no means complete, account of the uprising. On the other, it is an attempt to come to terms with the interrelationship between violence and memory in South Africa.

    This born-digital work is envisioned as two buildings, interconnected, perhaps even standing under the same roof. The buildings have many floors, large and small rooms, alcoves, basements and common rooms. They are interconnected by a series of passageways, staircases, larger and smaller doors. Thus, this book does not offer merely another alternative interpretation of the story of Soweto, no single narrative of the past or single interpretation, but rather the multiple stories that were told and the contested meanings that were attributed to the events of Soweto. It seeks to describe and establish relationships among these multiple narratives as well as the processes of societal and individual remembering and forgetting, looking at the many levels, layers, spaces, and times in which they took place.

    The electronic medium, with its ability to create multiple linkages at many levels and to surpass the simple linearity of a book, attempts to replicate the many layers of meaning associated with the uprising. Some of them have changed through time, some complement each other, others conflict.

    This e-book provides extensive supplementary materials, accessible via pop-up windows (including thousands of photographs, with the option of browsing for these by keyword or type); official documents; essays; and interviews. It takes advantage of extensive interactive cross-referencing within the text to promote non-linear navigation, including “red thread” sections showing a list of all related sections throughout the e-book. It also provides a wealth of related historical documents in the form of PDFs, and a glossary.

    A Gutenberg-e title.
    Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

    Gengenbach, Binding Memories, now on HEB


    Heidi GengenbachNew York: Columbia University Press, 2006. HEB 2010.

    Building on the insights of feminist scholars who had used personal narratives to explore women’s constructions of the past, this book argues that during the last two centuries women in the rural communities of southern Mozambique had not suffered as silent, helpless, or, at best, coping victims of Gaza Nguni conquest, Portuguese colonialism, South African mining capital, and patriarchal clan rule.

    How did women experience and explain the sometimes colliding, sometimes colluding forces of ostensibly masculine power that had transformed the region, so often destructively, since the early nineteenth century? Were imperialism and capitalism, guns and gold, tradition and patriarchy really as omnipotent in determining the exterior and interior landscapes of women’s lives as scholars had claimed? Would the dynamics of precolonial or colonial political power, proletarianization, mission Christianity, agriculture, or African marriage and family look the same if one examines them from the point of view of rural women?

    Do some people remember differently—not in the sense that the details of their memories differ, but in terms of the tools of their memory, the forms their remembering takes? What, for instance, if some people choose not to put experience solely into story, or not to articulate their memories through language at all? The work of remembering, like the work of history, involves sorting through and making sense of the jumble of what happened. We take what we know, we arrange it, we come up with an explanation, and we store that explanation somehow—because we created it for a purpose, and for an audience of some kind. After all, we do the work of remembering in company, as members of a community, never in a social vacuum and never entirely on our own. But who is to say that these explanations, these records of interpreted experience, must be organized and presented as narrative, in discourse rather than some other form? Is narrative our only medium of access to the past, the only meaningful shape remembrance—or history—can assume?

    How does a Western academic historian present in writing historical knowledge that comes in the shape of a clay pot or a line in the soil and that obeys imperatives different from her own? While sections of this book on women’s life-storytelling do rely on existing Africanist scholarship for models of historical narrative, none of these models perfectly fit the culture of female storytelling. Collectively they raise a crucial question: To what extent can or should academic historians subordinate their subjects’ conventions of historical narrative to the formal conventions of their discipline?

    Includes image maps to facilitate non-linear navigation, audio clip interviews, and a Flash animated map. Dozens of supplementary materials are accessible via pop-up windows, including the author’s field notes, interview transcriptions, and newspaper clippings. Includes a glossary and over 500 color and black and white images.

    A Gutenberg-e title.
    Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

    Friday, April 30, 2010

    HEB Offers Libraries Free, Two-Month Trials

    ACLS Humanities E-Book is offering institutions a free, two-month trial of the collection during May and June in anticipation of the Summer/Fall acquisition season.

    If you would like to request a trial, please email your name, email address and institutional affiliation to subscriptions@hebook.org. Once your response is processed you will receive a username and password to access the collection online.

    As your library plans for the expansion of its digital collection, we hope you'll consider ACLS Humanities E-Book. For a complete list of titles available, please visit http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

    Wednesday, April 21, 2010

    HEB Handheld Reading Device Survey: Summary of Results

    HEB recently concluded its survey to test the use of digital scholarly monographs for research purposes on various handheld reading devices, such as Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s iPhone. (For details, please visit the HEB website.)

    We offered participants a choice of three sample titles to download, all taken from our online collection and reformatted for portable e-book readers, with each available in two different formats, ePub and prc/MOBI. The survey was completed by 142 respondents, 86 of whom (i.e., more than 60%) described themselves as librarians. Independent scholars, instructors, students, writers, and technology consultants were among the remaining participants.

    Full details of the survey results and handheld conversion process will be featured in a forthcoming white paper, but here are some of the more important findings.

    Respondents were asked to rate their experiences with both content and functionality. Most indicated that they were quite satisfied with straight-forward reading and navigation, in spite of formatting limitations resulting from converting to ePub and prc. In terms of e-reader functionality, responses reflected a certain amount of frustration with interactive features, such as compiling and working with annotations, and options for reference and citation.

    Overall, survey participants reacted more or less favorably to HEB’s sample titles, and about 75% expressed an interest in downloading additional monographs. (Forty-six percent answered they would definitely be interested in this, and an additional 29% expressed interest if the titles were free or priced below $10.)

    HEB also surveyed participants regarding their general reading preferences, and current use of handheld readers for research purposes appeared to be relatively low. When asked to compare the two formats, 69% of participants who also had access to HEB’s online collection seemed to prefer this for research and scholarly use. This does not come as a surprise, since a number of features considered important to digital scholarship by survey participants (e.g., access to external resources, searching across titles, and color images) were either restricted or unavailable altogether on then-current handheld devices. However, among the same subgroup, for casual/general reading, those preferring the handheld edition outnumbered those preferring the online edition three to one.

    After closing the survey, HEB conducted a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to Apple, Sony, or Amazon, and the winners have been notified. Thanks again to all our participants.

    Wednesday, April 14, 2010

    HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2010

    ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 15th round of royalties to nearly 100 publishers and 400 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 5 million hits on the site over the past year. Once again, HEB presents its top-ten hit titles in the collection.

    Worth noting is that Islam and the Middle East (consistently on the list since 2003) has fallen off the top ten. Hodgson’s Venture of Islam, a constant in the top ten in the past, is now at 13th place. Meanwhile, Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather maintains its strong performance. This period it has been joined by several other titles in colonial, race, and gender studies (a trend continued among the next ten on the list). At the same time, other disciplines or methodologies — especially sociology and media studies — have emerged as leaders. Apropos is the appearance here of two presses new to the top ten: NYU and Verso.
    1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso)
    2. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press)
    3. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press)
    4. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press)
    5. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge)
    6. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon)
    7. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Harvard University Press)
    8. Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (University Press of Virginia)
    9. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press)
    10. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (McGill-Queen’s University Press)

    Wednesday, April 7, 2010

    New MARC Records

    As previously reported, ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 576 books to its collection, bringing the total to 2790 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas. All current subscribers now have access to all of the new books added to the collection.

    Cataloging records are available to HEB subscribers for download, and instructions for obtaining these records are included below. As you know, it is very important to load the MARC records into your catalog as soon as possible, because most users become familiar with, and begin to access, the site from the library catalog.

    New records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available via your browser at:

    • If you are a new subscriber or if you have not recently updated your MARC records, in order to download all ACLS Humanities E-Book records to date you need to download acls1-7.zip.

    • If you only need to add the new titles, and your records are up-to-date with the last download in Winter 2009, you simply need to download acls7.zip

    Downloads contain three files:
    a. The records in USMARC communications format
    b. The same records in ASCII format
    c. readme.txt - in ASCII format (explains what is contained in each of the above).

    There is a discrepancy between the number of records and the number of books in the collection due to the fact that multi-volume works have a single record. A complete set will include 2651 records for 2790 books.

    Friday, March 19, 2010

    HEB Round 7 Titles Released

    We are happy to announce the launch of the latest round of titles on HEB: 576 new works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including important new series from the American Sociological Association, Cambridge University Press, the English Institute, and the Society of Biblical Literature.

    With the addition of these new works HEB's list now stands at 2790 titles, with over 1 million pages and over 45,000 images. It offers titles in over two dozen disciplinary or area studies, many new to this round, including many titles in performance studies (theater, music, dance, performance), film and media studies, literary criticism, sociology, bibliographical studies, history of the book, and biblical studies. We continue to add titles in all areas of history, women's studies, Jewish studies, and many other fields. HEB now includes monographs, critical studies, primary sources, reference works and volumes of essays. The entire collection is full-text and completely cross-searchable. It is also browsable and searchable by series.

    HEB continues to offer peer-reviewed titles of the highest quality from nearly 100 scholarly publishers. These titles have been chosen by our partners among twenty participating ACLS learned societies for their continued value in teaching and research. Selection and digitization for the next round of HEB titles is already underway.

    Friday, February 26, 2010

    Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese now on HEB.


    Tonio Andrade New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. HEB 2010.

    In 1600, Taiwan was a wild land, inhabited by headhunters and visited mainly by pirates and fishermen. A hundred years later it was a prefecture of the Chinese Empire, home to a hundred thousand Chinese colonists. What accounted for this transition? How did Taiwan become Chinese?

    This new XML title traces the history of Taiwan in this pivotal period of European rule, 1623 to 1662. While also considering a short-lived Spanish colony in northern Taiwan (1626–42), Andrade focuses on the Dutch colony (1624–62) and the emergence therein of a Sino-Dutch hybrid colony, a process he calls “co-colonization.” This process was born out of economic and administrative cooperation between Dutch and Chinese colonists, but it also involved coercion: This is not a book just about peaceful coexistence.

    These stories of cooperation and competition shed light on one of the most important questions of global history: How do we understand the great colonial movements that have shaped our modern world? Historians have focused on European colonialism, paying little attention to non-western counter examples. Andrade studies Taiwan because it is a place where European and non-European colonialism met, where two different civilizations encountered “people without history,” and thus an ideal microcosm for understanding colonialism.

    Much of the documentary evidence for this book comes from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) Collection of the National Archives of the Netherlands in The Hague, as well as from other archives, such as the Arsip Nasional of Indonesia, the Archivo General de Indias, and Chinese sources, many of which can be found online at the Academia Sinicas Scripta Sinica.

    This XML title contains 27 maps, many contemporary, accessible in two different hi-res image viewers, and 37 color and b&w figures, many from Caspar Schmalkalden’s Die Wundersamen Reisen… of 1642–52 and from the Academia Sinica’s collection of Genre Paintings of Taiwan Aborigines, modern photos, graphs, and tables. The book also offers a hyperlinked conceptual, topical and thematic index, Unicode Chinese, and hyperlinks to external resources.

    A Gutenberg-e title.
    Please see the complete list of Gutenberg-e titles available and forthcoming in HEB.

    Monday, February 1, 2010

    Reminder: HEB Handheld Reading Device Survey

    ACLS Humanities E-Book requests your participation in a survey, which has been designed to test the viability of presenting titles from our collection in new formats for use on handheld e-book readers, including the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, and Apple iPhone. Your participation will help us to gather valuable feedback on the use of scholarly titles on handheld devices.

    To participate, please visit www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html. Here you can download one or more free HEB titles to your e-book reader and access the survey. (If you've already downloaded a title, please remember to go back and answer the survey questions!) Titles include: The Arabs and Medieval Europe by Norman Daniel, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America by Lewis Hanke, and The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi.

    To thank you for your time and considered responses, we'll be doing a raffle drawing for three $50 gift certificates to a retailer of your choice: Amazon, Sony, or Apple. Be sure to fill out the contact information on the last screen of the survey to enter the raffle. Individual responses are strictly confidential. The overall results and analysis will be made available in a subsequent white paper.

    Thank you for your participation.
    ACLS Humanities E-Book

    Friday, January 22, 2010

    HEB Enters the History of the Book in America

    In their authoritative essay, "The History of the Book in America" in the newly published The Oxford Companion to the Book, (ed. Michael F. Suarez, SJ and H.R. Woudhuysen, 2 vols. [Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2010], 1:425-42), Scott E. Casper and Joan Shelley Rubin survey and analyze the history of book production and culture in America from its 17th-century beginnings into the 21st century. They trace trends and milestones from John Eliot's Indian Bible (1661-63) printed in Cambridge, MA, through Benjamin Franklin and Peter Zenger, through the growth of Harper, Putnam, Houghton Mifflin, Lippincott, Holt, Knopf and Random House, Time-Warner and the other great American presses of the 20th century. In their survey they discuss the industrial book, literacy and modes of reading, the public library, trends in publishing, marketing and reading, consolidation and globalization, and conclude with a section on "The Future of the Book." Desktop publishing, POD and e-books follow in rapid succession, culminating in several examples of this future: Stephen King, Google Book, and (in some detail, p. 441) the American Council of Learned Societies' "History E-book project" (now, of course, ACLS Humanities E-Book). We're impressed to find ourselves in such good publishing and historical company and to be publicly recognized as a culminating element of the history of the book in America.

    Wednesday, January 6, 2010

    Directors to Introduce HEB Portal at ALA

    HEB will be attending this year's ALA Midwinter meeting in Boston, MA, from January 15 to 18. In its review of ACLS Humanities E-Book (September 2009) the Institute of Historical Research (London) called HEB "one of the best - if not the best - electronically accessible sites in the humanities." For its tenth anniversary, HEB is now completing details for a "universal" collaboration with university presses and learned societies to create a collection with complete publisher lists and a new purchase and perpetual access model. This new "HEB Portal" will facilitate the distribution of scholarly monographs and related materials to the scholarly and library community. Please visit Booth 2553 to discuss details with Directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto.