New HEB Handheld Editions

HEB has officially launched its handheld/mobile editions program, with several dozen titles from the online collection now available for use with various handheld readers, and more to come down the line. For the time being, these titles may be individually purchased for $9.99 from various online retailers, including Amazon and iBooks. We are also exploring options for eventually offering the books as part of a subscriptions package.

This initial set of handheld titles includes older as well as contemporary works, from fields such as European, African, and Asian History; Women's Studies; Art; Science and Technology; and more.

Among HEB's current handheld offerings are George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England; de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397-1494; Hubert Jedin's History of the Council of Trent, Volumes I and II; Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate; Claire Robertson and Martin Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa; Stephen Schuker, The End of French Predominance in Europe; Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management; Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; and E. Fuller Torrey: Schizophrenia and Civilization.

For details on all titles currently available, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html.

Usage Stats for HEB

As a reminder, usage statistics for the HEB collection are available to subscribing institutions wishing to monitor the extent to which this resource is used by students and faculty, as well as the popularity of individual titles. To obtain stats, go to the following link:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/s/stats/subscriber
and select "ACLS Humanities E-Book (acls)" in the list of collections displayed at left.

To obtain an overview of hits for the collection as a whole, including searches, under "Choose report type," select the "Custom" report option and specify the desired date range. The report will be issued immediately and displayed in your browser. Note that you must be within the institution's allowed IP ranges to issue these requests, which are tracked via automatic IP recognition (no log-in is required).

For a detailed, COUNTER-compliant report showing individual titles, select "Book Report 2" under "Choose report type," select the desired year, and enter the recipient's e-mail address. (Do not select "Book Report 1," as this provides data only for those digital texts that the user can view in their entirety all at once. This does not apply to any of the books in the HEB collection, which can be viewed exclusively on a page-by-page or section-by-section basis.) The requested report will be issued via e-mail and may take a few hours to arrive in your mailbox.

Note that proxy access through third-party providers such as Shibboleth and EZProxy is tracked separately, and those usage stats should be added to the reports described above. Access via password log-in will also not be reflected in HEB usage stat reports.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2012

ACLS Humanities E-Book recently reported and paid its latest round of royalties to our participating publishers and authors. Please find the top ten most frequently hit titles in our collection of over 3,300 titles for this latest royalty period listed below.

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) remains in first place. Also making repeat appearances on this list are Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books), Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press), Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press), Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press), Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), and Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge).

Titles in Latin American studies, gender studies, and U.S. history are new in this round. They are Inga Clendinnen's Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge University Press, 2003; first published in 1987), Joan Wallach Scott's Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1999; first published in 1989) and Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004). New titles making a jump into the top ten hit books can indicate course adoption for a semester and/or general shifting interests in academia and the scholarly community.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
3. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
4. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990)
5. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
6. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
7. Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
8. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
9. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, 1999)
10. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)

ALA Midwinter 2012 Recap

The American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas (January 20-23) afforded HEB the opportunity to present an update of its collection to attendees and to speak with many of our subscribers, whose feedback on content and features they’d like to see added to the collection is always welcome. In part based on comments collected at ALA, we are now in the process of reviewing prospective interface improvements with our technical partners at the University of Michigan’s MPublishing division and are working toward a web overhaul later this year.

At ALA, HEB was able to announce a new round of forthcoming titles—405 total, including 83 award-winning books—scheduled for release this spring, with new titles being added in philosophy, film and media studies, literature as well as multiple other areas. To download a complete list of these, please see http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

As before, interest in prospective handheld/mobile editions of books from our online collection was high. HEB is still working on a definitive list of titles to be converted to mobile-friendly formats, and we’ll be posting this on our website in the coming months. For the time being, a subset of handheld editions will be available for individual sale at an affordable price ($9.99) via Amazon, iBooks, and several other online retailers. We are also working on a model for offering these titles as part of a subscription package in the future.

Interest in and buzz surrounding emerging technologies both for delivery—e.g., cloud versus download—and discovery of digital content was high at ALA. HEB staff was able to confer about this with representatives of other scholarly publishing initiatives as well as with a number of commercially-oriented content providers and vendors, in our ongoing inquiry into what is most relevant to the former group and what is relevant to all readers.

Finally, HEB collected roughly 100 entries for our iPad raffle. The drawing has now been held and we’re pleased to announce the winner: Lynette Nickell, Children's and Young Adult Services Librarian at the Ector County Library in Odessa, Texas.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth to see us.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2012

HEB will once again participate as an exhibitor at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, TX, January 20-23.


More than 400 books will be added next spring to our collection—bringing the total to over 3,700—and we will have an updated list of these forthcoming titles available that we'd like to share with you. Drop by to hear what else is new at HEB and pick up our giveaways.

If you are attending ALA, please stop by booth 1360 or write to Patti Whittier (pwhittier@hebook.org) to set up an appointment. We look forward to seeing you!

For meeting details and registration, please visit ALA's website http://www.alamidwinter.org.

HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2011

ACLS Humanities E-Book recently reported and paid its latest round of royalties to our participating publishers and individual authors. Below we once again list the top ten most frequently hit titles in our collection of over 3,300 titles for this latest royalty period.

Several titles from previous periods remain in the top ten: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) is again in first place; Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge), John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon), and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books) have all previously appeared on this list.

Among the new entries rounding out this diverse roster of classic and contemporary works, history, cultural studies, gender studies, as well as race and ethnicity clearly remain of interest to HEB subscribers. One new addition is George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books), perhaps also reflecting a growing interest in LGBT studies among humanistic scholars. HEB will in fact be adding to its list of LGBT/Queer Studies titles in the coming year, one of several areas we are in the process of expanding.

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
3. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
4. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
5. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
6. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
7. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
8. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994)
9. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
10. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken Books, 1995)

HEB Launches New Handheld Editions Program

The first titles from HEB's online collection converted for use with handheld devices are now available for purchase from various distributors. Among this initial set are a number of seminal works now out-of-print and out-of-copyright—and often hard to find—which we are making available in an affordable downloadable edition, such as William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England; Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica; John Hobson, Imperialism: A Study; Hubert Jedin's History of the Council of Trent, Volumes I and II; Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy; M. Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Volumes I and II; and Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management.

We will be offering additional titles for use with mobile devices and posting details about our handheld editions program on our website in the near future. Please stay tuned.