New Participating Societies Partner with HEB

ACLS Humanities E-Book is pleased to announce that the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the World History Association (WHA) have partnered with HEB as contributing societies. HEB actively works to expand the areas of scholarship included in our collection to reflect current trends and interests in scholarly research, and now collaborates with twenty-seven of ACLS’s constituent learned societies on these efforts. (See a list of all participating societies here.) As new contributors, AAR and WHA have recently developed lists of recommended titles of enduring value in their fields.

The AAR list was compiled by the heads of the AAR’s sixty-four program units, which include the following: Animals and Religion; Buddhist Critical–Constructive Reflection; Chinese Religions; Indigenous Religious Traditions; Law, Religion, and Culture; Mysticism; Pragmatism and Empiricism in American Religious Thought; Queer Theory and LGBT Studies in Religion; and Religion in Europe. These recommendations increase and diversify our offerings of high-quality titles in religion and theology.

HEB received a comprehensive bibliography of significant works in world history from The World History Association, admitted to ACLS in 2011. These titles reflect the WHA’s goal of fostering historical analysis undertaken from the point of view of the human community as opposed to that of specific nation-states, discrete regions or particular cultures. This list greatly expands our offerings in transregional, transnational and transcultural studies.

In addition, HEB was recently provided with new title suggestions from existing contributors, such as the American Society for Environmental History and the American Historical Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Historians Task Force.

Over the past few months HEB has been securing rights to and acquiring books based on these recommendations, which will form part of our upcoming release of several hundred titles scheduled to go live in late spring or early summer 2013. We look forward to making these scholarly-selected titles in the emerging and traditional fields of environmental history, LGBTQ studies, religion and world history available to our subscribers.

Latest HEB Top-Hit Titles (Spring 2013)

The latest list of the ten most frequently hit titles in the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection (totaling 3,700 books) is posted below. These findings are from our most recently processed royalty period, covering July 2012–December 2012.

In addition to the titles making repeat appearances on this list, there are two new entries for this cycle: Walter Johnson's Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, investigating the politics and social mores of the domestic slave trade through the example of the New Orleans slave market; and Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, which details the origins of this life-changing technology in business and government in the form of huge appliances through the development of our familiar home PCs. Frequent use of specific titles in the collection generally indicates recent course adoption or simply growing interest from scholars in the fields in question.

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. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
4. Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York University Press, 2006)
5. Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2004)
6. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
7. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early American (Harvard University Press, 2003)
8. Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Harvard University Press, 1999)
9. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
10. Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine (Perseus Books, 1996)

New Handheld Titles Just Released

HEB has just released another round of downloadable titles, including Paul Boyer and Tom Engelhardt's By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, and James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era.

This brings the number of handheld titles now available from HEB to around 90, with dozens more slated for conversion in the coming months. Fields covered include Women's Studies, Religious Studies, Native Peoples of the Americas,  Asian History, African History, Latin American History and more; publication dates span the 1920s through 2000s.

All titles in HEB's handheld/mobile editions program may be individually purchased for $9.99 from various retailers, including Amazon, BooksOnBoard, eBookMall, Lybrary.com, Powell's Books, Feedbooks, and others.

For details on the program, please visit: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/handheld.html.

HEB at NYSAIS Education and Information Technology Conference

HEB will be a first-time exhibitor at the NYSAIS (New York State Association of Independent Schools) Education and Information Technology Conference (NEIT 13) this year. The conference takes place January 30-February 1, 2013, at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY. Details on the event can be found here.

We are happy to be able to offer annual subscriptions to secondary schools at the competitive rate reserved for institutions categorized as "very small" according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning.

KC Trommer, HEB subscriptions and marketing coordinator, will be available at NEIT 13 during exhibit hours on Thursday, 1/31, from 6PM to 9PM, as well as in attendance at the conference the following day, Friday, 2/1. Please write to subscriptions@hebook.org to set up an appointment or for details on how to subscribe.

Collection Development Survey Results

HEB recently asked its subscribers to take part in a survey designed to assist us in expanding our title list to reflect current interests in scholarship and adding to any underrepresented areas. In response we received feedback from 185 participants at subscribing institutions.

Those areas generating the most interest included several that are already prominently featured or traditionally strong in the HEB collection, such as European History and U.S. History. The top five fields of interest to participating subscribers were Film and Media Studies, American History, Latin American History, Art and Architecture and Literature—though each of the remaining thirty-one options was also selected a number of times. These results seem to indicate that, for one, maintaining the current breadth and diversity of our humanities offerings is essential; and furthermore, that certain core fields have remained popular over the span of HEB’s ten-year existence and our subscribers would like to see these continue to grow.

We had also asked survey participants to suggest new areas to explore and specific titles they would like us to consider adding. These too covered a wide variety of fields, including mythology/esoterica, non-western religion, gender studies, ecology, cultural studies, psychology, and other categories that, while not strictly falling under the mantle of a humanities-oriented initiative, may include some cross-over.

These findings will be used by HEB to continue to develop our collection over the coming years. We thank everyone who took part in the survey.

HEB at ALA Midwinter 2013

HEB will once again be attending the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting, taking place in Seattle from January 25 to 29.

To set up an appointment, contact us at info@hebook.org. Or simply stop by our booth!

We will be available at Booth 1210 to discuss what’s new at HEB, including plans for expanding our title list, our newly redesigned website to be launched in early 2013, and the latest additions to our growing list of downloadable/handheld books, as well as to answer any questions from current and future subscribers. We look forward to seeing you there!

Please visit the 2013 ALA Midwinter website to register and for further details on attending the meeting.

HEB Top-Hit Titles, Fall 2012

Listed below are the top ten most frequently hit titles in the ACLS Humanities E-Book collection of 3,700 books, as of our latest royalty period (covering the first half of 2012).

Most of these books have been in frequent use over the past few years, and evidently continue to be much in demand. Making repeat appearances on this list are Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso); 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); Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press); Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books); John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press); and Albert Habib Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press).

New entries, both from esteemed university presses, address the subjects of immigration law and African American women's history. They are Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press) and Tera W. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press).

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. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
4. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
5. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
6. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
7. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
8. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
9. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004)
10. Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 1997)