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)

Revised HEB Title List and MARC Record Set Now Available

ACLS Humanities E-Book has recently updated its collection, resulting in a slight change to our title list and MARC record set. (Please note that, while HEB generally updates its collection on an annual basis as new rounds of titles are released, individual new frontlist titles may be added or—rarely—existing titles may be taken down in between these release cycles.)

The collection now stands at 3,690. An up-to-date title list, including ISBN numbers and subject headings, can be found here: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.html.

MARC records for the collection have also been revised and the latest set is available for download. New subscribers or those who have not recently updated their catalogs should download the latest cumulative file, acls1-9.1.zip. If you have previously updated your records in tandem with the July 2012 release, the current set is identical except for the following: The control number in field 001 was streamlined for a subset of records, records for 18 titles have been removed (the existing link in your catalog will now lead to an inactive title record page; please see this link for a list of all titles removed from the collection since its launch, with date of removal), and this batch includes one new frontlist title released in September.

The latest records for ACLS Humanities E-Book are available at: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683.

Please don't hesitate to contact us with any additional questions by writing to info@hebook.org.

New on HEB: Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices

HEB has just added a new XML title to its collection:  Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna by Maria Rentetzi. In her examination of women working as independent radioactivity researchers at Viennese institutions in the early decades of the last century, Rentetzi draws on documentary research, material culture and built environment analysis, and oral histories. Her text is accompanied by historical photographs and statistical overviews of female participation in radium-related research and scholarship from the 1910s through the 1930s.

This represents the HEB edition of a prizewinning monograph originally published as part of the Gutenberg-e program, a co-initiative of the American Historical Association in conjunction with Columbia University Press.