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)

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:

http://www.humanitiesebook.org/librarians.html#Anchor-MARC-21683

• 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.

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.

Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese now on HEB.

Tonio Andrade

How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century.

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 Sinica’s 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.

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

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.

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.