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.

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)
10. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken, 1995)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.