Growing Success of HEB Individual Subscriptions

ACLS Humanities E-Book is proud to announce that thirty-four of the seventy ACLS constituent societies are now represented among individual subscribers to the HEB collection. This includes societies of all sizes, ranging from 400 to 30,000 members. 

Since June 2009, HEB has offered members of all learned societies the ability to purchase individual subscriptions to the collection for just $35 for a 12-month subscription, which entitles the individual subscriber to the full text of over 3,300 fully cross-searchable titles across all fields in the humanities. Once a subscriber, members can access the collection from home, office or while traveling. 

More information about individual subscriptions is available at http://www.humanitiesebook.org/sub-ind.html. 

HEB at ACRL 2011

HEB was an exhibitor at this year's ACRL conference in Philadelphia from March 31–April 1. A number of subscribers stopped by our booth to tell us that they value the collection and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them in the future.

During the meeting HEB was pleased to be able to report that we are currently in the process of creating handheld editions of an initial batch of around fifty titles from our online collection, slated for release in May or June. The books will be competitively priced and available for individual purchase from various online retailers. They will be the first of about 300 titles that HEB is placing into its handheld program in order to investigate the viability of this format for scholarly monographs and to test the efficiencies and costs of a replicable and scalable workflow. This project follows up on the findings of our survey and white paper devoted to the issue of scholarly monographs in handheld devices completed August 2010.

HEB discussed with subscribers and other interested librarians its prospective plans to offer titles for download to mobile/handheld devices. There is currently no provision for making downloadable titles available as part of a subscription package, since all content is already available to unlimited users online through our regular subscription terms. HEB sees the handheld as the digital equivalent to its POD (print-on-demand) program, that is, as another method of expanding its core online service to additional audiences and uses for those who desire such formats.

HEB also reviewed with librarians several new digital publishing initiatives currently in the planning stages or underway at various universities, university presses and other academic institutions. While many new publisher initiatives are planning the creation of extensive frontlist offerings for digital purchase, HEB remains committed to its role in providing an extensive, very reasonably priced, curated list of the highest-quality titles in the humanities that have passed the test of time and that will have greater assurance of access and use by library patrons. Through its rigorous peer-review process, coordinated with ACLS's seventy constituent learned societies, HEB will continue to offer the best of humanities scholarship in a single, not-for-profit platform for years to come.

Stay tuned for further developments on any of the above and keep up to date by visiting or subscribing to this blog.

HEB and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)

As part of its ongoing policy of urging the inter-institutional coordination of digital scholarly resources (see “Ten Years Later: The Future Is Past,” HEB News 3.2, Spring 2009), HEB was very pleased to be part of the initial Digital Public Library of America planning workshop in early March at Harvard University, hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The meeting included many key people from the world of digital humanities—including scholars, librarians and university presses—as well as people from public libraries and commercial interests.

There was a lively discussion on the content and scope of a potential DPLA, but this was just a first step in defining this bold initiative spearheaded by historian Robert Darnton. A report of the results of the first meeting can be found online at:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dpla/March_1_Workshop_Notes.

There is an opportunity to subscribe to the DPLA listserv at:
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lists/subscribe/dpla-discussion.

Professor Darnton's talk and article on DPLA (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/28/can-we-create-national-digital-library) will also be of interest to scholars and librarians concerned about our digital future.

HEB’s Fair-Use Policy

A thorough understanding of copyright and fair-use rights continues to be important to the work of students, scholars and authors. HEB has recently updated the description of its printing and downloading policies in the Help section of our website, in order to provide more information to users of the HEB collection.

ACLS Humanities E-Book follows fair-use rights and restrictions for all books on the site. Since most material on this site is licensed from participating publishers for electronic distribution only, fair-use restrictions should be carefully followed by users for any printing. This means that you may print pages for your personal research use only. If, as an instructor, you want to use material in a course, you can provide the permanent URL on the title record page and the appropriate page numbers to students. If you want to photocopy pages for your course, you must apply directly to the original publisher for permission.

Under the “page pdf” viewing option for titles in the collection, the default setting is set to both view and print three pages at a time. This is generally sufficient for following a citation or extracting a quotation and follows HEB’s policy for fair-use rights and limitations. If in doubt, or for further information, see our section on fair use.

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.