HEB at ALA Midwinter 2012

HEB will once again participate as an exhibitor at the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, TX, January 20-23.


More than 400 books will be added next spring to our collection—bringing the total to over 3,700—and we will have an updated list of these forthcoming titles available that we'd like to share with you. Drop by to hear what else is new at HEB and pick up our giveaways.

If you are attending ALA, please stop by booth 1360 or write to Patti Whittier (pwhittier@hebook.org) to set up an appointment. We look forward to seeing you!

For meeting details and registration, please visit ALA's website http://www.alamidwinter.org.

HEB Best Sellers, Fall 2011

ACLS Humanities E-Book recently reported and paid its latest round of royalties to our participating publishers and individual authors. Below we once again list the top ten most frequently hit titles in our collection of over 3,300 titles for this latest royalty period.

Several titles from previous periods remain in the top ten: Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso) is again in first place; 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), John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon), and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books) have all previously appeared on this list.

Among the new entries rounding out this diverse roster of classic and contemporary works, history, cultural studies, gender studies, as well as race and ethnicity clearly remain of interest to HEB subscribers. One new addition is George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books), perhaps also reflecting a growing interest in LGBT studies among humanistic scholars. HEB will in fact be adding to its list of LGBT/Queer Studies titles in the coming year, one of several areas we are in the process of expanding.

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. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
4. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge, 1995)
5. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
6. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton University Press, 1996)
7. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 1988)
8. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic Books, 1994)
9. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
10. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schocken Books, 1995)

HEB Launches New Handheld Editions Program

The first titles from HEB's online collection converted for use with handheld devices are now available for purchase from various distributors. Among this initial set are a number of seminal works now out-of-print and out-of-copyright—and often hard to find—which we are making available in an affordable downloadable edition, such as William Bradford, Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647; George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England; Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica; John Hobson, Imperialism: A Study; Hubert Jedin's History of the Council of Trent, Volumes I and II; Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy; M. Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, Volumes I and II; and Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management, Comprising Shop Management.

We will be offering additional titles for use with mobile devices and posting details about our handheld editions program on our website in the near future. Please stay tuned.

New on HEB: The English Institute's Work of Genre

HEB is pleased to announce the release of our latest XML title, The Work of Genre, edited by Robyn Warhol and published by The English Institute in collaboration with ACLS. This represents the second born-digital installment in the English Institute's ongoing series of publications derived from its annual conferences and comprises selected papers from the 2009 conference held at Harvard University. (For more information the launch of this digital series and its initial installment, On Periodization, please see the following link.) This volume features seven essays, in addition to the editor's introduction, exploring questions such as: How do genres come into being, and what distinguishes them one from another? What do considerations of genre occlude, as well as reveal? What kinds of generic categories might be useful for critical analysis today?

HEB will continue to offer further installments of this series, edited by Meredith L. McGill of Rutgers University, on an annual basis.

HEB Pricing for 2011-2012

ACLS Humanities E-Book is experiencing growing pains! This year, we have seen a dramatic increase in the size of the collection. With an average of 500 new titles added each year, the HEB program has now surpassed 3,300 titles of recognized high quality in the humanities. HEB just celebrated its 10th anniversary, passing the 1 million page mark!

Our growth reflects the popularity of HEB’s list and the continual improvement in content, search and access. The collection has expanded to include the highest-quality work in anthropology, linguistics, film and media studies, as well as sociology and philosophy. Additionally, HEB will continue to seek the best works in the humanities to create the most robust collection available in one package.

HEB will be making only moderate price increases this year, continuing to offer the most cost-effective resource in the humanities today. These price increases (effective as of August 1, 2011) are necessary to manage the growth in our operation, ongoing expansion of content and list development. As HEB has not raised its subscription rates in nearly five years, this reflects greater value based on the rapidly expanding list offered to its members. HEB continues to maintain competitive pricing despite the exponential growth of the collection. You can find our pricing on our website: http://www.humanitiesebook.org/pricingsubscriptions.html.

We continue to appreciate your loyalty and support of the ACLS Humanities E-Book program and its commitment to quality. And as always, we appreciate your feedback, thoughts and comments.

Drop us a line at:  info@hebook.org.

New MARC Records, June 2011

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just added 291 books to its collection, bringing the total to 3,334 works across a wide range of disciplines and subject areas, including important new series from Cambridge University Press, Fordham University Press, and University of California Press. 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, including one zip file for the 542 new round 8 titles and a second zip file for all 3,334 titles in the collection. 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.

As a reminder, the records are now in UTF-8 format, rather MARC-8 format as in previous releases. If you have any questions, please email us at info@hebook.org. 

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, you need to download acls1-8.zip (includes 3,149 records for all 3,334 books in rounds 1-8, online as of June 2011). 

• If you only need to add the new titles, and your records are up-to-date with the last download in March 2010, you simply need to download the file acls8.zip, which includes all 502 records for the 542 books added in April and June 2011.

PLEASE NOTE: The MARC records for our latest release, round 8, are in Unicode-UTF-8 format rather than the older MARC-8 format. To accommodate those subscribers not wishing to overwrite existing MARCs in a new format, we are making rounds 1-7 and round 8 available separately. However, for consistency, subscribers may want to download the cumulative file acls1-8.zip in the UTF-8 format.

Downloads each contain three files:

a. The records in MARC 21 communications format.

b. The same records in ASCII format.

c. A 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 3,071 records for 3,334 books.

HEB Best Sellers, Spring 2011

ACLS Humanities E-Book has just reported and paid its 17th round of royalties to more than 80 publishers and 170 individuals or their literary estates. This represents the results of nearly 6 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 3,000 titles.

Attention focused on cultural studies, world history, nationalism, gender and urbanism. 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 from second to third place, while John W. Dower's War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon) up to second place. 

University presses accounted for four of the ten titles, with one each from Stanford University Press, Harvard University Press, NYU Press and Oxford University Press.

Verso had two books in the top ten with City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles joining Imagined Communities. In addition to Verso, commercial presses in the top ten included Pantheon, Routledge, Beacon and Basic Books.


Considering the changing nature of humanitistic scholarship, it is interesting to note that many of these titles are older works and classic works in their fields. For example, Imagined Communities is a revised edition (2006) of a work originally published in 1983 and Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France was published in 1976.

And here’s the list:

1. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 2006)
2. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1993)
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. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early American (Harvard University Press, 2003)
6. Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914 (Stanford University Press, 1976)
7. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 1957)
8. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 1973)
9. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990)
10. Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 2006)