IVP - Addenda & Errata - December 2010 Archives

Now about that Festschrift and other things you need to know about the future of publishing (Part 5)

But what about that Festschrift? Well, I don’t want to say we’ll never publish a Festschrift! And of course I wouldn’t deny yours exactly. And for full disclosure (really!), right now I am trying to finish up an essay for a Festschrift, and—enjoy the irony—it’s a Festschrift I turned down as an editor.

Now about that Festschrift and other things you need to know about the future of publishing (Part 4)

Okay, so you’ve got your proposal for a killer app of an academic book and you’ve identified the right publishers. What else do you need to know? Well, the next thing is something you should have already been working on!

Now about that Festschrift and other things you need to know about the future of publishing (Part 3)

If you write academic books (broadly defined), what strategies might you employ for successful publishing in our new environment? Here are two potential strategies. (I’ll take up two more in part 4 —this will end up to be a five-part rather than three-part series!)

Now about that Festschrift . . . and other things you need to know about the future of publishing (Part 2)

The future of publishing is not entirely bleak.

Some corrections and cautions are in order.

Print is not dead. Not yet. Not by far. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek (a top-selling business book for at least three years), reported that in his end-of-2009 royalty statement, e-books (of all sorts) accounted for only 1.6 percent of total units sold. But things have been developing rapidly even since 12 months ago.

Now about that Festschrift . . . and other things you need to know about the future of publishing (Part 1)

Our academic obsession with books was underscored for me a few weeks ago when a NT scholar confessed to me that he had taken ten volumes of rabbinic literature along with him on his honeymoon. He admitted this was a sad commentary on his life at the time.

Sad? Frankly, I thought it was pathetic!

These days he could have taken along the entire corpus of rabbinic texts on his Kindle or iPad!