This just in — a display of our beautiful Collected Works of C.G. Jung series has been spotted at Librarie Galignani in Paris, which was the first bookshop for English-speakers on the European continent! If you find yourself strolling down the rue de Rivoli any time soon, pop in and have a look for yourself. If Paris is not in your near future, check out some of the lovely past window displays on the bookstore’s website!

“It all depends on how we look at things, and not how they are in themselves.”

– Carl Jung

On Thursday, February 2nd, the 2012 PROSE Awards will be livestreamed from Washington D.C. Hopefully Princeton University Press will be bringing home some prizes! “The PROSE Awards annually recognize the very best in professional and scholarly publishing by bringing attention to distinguished books, journals, and electronic content in over 40 categories. Judged by peer publishers, librarians, and medical professionals since 1976, the PROSE Awards are extraordinary for their breadth and depth.”

Check out the broadcast from 12-1:30 EST here: http://www.proseawards.com/video.html

PUP author Thomas J. Sargent, along with Princeton economist Christopher A. Sims, has been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Sargent, a professor at New York University, is a visiting professor at Princeton University this fall and has co-authored two books with PUP: “The Big Problem of Small Change” with François R. Velde (2003), and “Robustness” with Lars Peter Hansen (2007).

A piece in the Chronicle Review highlights AcademicPub — a new business that allows professors to assemble their own textbooks from a range of materials from book chapters and articles, to white papers and web site posts. Several university presses, including PUP have signed on to the service and you can read more about it here:http://chronicle.com/article/New-Digital-Tools-Let/129309/

What an ingenious way to precisely tailor course materials while lowering textbook costs. I wonder if it will catch on.

This great little blog post, Smart Books vs Less Smart People, riffs on The Poetry Lesson and will make you feel better.

As the writer notes:

It’s undeniable that becoming brighter from reading is a glorious thing; a gift, a wonderful democratic alchemy that liberals go on and on about like it’s an elixir. However, in defense of the less-well-read everywhere, I can’t ignore the stage fright one gets when dealing with material that knows so much more than you do, stuff that’s so complex it’s hard to figure out where it begins let alone how to enter it.

But there is good news in the end and a cautionary note to be patient:

You’re already pretty smart if you’re brave enough to tackle interesting subject matter that stretches you further and asks you to navigate new terrain. Success at this can take time.

I couldn’t agree more. As a publicist at an academic press, I am called upon to represent books that are lightning years outside of my comfort level (Hypoelliptic Laplacian and Orbital Integrals, anyone?) and yet I frequently find myself reading and reading and reading on into books that are supposedly too difficult. Give it a try — start here or here or here.

Yes, we are a publisher of textbooks, trade books, field guides, and everything in between (even a few novels!). But what really distinguishes what we–and all our University Press colleagues– do is that we publish important books. Our membership organization, The Association of American University Presses, has just published an impressive Books for Understanding list of about 1100 titles from university presses that contribute to our understanding of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and their influence throughout the last decade.

This tremendous resource includes smart, revelatory books aimed at the general reader as well as targeted academic works from a variety of disciplines. It is a wonderful place to browse for reading recommendations or to use as a bibliography if you are a researcher or journalist. You can browse the complete list here: http://www.booksforunderstanding.org/september11/list.html

Books for Understanding is an initiative of the AAUP that was actually born in the early days following 9/11. As journalists and the general public rushed to learn more about what was happening and the key players in the terrorist attack, University Presses were suddenly inundated for requests for obscure books on the World Trade Center, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, and other relevant topics. Following the recommendation of Sanford Thatcher, then director of Penn State University Press, the AAUP created this bibliography to serve as a regularly updated resource for the scholarly and journalism communities. And in the subsequent decade, Books for Understanding has responded to “in the news” subjects like Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by providing an unparalleled bibliographic resource.

So, like I said, Books for Understanding is one more reason to appreciate University Press publishing and to be proud of what we do.

Or at least the quest to have our books available anywhere and anytime. Here are some great shots of our books in far-flung places.

First up, the Beijing Book Fair. Our logo is up on the wall and there is a nice display of our books and catalogs here:

And here, a nice display of economics books snapped at the Maruzen store in Tokyo:

If you see Princeton University Press titles in a bookstore — snap a picture and send it to jessica_pellien@press.princeton.edu.

The questions come in many forms:

“Why is my book available on amazon.com before pub date?”
“Can we write about this book in June even though the pub date is July?”
“Why does amazon.com have October 21 listed as the pub date when the catalog says November?”

But at the heart of the matter is the strange and archaic practice of setting publication dates for books. Answering it requires a history lesson — a trip in the way back machine to a time before Amazon.com (was there ever such a time?), before you could ship anything anywhere in a day or two, and before press releases could be distributed with the click of a button. Yes, join me as we travel back in time to consider the origins of the publication date/bound book date controversy. This is the story that has been passed down to me via generations of publishers and publicists and I am pleased to share it with you all.

So what is the bound book date?

Bound book date is the day books are expected to materialize in our warehouse. This is literally the day the truck pulls up and unloads boxes of books. The warehouse crew then log this inventory and store it away in the proper place. Books are usually shipped out to bookstores and distributors who placed advance orders within a week.

And how is that different than a publication date?

The publication date is an artificial date set weeks later by (in PUP’s case, at least) the publicist overseeing media outreach for the book. The pub date usually trails the bound book date by 4-5 weeks.

But why would you need such a large gap between bound book date and publication date?

Well, there are two reasons. In ages long gone past, this cushion was necessary to accommodate the packing, shipping, unpacking, shelving process of getting a book onto a physical bookstore shelf. All of these processes simply took longer when things had to done manually and shipping times weren’t as quick. By setting the pub date 4-5 weeks after the bound book date, publishers could be reasonably assured that media reviews timed to pub date would appear when the books were actually available for purchase in stores all over the States. This gap also gives the media enough time to receive their review copies, and then read, write and publish their reviews. In a perfect world, everything — sales and media — would coincide on publication date.

Does this still make sense in 20XX?

Things have changed dramatically over the last few decades — shipping times are faster, the advent of internet bookstores means books are often available for purchase within a week or two of bound book date, and “media” has expanded to include bloggers and online versions of newspapers and magazines that work on shorter deadlines. Occasionally, books will be embargoed so that sales, bound book date, and publication date all occur on the same day (think a Harry Potter-like extravaganza at your local bookstore or your book arriving from Amazon.com on publication day), but for the most part we continue to use this out-dated bound book date/publication date system. While it may seem archaic, it also allows for delays in production, shipping from printers, or any of the other dozens of ways a book can be delayed in arriving at the warehouse. For the most part, this is a system the more traditional media are comfortable with, though we have begun accommodating earlier review and interview requests that occur in the window between bound book date and publication date.

So what do you think? Do artificial publication dates belong in the 21st-Century publishing world? What system would work better? Leave a comment below.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like this one.

David Warren of The Ottawa Citizen has picked a most “obscure anniversary” to write about today.

“The event I propose to celebrate was the publication of an essay in the autumn 1986 number of the highbrow quarterly, The Raritan Review. It was by a professor of philosophy at Princeton University (since retired), Harry G. Frankfurt, and the essay was entitled, ‘On Bullshit,’” he notes.

Well, thank you, David Warren, for choosing this subject for your column today because as any PUP fan knows, that essay became a New York Times bestselling book in a later incarnation.

“The title was memorable. It was not, however, gratuitous,” writes Warren in his celebration of the essay.

On Bullshit continues to hover at the top of our best-selling PUP books list, and, ironically, receives a boost around Christmas every year. Apparently, bullshit is the gift that everyone loves to give.

We were thrilled to see late last week a fantastic interview with our Director, Peter J. Dougherty, in The Huffington Post, by writer Anis Shivani. It is a terrific look at how we publish–and will publish–on, as Mr. Dougherty says, “the new global stage.”

Author Howard Wainer
Event Dates: September 14, 2011 – 7:00pm
Location
Princeton Public Library, Community Room
65 Witherspoon Street
Princeton, NJ

“Uneducated Guesses: Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies”

A distinguished research scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and adjunct professor of statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Wainer was principal research scientist at Educational Testing Service for 21 years. His book uses statistical evidence to show why some of the most widely held beliefs in education today, and the policies that have resulted from them, are wrong.

Part of the Thinking Allowed series sponsored by the library and Princeton University Press.

Scarcity of Beauty

The marriage market, employment, and how we judge each other: UT Economist and PUP author Daniel Hamermesh on the scarcity of beauty.

This is the last of five videos in which Hamermesh explains some of the research he did for Beauty Pays. If you missed the others, find them at the links below!

Beauty and Happiness

Why Beauty is Good for Business

Why Economists care about Beauty

The Economic Benefits of Beauty