"I certainly never write a review about a book I don't think worth reviewing, a flat-out bad book, unless it's an enormously fashionable bad book." --
says, John Gardner in Conversations with John Gardner
Quoted from 'Dictionary of Library and Information Science Quotations'     Edited by Mohamed Taher & L S Ramaiah. ISBN: 8185689423 (New Delhi , Aditya, 1994) p.150. Available @ Amazon.com

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Book in Embryonic Stage - But Ready for Delivery

This post is updated regularly, last updated Nov 1, 2006

"Networked Pre-publication Models: Opportunities, Possibilities, and Outstanding Questions in the `University without Walls'," Journal of Religious and Theological Information 2:1 (Fall, 1994) 95-114. Originally presented to the Special Topics Forum "Networked Electronic Publishing: Present Models and Future Opportunities for the Academy" as "Networked Pre-publication Models: Opportunities and Possibilities", American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, November, 1992.

What happens to a book before it is published? Much was happening, in the past, as in evident from the above citation.

But now with the emergence of the blogosphere, a book in its formation stage is being read by 1000 editors, not all of them are professional. A researcher, at Institute for the Future of the Book, looks deep into these prospects!!!

It is, in short, still all-ado-about a book in its embryonic (or pre-production) Stage? Will there be no need of ghost editors? Will the Book Acquisition Department in publishing houses get shrinked? And more questions may now pop up.

I just read the following news story (Thanks to Joseph Romain):

Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations, By JEFFREY R. YOUNG, The Chronicle of Higher Education (From the issue dated July 28, 2006)

While most scholarly books are reviewed by a few carefully chosen experts before publication, McKenzie Wark's latest monograph is getting line-by-line critiques from hundreds of strangers in cyberspace, many of whom know absolutely nothing about his academic field. continue reading


  • See another like minded blogger's post on the above subject Books or Bytes by Neil Campbell
  • See also Google for more such activism
  • 1 comment:

    Anonymous said...

    A comment on the citation from Journal of Religious and Theological Information

    I look forward to getting feedback from you and others who might have comments. (Fascinating that a presentation in 1992 might elicit comment 14 years later!!)

    "L. G. Bloomquist (SPU)" gbloomquist@ustpaul.ca