The Book Publishing Industry focuses on consumer books (adult, juvenile, and mass market paperbacks) and reviews all major book categories to present a comprehensive overview of this diverse business. In addition to the insights and portrayals of the U.S. publishing industry, this book includes an appendix containing historical data on the industry from 1946 to the end of the twentieth century. The selective bibliography includes the latest literature, including works in marketing and economics that has a direct relationship with this dynamic industry. This third edition features a chapter on e-books and provides an overview of the current shift toward digital media in the US book publishing industry.

This acclaimed must-have resource provides the following: - Expert reviews of the key trends, events, and developments that will influence your work in 2004 and the years to come- Clear explanations of new legislation and changes in funding programs--and how this will affect libraries- Definitive statistics on book prices, numbers of books published, library expenditures, average salaries, and other budget-crunching assistance- A full calendar of events, key organizations, names and numbers of important individuals (including e-mail addresses and fax numbers), and much more This fully updated reference tool makes it easy to stay on top of the developments that affect libraries, booksellers, and publishers alike--and to find fast answers to the countless on-the-job questions you encounter.

Books, scholarly journals, business information, and professional information play a pivotal role in the political, social, economic, scientific, and intellectual life of nations. While publications abound on Wall Street and financial service companies, the relationship between Wall Street’s financial service companies and the publishing and information industries has not been explored until now. The Economics of the Publishing and Information Industries utilizes substantive historical, business, consumer, economic, sociological, technological, and quantitative and qualitative methodologies to understand the people, trends, strengths, opportunities, and threats the publishing industry and the financial service sector have faced in recent years. Various developments, both economic and demographic, contributed to the circumstances influencing the financial service sector’s investment in the publishing and information industries. This volume identifies and analyzes those developments, clearly laying out the forces that drove the marriage between the spheres of publishing and finance. This book offers insight and analysis that will appeal to those across a wide variety of fields and occupations, including those in financial service firms, instructors and students in business, communications, finance, or economics programs, business and financial reporters, regulators, private investors, and academic and major public research libraries.

Reference librarians are no longer expected to know much about the information they find; they are merely expected to find it. Technological competency rather than knowledge has become the order of the day. In many respects, reference service has become a matter of typing search terms into a library's online catalog or a web search engine and providing the patron with the results of the search. Calling for a re-intellectualization of reference librarianship, this book suggests another approach to providing quality reference service--reading. The authors surveyed both academic reference librarians and public library reference personnel in the United States and Canada about their reading habits. From the 950 responses, the authors present findings about the extent to which librarians read newspapers, periodicals, fiction and nonfiction, and recount and analyze stories about how reading has made them better librarians. The authors also report that North American professors in the humanities and social sciences believe that the best reference librarians are those who have wide-ranging, subject-based knowledge as opposed to the type of process-based, functional knowledge that is increasingly dominating the curricula of many Library and Information Science programs.

The fifth volume of A History of the Book in America addresses the economic, social, and cultural shifts affecting print culture from World War II to the present. During this period factors such as the expansion of government, the growth of higher education, the climate of the Cold War, globalization, and the development of multimedia and digital technologies influenced the patterns of consolidation and diversification established earlier. The thirty-three contributors to the volume explore the evolution of the publishing industry and the business of bookselling. The histories of government publishing, law and policy, the periodical press, literary criticism, and reading--in settings such as schools, libraries, book clubs, self-help programs, and collectors' societies--receive imaginative scrutiny as well. The Enduring Book demonstrates that the corporate consolidations of the last half-century have left space for the independent publisher, that multiplicity continues to define American print culture, and that even in the digital age, the book endures. Contributors: David Abrahamson, Northwestern University James L. Baughman, University of Wisconsin-Madison Kenneth Cmiel (d. 2006) James Danky, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert DeMaria Jr., Vassar College Donald A. Downs, University of Wisconsin-Madison Robert W. Frase (d. 2003) Paul C. Gutjahr, Indiana University David D. Hall, Harvard Divinity School John B. Hench, American Antiquarian Society Patrick Henry, New York City College of Technology Dan Lacy (d. 2001) Marshall Leaffer, Indiana University Bruce Lewenstein, Cornell University Elizabeth Long, Rice University Beth Luey, Arizona State University Tom McCarthy, Beirut, Lebanon Laura J. Miller, Brandeis University Priscilla Coit Murphy, Chapel Hill, N.C. David Paul Nord, Indiana University Carol Polsgrove, Indiana University David Reinking, Clemson University Jane Rhodes, Macalester College John V. Richardson Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester Michael Schudson, University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University Linda Scott, University of Oxford Dan Simon, Seven Stories Press Ilan Stavans, Amherst College Harvey M. Teres, Syracuse University John B. Thompson, University of Cambridge Trysh Travis, University of Florida Jonathan Zimmerman, New York University