news and updates from NUS Publishing / Singapore UP

NUS PRESS catalogue

2006-11-02T14:53:00.000+08:00

We're now publishing our scholarly titles under the imprint NUS PRESS instead of Singapore University Press in an effort to align ourselves closer to the university's overall branding.

The 2006-07 catalogue is now available, showcasing the line-up in the next 8 months.

If you want your own printed copy, please send us an e-mail (nusbooks@nus.edu.sg) or drop in at our office on the NUS campus.

UK Independent Bookstores struggle to survive

2006-05-22T16:31:00.000+08:00

The Guardian carried a report on the state of independent bookstores in the UK today. Interesting mix of views about the future of these community-based stores. If you thought books were expensive in Asia, take a look at the prices quoted in this piece!

In Singapore, we have Select Books at Tanglin Shopping Centre. We used to have Skoob Books, but they went out of the retail business because they couldn't afford retail space rentals. Recently, Research Books at UE Sqaure also closed. Knowing that the stuggle of indie bookstores is a world-wide phenomenon... will the likes of Select Books survive? I certainly hope they can and do survive... not just because we need them professionally, but for me personally, it's such a joy of a place to go to!

Contentious Journalism and the Internet-launched!

2006-02-23T11:20:00.000+08:00

NUS Publishing and Institute of Policy Studies launched Cherian's new book yesterday, amidst the sad news of the passing of Singapore's former Foreign Minister, Mr Rajaratnam, who was a journalist and editor before he embarked on a career in politics. We observed a minute's silence to remember Mr Rajaratnam and his invaluable contributions to Singapore.

Cherian gave a short talk on his book, highlighting some inherent issues in journalims, e.g. myth of "objective" journalism, and pointing out that human ingenuity, not technological "hardware", is the main ingredient to more democratic dialogue and endeavours. This is clearly evident when he compared alternative media sites in Malaysia with those in Singapore.

You've got to read the book! :)

New Book by Cherian George, ex ST journalist

2006-01-18T15:19:00.000+08:00

Launching soon, a new book by Cherian George entitled Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and Singapore .

Cherian George wrote the bestseller Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation, published in 2000. In his new book, which is based on his PhD thesis, he turns his attention to journalism and examines how the Internet technology has impacted the nature of journalism and the wider implications of civil society's engagement with the government in Malaysia and in Singapore. It's an engaging read for anyone interested in politics and the media.

Details of the launch will follow next week, so come visit our site again!

Happy holidays!

2005-12-14T15:31:00.000+08:00

Last posting for the year and we take the chance to wish everyone happy holidays and happy reading. With some many other available distractions, it's getting harder to find time to read even during holidays! Maybe reading will one day be paid work ;)

In the meantime, we're still open during the the NUS holidays, except for Boxing Day and the weekends. Drop in for a browse if you're on campus...we have some new books, which we'll only send out alerts in the new year.

CIJ is indexed by Int Bibliography of Social Sciences!

2005-10-24T11:04:00.000+08:00

China: An International Journal is indexed by the International Bibliography of Social Sciences (IBSS). What does this mean? It means that you can google scholar search the titles of the articles in the journal, right down to keywords of the article. For research scholars, it means your articles are more likely to be found and read!

IBSS is based in the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. For more info on IBSS, see http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/IBSS/about/about_IBSS.htm

Thanks to Valee, Lena and Santha ... and Farewell Peter

2005-09-23T10:56:00.000+08:00

Believe it or not but three of our staff, Valee, Lena and Santha have been with the Press for more than 20 years respectively!! Singapore University Press has been around since 1972 after the University was renamed to reflect the separation of Malaysia and SIngapore. Hey... the Press is a part of the nation's history! Seriously though... it's wonderful to work with them because they are ever dependable and really know their stuff.

Sadly, Peter Schoppert, our managing director (and in-house blogger), left the Press in mid September for greener pastures. We wish him all the best and thanks for all the Fish during his time with us :) Meanwhile, Paul Kratoska is our acting director.

NUS Publishing Open House and Party

2005-09-07T10:00:00.000+08:00

If you're reading this, you're invited.

NUS Publishing invites you to afternoon tea

to celebrate long service awards for three of our staff -- Valee, Lena and Santha -- and to bid farewell and best wishes to our director, Peter Schoppert.

Prof Paul Kratoska will take over as Acting Director, NUS Publishing, with effect from September 14, 2005.

Place: SUP office at AS3-01-02. 3 Arts Link, Singapore 117569.
(next to LT 13 in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)

Date: 9 September 2005
Time: 4 pm
Dress: Office attire. Bring/wear something bright
Nibbles, tea, wine and fruit juice will be served

RSVP to Winnifred Wong at winnifred@nus.edu.sg or 6874 8186 by 7 September

Hobson-Jobson's online!

2005-08-25T18:30:00.000+08:00

The definitive Anglo-Indian dictionary has been posted online by the University of Chicago's Digital South Asia project. This is a real joy... Hours of fun. Some places to start:

shampoo, pajamas, pundit, cashmere, veranda, pariah, thug, cummerbund, rattan, shawl, loot, punch, jungle, khaki, calico, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, juggernaut, bungalow, bandana, toddy, chintz

Thanks to Amardeep Singh of Lehigh University.

Conversations with Difference is "pick of the week" in the MelbourneAge

2005-08-19T10:20:00.000+08:00

Pick of the week last month, but we just received our copy today.

«Goenawan Mohamad has been at odds with the prevailing powers in Indonesia almost since his birth. His father was executed by Dutch occupying forces in 1947; when in his 20s Mohamad was denounced by the Indonesian Community Party and fled to Europe. The magazine, Tempo, which he founded in 1971, was banned by Soeharto’s regime in 1984. Under Soeharto, he developed an oblique and allegorical style of writing to avoid censorship. Unlike most opinion pieces, Mohamad’s essays written for Tempo are tantalisingly subtle and nuanced. Instead of easy outrage at the murder of a girl by her Palestinian father, Mohamad approaches this tragedy through a contemplation of the notions of “difference” and “sameness”. This tension between the “I” and the “not I” is teased out in another essay about monotheistic fundamentalism and its need to crush the “other”. Like all good essayists, Mohamad is more interested in meditating on the complexities of modern multicultural societies than offering up simplistic solutions.»

- Fiona Capp, Review, The Age, July 23, 2005

Conversations with Difference is published by Tempo, Indonesia, but distributed in rest of Asia and Australia by Singapore University Press.

Technorati Tags: literaryreviews

An evening with Jomo

2005-08-17T10:14:00.000+08:00

Yesterday the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies hosted a very nice "evening with Jomo" which was an opportunity to launch Malaysian 'Bail Outs'? Capital Controls, Restructuring and Recovery and After the Storm: Crisis, Recovery and Sustaining Development in Four East Asian Economies, both recently published by Singapore University Press. In addition, ISEAS took the opportunity to launchReforming Corporate Governance in Southeast Asia: Economics, Politics and Regulations, Ho Khai Leong (editor).

Jomo spoke on his overall research projects and direction, and fielded questions, among them "now that you have become a UN bureaucrat does it mean you will stop thinking...".

Many thanks to Director Kesavapany for hosting a lovely evening. NUS Publishing brought the wine...

Excerpts of Mustapha Hussain's memoirs posted online

2005-08-11T08:14:00.000+08:00

Sample a bit of this extraordinary life story through excerpts posted online. Says Insun Sony Mustapha, Mustapha Husain's daughter who translated his memoirs, they were "written in 1976 when he was 66 years old and 31 years after World War II ended. Despite his feeble health and long years of silence, these episodes of his life remained vivid in his mind..." NUS Publishing is distributing this book outside Malaysia on behalf of Malaysian publisher Utusan Publications & Distributors Sdn Bhd.

Are used book sales good or bad for publishers?

2005-07-29T12:55:00.000+08:00

This terrific article in the New York Times argues that used book sales are *good* for publishers. Article bolsters its case by linking to some academic papers freely available on the web, and it specifically examines university textbooks as an area where this is true.

National Library unveils Library 2010 plan

2005-07-24T23:33:00.001+08:00

Singapore's National Library can play a key role in Singapore's publishing ecosystem, and they have some ambitions in this area. [Update: The new Library 2010 plan has just been posted on the NLB website. It is a 2 MB download.]

Sad State of arts and cultural journalism in Singapore

2005-07-08T15:38:00.000+08:00

David Chew's article in Today covers the closing of arts publication Vehicle, and bemoans the state of arts journalism in Singapore. David mentions Vehicle, The Arts Magazine and FOCAS (we help a bit with their circulation: FOCAS is not closed but having a hiatus.) It is not just arts and culture: Singapore has no "quality" weekly or monthly, no "review" of cultural, political and social affairs. No obvious place to review university press books...

Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia

2005-07-08T15:20:00.000+08:00

Copies of this important new book arrived in our warehouse last month. We believe it really is the best single-volume history of Southeast Asia currently available on the market. Please contact winnifred[at]nus.edu.sg if you are interested in textbook adoptions.

British Library predicts 'Switch to digital by 2020'

2005-06-29T18:04:00.000+08:00

British Library puts numbers on the switch to digital publishing of research findings, projecting that "by the year 2020, 40% of UK research monographs will be available in electronic format only, while a further 50% will be produced in both print and digital. A mere 10% of new titles will be available in print alone by 2020."

The report calls this a "seismic shift", although it feels more like day-to-day reality for publishers like us in the middle of the transition.

Google at the AAUP meeting

2005-06-21T23:35:00.000+08:00

Google was a big subject at the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia. I asked a couple of questions in one session about territory rights and the Google Print program. However the main action was in the very well-attended session addressed by Tom Turvey, a Google Senior VP entitled "Online Opportunities". UP publishers in general seem very keen on Google Print, but the doubts creep in when it comes to Google's Library digitization project. To this newcomer to the American university press scene, it looked like the strong reaction from publishers reflected as much about university presses' deep but difficult relationship with their libraries as it did their relationship to Google. At base, presses believe that libraries shouldn't be in the business of digitizing of in-copyright material, no matter what the safeguards put around the resulting files.

I also heard one publisher saying that the growth of Google and Google Scholar would mean the end of libraries. "Who needs them if everything is online and open access, and you search Google to find it".

Remembering the Karayuki-san

2005-06-20T19:28:00.000+08:00

Very interesting article about remembering the Karayuki-san, the Japanese prostitutes who worked in Singapore in the early years of the 20th century. The piece takes the perspective of young Japanese women working in Singapore. It interviews Kazuo Sugino, the head of the Japanese Association in Singapore. If you don't know about the Karayuki-san, you must read our book, by James Warren.

Sacrilege: a university library dumps rare books

2005-06-19T00:16:00.000+08:00

The Guardian reports on an ill-advised and hastily-implemented "de-accessioning" program
at The Octagon library at Queen Mary, University of London, in Mile End, east London.

'This is a crass display of philistinism,' said one staff member. 'There are books dating back to the 18th century, there are first editions, there are copies of Voltaire.'

Another lecturer looking through a skip said: 'This is sacrilege. Look at all these books that are being thrown away without any thought. It is shocking.'

Day One of the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia

2005-06-16T23:10:00.000+08:00

That's American Association of University Presses. Yesterday was spent in a very useful and enjoyable discussion of fund-raising for university presses. Discussion centred around the various types of fund-raising that presses do, from title subventions and project funding to raising funds for endowments. Many different best practices were discussed, and picked apart. Those attending the round-table included press directors from Texas, Duke, the Getty, Amsterdam, Missouri, NYU, Rutgers, Texas A&M and others. Also present were development officers, both those employed by their presses or those employed by university development offices, and assigned to their university presses on some part-time basis.

Open access self-archiving: An author study

2005-06-11T11:27:00.000+08:00

NUS Publishing has been advocating that NUS support an institutional archive to allow and encourage scholars to self-archive their research work. The benefits of archiving pre-publication versions of papers is to 1) to make original research available easily and quickly, without overly-restrictive copyright barriers to use of material for education purposes, this as a supplement to the traditional journal publication system, and 2) to gather in a single searchable database the research work of the NUS community. A recent research project, published as Open access self-archiving: An author study, surveys authors to understand self-archiving from an author perspective. Clearly authors are ready for archiving, and they archive because they know it is the best way to get impact for their research.

Very useful for NUS library users - NUS Library Proxy Extension for Mozilla Firefox

2005-06-06T12:20:00.000+08:00

Written by Olivo Miotto, this extension is hosted on the website of the Institute of System Science at NUS. As the webpage says:

If you're an NUS researcher or student, you're probably familiar with this scenario: you search for a journal paper, you find the link (e.g. from PubMed) to the paper, only to find out that you need a subscription to get the full text. NUS has the subsciption (often) but you still need to log in. The savvy ones know that you can append '.libproxy1.nus.edu.sg' to the journal's host name to do this. This extension does the host name appending for you, so it belongs to the category 'dead simple but really useful'. If you find yourself at a journal site, you can right-click and select 'NUS Library Proxy' from the menu. The page will be reloaded via the NUS Library Proxy, so you can have full text access if NUS subscribes to the journal.

Echoes of Southeast Asia & China in the Ming - "Zheng He fever grips Asia"

2005-05-28T17:30:00.000+08:00

This article by Larry Teo usefully summarizes the various events going on to celebrate the 600th anniversary of Zheng He's voyages. It has a particular focus on Singapore of course, where there will be a conference, exhibitions and the erection of a fibreglass replica of what might have been the famous "dragon's tooth gate" of the old Chinese texts. Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu editor Geoff Wade is quoted, reminding us that the Ming voyages were not purely peaceful in nature.

Academic vs popular histories

2005-05-23T10:55:00.000+08:00

A strong analysis, from the American point-of-view, of the enterprise of history-writing by David Greenberg. He takes a wide overview of the different choices and trends in history-writing, and the issue of their relevance to both academic and public audiences. What should we write about he asks.

He doesn't go on to analyze the situation from a publisher's perspective (though we note with gratitude the mention he gives to the key role university presses play here). The scholarly enterprise of writing history for scholarly audiences will always be of great importance. What is not clear is whether such writing can continue to be published in the usual manner, not if audiences for such books fall below a sales threshold of a few hundred copies. Is it economically rational to invest in book editing, production and marketing efforts for such small print runs, when cheaper alternatives for distributing this research exist?