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

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.]

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...

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 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 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".

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.

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.'

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.

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.