A Kite’s Flight: William Gumede's first children’s book

Posted by Celia Walter | 2 Jun, 2011

In an unexpected and bold move, William Guimede has published his first children’s book, A Kite’s Flight.

Gumede is the author of the bestselling book Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC (2005) as well as Poverty Of Ideas (with Leslie Dikeni, 2009). He was also previously Deputy Editor of the Sowetan, South Africa’s largest national daily newspaper.

From Polity.org.za Video clip of interview with the author

Book Citation Index launch in 2nd quarter 2011

Posted by Celia Walter | 26 Oct, 2010

At this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, Thomson Reuters announced a new product, Book Citation Index, to add to its suite of citation indexes. To get the story behind this announcement, NewsBreaks went to the company’s vice president for editorial development and publisher relations, James Testa...

What exactly is the Book Citation Index and what is the product intended to provide for users?

With Book Citation Index, we are rounding out our citation coverage of core research literature. We have what we believe are the top tier regional and international journals in the Web of Science (WoS) citation indexes. The selection criteria for those indexes are well-known. We also have the Conference Proceedings, which provides comprehensive coverage of the conference literature back to the early 1990s, with cited references going back to 1999.

The other major format is the world of books. We know that they are extremely important in the social sciences and the humanities. But they are also important in the sciences. Social scientists use them heavily and cite them heavily. We want to make sure that we best serve that community by complementing the other two forms of publications—serials and proceedings—in the book arena as well. That’s our primary goal.

Read the Complete Interview

Source: InfoToday NewsBreak via The Resourceshelf

 

The Google Book Scanning Project: Issues and Updates

Posted by Celia Walter | 2 Sep, 2009

Educause Live presents: The Google Book Scanning Project: Issues and Updates. September 2, 2009 at 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT). 

"For about five years, Google has been scanning and indexing millions of volumes drawn from academic libraries and other sources worldwide. The project has been greeted with high praise but also with lawsuits. In the latter category, a judge will shortly decide whether to approve a settlement reached last year by Google and several organizations representing authors and publishers. The issues swirling around the settlement include the treatment of absent rightsholders, user privacy, and competition. This session will offer a status report on the project and explore both sides of these questions"
Peter Scott's Library blog

Google's plan for world's biggest online library: philanthropy or act of piracy?

 by William Skidelsky The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009

Google has already scanned 10 million books in its bid to digitise the contents of the world's major libraries, but a copyright battle now threatens the project, with Amazon and Microsoft joining authors and publishers opposed to the scheme...[More]

 

 

Best Book Websites

Posted by Celia Walter | 25 Aug, 2009

On 12th July, The Sunday Times Ingear section listed 10 best book websites. They were:

DailyLit
http://dailylit.com/

Shelfari
http://www.shelfari.com/

Rare Book Room
http://rarebookroom.org/

FreeBookSpot
http://www.freebookspot.in/

Authonomy
http://authonomy.com/

Google Books
http://books.google.com/

Blurb
http://www.blurb.com/

BookCrossing
http://bookcrossing.com/

LibriVox
http://librivox.org/

Goodreads
http://www.goodreads.com/

Read the reviews of the ten sites above, at the Times Online.

 

From Internet Resources Newletter

Search magazines on Google Book Search

Posted by Celia Walter | 10 Dec, 2008

Search and find magazines on Google Book Search

Today, Google is announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.

http://alashazam.blogspot.com/2008/12/search-and-find-magazines-on-google.html

 

...

There’s no mention of a titles list, and there’s clearly some limitations on these (Check out Jet, for instance…they only have every 5th year of the mag). Popular Science is there in its entirety, but only 2000-Feb 2008.

But in any case…it’s an interesting development. If Google decides not to provide a titles list, is anyone interested in crowdsourcing it? Where can we dump the resulting data so that it’s harvestable?

Pattern Recognition blog

The African review of books

Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Aug, 2008
The African review of books
The African Review of Books (ARoB) is an online scholarly publication, which publishes reviews of recent (and some not quite so recent) fictional works which the author considers might be of interest to a South African readership. One might expect that this would focus more on South African publishing than is the case - the country does, after all, have a very strong publishing industry. However, the site is much more wide-ranging than that - there are reviews of books about Africa which are published in Europe, South American novels and short stories from India on the site at the moment (July 2008). None of them are particularly recent, either, although the reviews are. As the reviews are nearly all the work of one person, this would appear to be the result of the site being a more personal collection than the title might suggest. Having said that, the reviews are extremely well thought-out, considered and interesting and the site provides an authoritative investigation into the books which are presented. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.africanreviewofbooks.com/