10. Speak on the topic “Trade, Textbook and Academic Publishing”.

UNIT 5

Categories of Publishing:

Reference and Self-Publishing

A. Quickwrite.

In one minute write as much as you can and as fast as you can to explain what publishing is. Compare your writing with that of a partner and find out how similar your understanding of publishing is.

B. Discussion. Think of possible answers to these questions. Share your opinion with the group.

1. Have you ever used a reference book? What for?

2. Have you ever self-published? Speak about your experience.

C. Topic Vocabulary. Learn the words and phrases below.

reference – сноска (в книге), ссылка (на примечание, источник и т.п.), справка

index – алфавитный указатель; индекс; каталог; список

reference book – справочник; книга, выдаваемая для чтения только в помещении библиотеки

to distinguish smth from smth – отличать, различать

bookseller – торговец книгами, продавец книг

paperback – мягкая дешевая бумажная обложка; книга в бумажной обложке

handy – удобный (для пользования), портативный

manual – руководство, справочник, указатель, учебник

accessible – доступный

subscription – подписка, стоимость подписки

sophisticated – опытный, осведомленный, авторитетный

available – доступный, имеющийся в распоряжении

suitable for – подходящий, соответствующий

to be wary of – остерегаться кого-л., чего-л.; настороженно относиться к кому-л., чему-л.

D. Read and translate the text.

Text 5

This Unit is going to deal with the rest of the categories of publishing: reference and self-publishing.

1. Reference. Like “textbook,” “reference” is a term that can be used too loosely. Your book on Brecht* might be so detailed that it could act as a frequent reference for theater historians. That is, people will consult your long and thorough index and bibliography. You might think your project would make “a handy reference,” but that doesn’t make it a reference book.

Let’s distinguish hard reference from trade, or soft, reference. Soft reference may show up in bookstores or at a discounted price from an online bookseller. There are lots of soft reference books, from paperbacks on spelling demons to handy manuals on repairing sink traps. The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music is soft reference, as is, on a more scholarly note, The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (at 1400+ pages it’s soft, but heavy.) In other words, things you might buy, usually in paperback, and keep around the house.

Traditional, printed dictionaries and encyclopedias were at one time the heart of hard reference publishing, and librarians are their key purchasers. The very largest reference projects are often cooked up by the publishers themselves or by “packagers,” basically independent companies that think up big or complicated book projects and take them as far as a publisher would like, even all the way to printing them.

Reference publishing has long ceased to be about physical books alone. Reference works continue to appear in traditional printed form, but many are also accessible electronically – on CD, on a publisher’s subscription-based Web site, in the databases of online aggregators, and in formats and combinations bound to expand our understanding of what “information” and “book” will mean in the twenty-first century.

2. Self-publishing. The prefix “self” speaks volumes. Friedrich Nietzsche** took the text of Beyond Good and Evil into his own hands and published an edition of six hundred copies. In recent years, corporations have self-published manuals and other projects for their own use. Some business bestsellers, like The One Minute Manager, began as self-published projects, and went on to sell millions of copies. Sophisticated packagers are available to help the ambitious writer move an idea to market without knocking on the doors of trade houses.

In the Age of the Internet self-publishing is easier than ever. Create your text, build a Web site, slap up your document, and you’re an author with a work only a few keystrokes away from millions of readers. Putting one’s work on the Net is always an option, and while it has been despised by serious scholars, trends in the culture of publishing are bringing about a rethink of these attitudes toward electronic dissemination.

Once one isolates self-publishing, there are four broad categories – trade, textbook, scholarly, and reference. For most academic writers, the principal choice is, of course, “scholarly.” But the neatness of the categories conceals the messiness of most publishing houses. Some houses, like Norton, have trade and textbook divisions. Others, like Palgrave, have trade and academic divisions, including Bedford Books, an imprint that specializes in anthologies and other materials for course adoption. Random House has a small reference division, but it’s primarily a trade house. And many trade paperback houses see their books go into classrooms in large adoption quantities.

If publishing houses are sometimes messy organizations, some books really do fall into more than one category. The Encyclopedia of New York City is genuinely a reference work suitable for public collections, and a trade book that can be sold to individuals for home libraries. Oxford University Press publishes a vast list of specialized scholarship, as well as a distinguished list of reference and trade titles. (Oxford’s scope is so broad that it even has a vice president for Bibles.) In a single season, a university press might offer a trade book on gardening, the memoir of a Holocaust survivor, a study of women in African literature, a workbook in Mandarin Chinese, an illustrated atlas of dams and irrigation, and so on.

A word of caution: authors sometimes make the mistake of presenting their work as a combination of trade, scholarly, and reference, with a dash of text thrown in. You can understand the motivation – the all-singing, all-dancing academic book that might appeal to every segment of the market. But publishers are wary of authors who claim too much for their progeny, and marketing departments will be skeptical of the proposal that envisions a book for student use that will also be of interest as a trade hardback. No editor wants to take on a manuscript with multiple personality disorder.

This brief map of the publishing world is meant to demonstrate the range of publishers that exist, and the kinds of works they produce.

(adapted from http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html)

* Brecht [brekt, brext], Bertold (1898-1956) a German writer of plays and poetry, known especially for his plays “The Threepenny Opera”, “The Caucasian Chalk Circle”, and “Mother Courage”. Brecht’s plays deal with political ideas and are similar in form to ancient Greek plays.

** Nietzsche ['ni:t∫ə], Friedrich (1844-1900) a German philosopher, whose most famous books are Thus Spake Zarathustra and The Antichrist. He believed that a new type of person would exist, who would be free to follow his own moral principles.