A seminar at the London Book Fair (April 15th 2013) asked the question: how will publishing interact with technology in the future? Stephen Devlin, CTO of Macmillan, had the fascinating answer: via product owners. The product owner, is the person …
Semantic web, semantic search, semantic this, semantic that – it’s enough to make a linguist or philosopher sigh with despair when the term is bandied about like this. Within specific domains such as philosophy or linguistics, there is a pretty …
Philip Thody and Howard Evans: Faux Amis and Key Words: a dictionary-guide to French Language, Culture and Society (1985) (published in the US as Mistakable French)
Reference books for learning a language include some of the dullest titles ever …
Reviews to be posted in the new few weeks include:
Encyclopedias of the Enlightenment – there are several; this batch enables a typical French academic reference to be compared with a volume for the US college market.
I’m sure you’ve been in the same situation. You go to a shop and see something you would like to buy. For whatever reason, you don’t buy it at that moment, but when you come home you look …
A good idea of the current position of reference publishing from a publisher’s perspective could be seen from a seminar on reference publishing (21 March 2012), at University College, London (part of the Digital Publishing Forum series), conceived and chaired by …
Every reference editor in the world dreams of writing the following entry. Lost in the middle of a vast multi-volume encyclopedia, who would notice such an innocent-seeming entry? But it reveals the circularity of so much reference publishing.
Here is the entry for “oak” from Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates, 1873 edition. This reference book, unique to the best of my knowledge, combines a brief definition or background, usually very brief, and some interesting significant dates around the topic. Here, …
Reading Time: < 1minuteI used to think that reference publishing was somewhat out of date; that nobody produces reference works nowadays, ever since Wikipedia took over the encyclopedia market.
But it is clear that reference publishing is not dead. It has changed, with …
