And it begins

• The Christian Science Monitor is ending its daily print edition and moving online.

Drumroll please.. who's next?

The Monitor's circulation is just 52,000 -- down from 160,000 two decades ago -- and its early deadlines are crippling. Since most copies are sent to subscribers by snail mail, all copy must be turned in by noon for the next day's edition.

"The cost of producing it, printing it and distributing it is pretty high," Yemma said.

But the Monitor, which concentrates on analysis, has a strong news team: 95 editorial staffers; eight foreign bureaus in an age when mid-size papers are shutting theirs; and eight domestic bureaus, including a nine-reporter Washington office.

If you really want to get published...

• The Guardian reports on Harper-Collins' new publishing imprint.

Sounds iffy, but everything publishing-related is these days.

Now Robert S Miller, the longtime and energetic founder-president of Hyperion, is to head up a new imprint for HarperCollins, which will specialise in short, "popular-priced" books from authors prepared to accept lower advances, or none at all. He is also planning to shift the burden of risk towards the bookseller by offering titles on a no-returns basis.

"Our goal will be effectively to publish books that might not otherwise emerge in an increasingly 'big book' environment, an environment in which established authors are under enormous pressure to top their previous successes, while new authors are finding it harder and harder to be published at all," Miller said in a statement issued yesterday by HarperCollins.

Opening the floodgates

• Harvard University is considering open access publishing for its faculty.

Interesting... but Harvard's pretty late to this party. The University of Pittsburgh Press, for example, has had scholarly works freely available online for a while now.

What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an “opt-out” system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard’s provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said.

The publishing industry, as well as some scholarly groups, have opposed some forms of open access, contending that free distribution of scholarly articles would ultimately eat away at journals’ value and wreck the existing business model. Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo. It would also cut into subsidies that some journals provide for educational training and professional meetings, they say.

Old news department

• The Boston Globe discovers that people can self-publish their own books.

A decent overview of DIY publishing, albeit lacking info about the potential downside(s); this article at Writer's Digest is a much more thorough look at the pros and cons of the process.

Unlike vanity publishing, in which aspiring authors pay to have their books run on traditional presses, on-demand publishing doesn't have to cost writers a cent.

Publishers produce books only after they're ordered and paid for, which eliminates overruns and the need for warehousing. They charge for printing, or take a cut of sales, and they set up payment systems, online bookstores and Web marketing tools.

Some authors publish on-demand books in hopes of catching the eye of a major publisher. But not all writers who use on-demand publishers aspire to write the great American novel.

Uh-oh...

• The Associated Press is discontinuing their book review package.

Not a good sign...

When E&P asked AP about the decision, Linda M. Wagner, the wire service's director of media relations and public affairs, said in a statement today: "AP is revamping its Lifestyles coverage to focus more resources on topics like food and parenting, and as a result we are discontinuing the book-review package that had moved through that department."

Can't we all just get along?

• An editorial at The Chronicle of Higher Education implores publishers & web designers to work together.

Wise words from Kate Wittenberg, the director of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University:

Thus a number of things are clear: First, partnerships are the critical element in developing effective and relevant resources for the next generation of information users. Second, we need to face the fact that commercial search engines are now the mechanism of choice for finding information, and we desperately need Google and other powerful players in the search-engine field to help users find our content and services. We must begin treating such players as valued partners with whom we will negotiate effective ways of collaborating that benefit our businesses and our users. Finally, we know users are becoming used to communicating in sophisticated, interactive, and collaborative online environments, and therefore that the traditional forms for publishing content are at risk of becoming irrelevant if they do not evolve.

Keep in mind that we are all mutually dependent, and that no group is in a position to dictate the discussions or the outcomes: Search engines need the content provided by publishers and libraries to provide a high-quality experience for users; libraries need stable, robust technology platforms, wide use of their collections, and growing communities of new users; scholars and students need more effective access to information and the skills to determine its quality and value. So it is alarming that those groups are so often in conflict that they end up in court rather than at a conference table.

After 2005, the only way to go is up

• Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known form of Mayan writing.

Too bad “the writing is mostly indecipherable.” But it does make you wonder what strange, wonderful combination of circumstances compelled humans to start writing. Some strange new desire to create, to make your mark... that, or to scrawl angrily, “For a good time, stop by Kukulcan’s tent.”

• Chapters from 1970s-era novels are rejected by 21st century publishers.

This is just hilarious:

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

Like I always say, the only constant in the world is change, but there’s still no accounting for taste. Book buyers aren’t looking for, you know, writing; they’re looking for a multimillion-dollar cash cow they can turn into a movie, a record album and a theme park.

• Lit-crit is turning to science for new ideas.

An interesting read, from a different perspective. Author Nick Gillespie’s most intriguing point follows:

Both cognitive and evolutionary approaches to lit-crit have been gaining recognition and adherents over the past decade or so. Cognitive critics are less interested in recurring plots or specific themes in literature, but they share with the Darwinists an interest in using scientific advances to help explore the universally observed human tendency toward creative expression, or what the fascinating anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake called in Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why, “making special.” This unironic -- though hardly uncritical -- interest in science represents a clear break with much of what might be called the postmodern orthodoxy, which views science less as a pure source of knowledge and more as a means of controlling and regulating discourse and power. The postmodern view has contributed to a keener appreciation of how appeals to science are often self-interested and obfuscating.

Criticism being the exploration of a personal reaction, it follows that the self-examination that it entails would lead some down a more scientific path, ostensibly to find data with the cold hardness of fact to support their own feelings and interpretations. But it figures just as much that those very “facts” are actually quite specious -- any statistician will tell you that you can find any amount of data to “prove” your “theory,” no matter how insane. Simple old willpower can bring any nutty notion to light but the ideas that strike a deeper, more logical and rational chord within us -- theories like evolution, for example -- tend to take on lives of their own, far beyond what their discoverer ever intended or even understood themselves. I remember a bit from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy where he talked about how a philosopher in ancient Greece -- Anaxagoras, I believe -- came up with a version of heliocentrism, long before 17th-century scientists like Copernicus and Kepler proved it so; the point being, sometimes the answer sits right in front of people for a long time before anyone notices. Lit-crit might come up with some fancy new terms but unless they’re really, really challenging the status quo, it’s just gonna be old wine, new bottle.