{"id":53313,"date":"2023-03-17T05:42:00","date_gmt":"2023-03-17T05:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=53313"},"modified":"2023-03-20T10:26:48","modified_gmt":"2023-03-20T10:26:48","slug":"celebrating-1000-elements-elements-in-publishing-and-book-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2023\/03\/17\/celebrating-1000-elements-elements-in-publishing-and-book-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrating 1000 Elements: Elements in Publishing and Book Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

Publishing an academic book takes time. Sometimes even years. And that can be for all kinds of reasons, from the extensive length to making corrections, and from production delays to peer reviewers going awol. For the author this can be deeply frustrating — when you’ve finished a manuscript you want to send that item off into the world; you certainly don’t want it to become out of date simply by virtue of time passing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we conceived of our Elements series, we had some of these frustrations firmly in mind: we wanted to create a product that was feasible to turn around quickly, to take advantage of the fast-developing discussions and themes that are so common in our field of Publishing Studies. The trade changes almost daily, as it has done since the invention of the codex and, later, the rise of printing. Allowing scholars to have conversations that were both deep and timely in this space mattered to us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why Elements provided the perfect format: short books that permit scholars to publish pieces that are too long for an article, but too short for a book, which are positioned as both scholarly and polemic, and which — crucially — can be available in as little as 6 months from delivery of the manuscript. And this project proved to be appealing to others, too, as the take-up of our series has shown. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under the overarching series of Elements in Publishing and Book Culture<\/a>, we now have 14 sub-series, or ‘Gatherings’, each devoted to a different facet of the topic. More than 50 titles have been published, and many more are on their way. In fact, we are nearing our 100th<\/sup> commission!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been our privilege over the past few years to work with many talented editors and scholars, who, even throughout the pandemic, kept the new titles coming through.  The series opens up opportunities for new scholars to publish, as well as providing a home for more established writers, and so the variety of texts reflects the dynamics of a field which thrives on collaboration and interdisciplinarity.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Press has been supportive of our vision for this series right from the start, and the responsive attention we\u2019ve received from Bethany Thomas and her colleagues has, undoubtedly, been the reason why so many Elements are now out in the world.  At a time when academic publishing is seeing so many changes, it is good to be able to report the positive experience editing this series has been, and still is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say there haven\u2019t been challenges \u2013 there have been! \u2013 but we\u2019ve worked our way through them together.  We\u2019re particularly delighted that our cover designs work so well as a distinctive brand, an \u2018element\u2019 we were really keen to build into this series, to showcase book design and the Press\u2019s long history of excellence in this area.  Seeing them in the Cambridge University Press bookshop is a genuine thrill, and there\u2019s certainly plenty more new titles on their way to get excited about!   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Publishing an academic book takes time. Sometimes even years. And that can be for all kinds of reasons, from the extensive length to making corrections, and from production delays to peer reviewers going awol. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":53315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4187],"tags":[5282],"coauthors":[10618,10619],"class_list":["post-53313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-humanities","category-literature","tag-cambridge-elements"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53313"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53391,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53313\/revisions\/53391"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53313"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=53313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}