[LINK] Bloomsbury and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

[Tom Worthington]

Colin Steele organised a round table this morning at The National 
Library of Australia, with Richard Charkin, Executive Director of 
Bloomsbury Publishing, London. There were 26 people present, about one 
third from the library, a third from the ANU and the rest from federal 
government agencies and universities.

Richard, who I met in the library's cafe on the way in, is talking at 
forums in Melbourne and Sydney. Senator Kim Carr, Minister for 
Innovation, Industry, Science and Research talked at the forum 
yesterday. In his speech "THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION: PUBLISHING IN THE 21ST 
CENTURY" the Minister announced a book industry support group: 
<http://minister.innovation.gov.au/Carr/Pages/THEDIGITALREVOLUTIONPUBLISHINGINTHE21STCENTURY.aspx>

The group has not been set up and its composition and role is unclear. 
Richard commented that the Minister seemed to be making it up as he was 
speaking.

Richard talked about Bloomsbury's role in publishing educational and 
scientific materials with "Bloomsbury Academic". He talked about the 
tradition business model of publishing, with the separate roles of 
publishers and book stores and its evolution. He also covered the Apple 
iPad Kindle, relationships with universities, e-learning and the role of 
the academic paper.

To show this was not all theory, Richard illustrated his talks from his 
work in major publishing ventures, some of which he asked me not to blog 
the details of.

He ended my mentioning some new Bloomsbury intiaives. They have set up " 
Bloomsbury Academic" which has adopted the Creative Commons licence, 
with "vanilla text" versions online for free, as well as selling e-book 
and print editions. Bloomsbury also created qfinance.com for the Qatar 
government, Bloomsbury Qatar Publishing Foundation for publishing 
educational materials and Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals to do 
institutional repository with open access for Education City's research 
output.

More in my blog at: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2010/02/publishing-round-table-national-library.html>.

-- 
Tom Worthington FACS HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Lecturer, The Australian National University t: 02 61255694
Computer Science http://cs.anu.edu.au/user/3890