Did you know that Indie book publishing is another term for “self publishing” or independent publishing? I didn’t and so I was intrigued when I got a press release titled “Indie Book Publishing Provides Professionals the Edge of Putting their Expertise into Book Format.” The concept is using the book as a business card which has helped many business people with marketing. Instead of arriving with all sorts of marketing materials, the person with the book as business card arrives with a book written in his or her field of expertise. Hmmm … pretty interesting.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/03/prweb2249394.htm

Reading in the Chronicle of Higher Education the other day about the role of the traditional humanities journal in the publication process. Apparently, at the Conference of Historical Journals at the American Historical Asociation’s annual meeting in January, an alarm was sounded. Are humanities journals receiving fewer unsolicited manuscripts than they once did? The move by many smaller journals to be carried by aggregator databases that allow readers to access the content article by article is threatening the identity of the journal as a collection of papers on a focused topic. This has been alluded to more than once at the Charleston Conference and many other venues.
“Humanities Journals Confront Identity Crisis,” by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2009.
http://chronicle.com/