Speaking up for Edwin Mellen Press

There’s been a certain amount of uproar of late regarding the innovative publicity and reputation-building practices of Edwin Mellen Press. (I’ve included a few examples. It’s really not difficult to find others.)

Digression: Apparently DuckDuckGo doesn’t build a URL when you search it from a Firefox search box: You get DuckDuckGo with the search box filled in, which I can’t really link to.

I believe there’s a misunderstanding here. So I’m not going to suggest anything as craven as boycotting Edwin Mellen Press, or signing petitions, or removing its titles from library approval plans (if they’re already there) or applying some scrutiny to acquisitions from Edwin Mellen Press.

Not at all.

I think innovative work should be rewarded.

If you’re an academic librarian–heck, if you’re a public librarian–I think you should explore Edwin Mellen Press’s innovative, forward-looking actions. If you find them remarkable, innovative and worth rewarding, you should do so.

Please do read this post carefully.

 

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 1st, 2013 at 11:42 am and is filed under Books and publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

8 Responses to “Speaking up for Edwin Mellen Press”

  1. Angel says:
    April 1, 2013 at 12:33 pm

    Happy First of April, Walt.

    Best, and keep on blogging.

  2. Walt Crawford says:
    April 1, 2013 at 1:02 pm

    Thanks, but this isn’t specifically an April 1 post. I mean every word, as read in full.

  3. Peter Binkley says:
    April 1, 2013 at 3:12 pm

    In that case I’d be interested in hearing more about the forward-looking actions you have in mind. (I assume suing your critics doesn’t count). I would really like to like this operation, but I’m not seeing it. What are they doing that other small presses aren’t?

  4. Peter Binkley says:
    April 1, 2013 at 3:33 pm

    (Or did I just fall for a reverse triple salchow April Fools joke?)

  5. Stephen Michael Kellat says:
    April 1, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    Well, now I get to re-write part of the next episode of LISTen as Walt basically went down the road I was intending to…

  6. Peter Binkley says:
    April 1, 2013 at 7:16 pm

    And indeed, I did not link-check unto the last link. I agree: they have earned their just reward.

  7. Deborah Fitchett says:
    April 3, 2013 at 12:12 pm

    (On the digression: maybe I have a different Firefox plugin, but my Duckduckgo toolbar search takes me to https://duckduckgo.com/?q=edwin+mellen+press)

  8. Walt Crawford says:
    April 3, 2013 at 12:43 pm

    Deborah: Could be. I have DDG as one of a dozen choices on the search-box pulldown (I have Worldcat.org and IMDB there, as well as Bing, my default, and Google and Wolfram|alpha and others…)–and when I entered the search, the URL when I got DDG was just DDG, with the query in the search box.

    Sometimes I’m amazed that any two people see the same thing with the same web software these days, ‘cuz it’s never quite the same software.