THE HUMANITIES E-BOOK CENTER

The HEB Center is located at the offices of the ACLS in New York City.

Members of the center staff keep abreast of recent developments and trends in electronic publishing in order to insure that HEB as a whole takes advantage of the most efficient and up-to-date authoring, editing, production, and distribution technologies as they become available and cost-effective. With the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan (SPO) it is creating e-book standards and style guidelines for both authors and participating presses. This technical and style information is made available through this HEB support web site and through direct consultations with the HEB Center.

Once the electronic manuscript has been completed according to the standards of HEB, the electronic files that have been prepared and tagged by the participating University Presses are then transmitted to the HEB Center. Here they are stored on a server while the staff at the HEB Center reviews the electronic files carefully to make sure all elements are complete and that all tagging and other coding has been done correctly and according to HEB’s standards and guidelines. With the approval of the sponsoring press, the Center then submits the electronic titles to SPO for publication.

The HEB Center also gathers all physical copies of titles for digitization, searches for out-of-print and rare copies, and arranges with libraries for special scanning of rare copies. It manages rights issues, including contracts, acquisitions, and print-copy review, before books are sent to SPO for processing.

The HEB Center has also coordinated and launched a print-on-demand (POD) series including nearly 300 titles. These are available in a wide variety of formats through either SPO or Lightning Source.

The HEB Center manages library subscription contracts, tracks usage statistics, provides support for subscribers, information to potential subscribers, and royalty payments to publishers and other copyright holders. It also provides meeting facilities for author conferences and HEB presentations, and advises both ACLS and its constituent learned societies on issues and trends in scholarly communication.

HEB Staff

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rev. 4/21/08