BTW News Briefs

Association of American University Presses to Promote U.K. Collective Licensing Program

The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is partnering with the Publishers Licensing Society (PLS) to promote UK Royalties Direct, a new collective licensing program, to AAUP members.

The UK Royalties Direct program was created by PLS to manage the collection and distribution of collective licensing revenues for copying and use of extracts by a variety of educational institutions and businesses in the United Kingdom. In a joint statement, AAUP and PLS said that the program would provide American publishers with visibility into how their works are used in the U.K., while at the same time providing greater protections for these publishers’ intellectual property rights and streamlining the processing of rights revenue.

UK Royalties Direct has already enrolled a number of publishers in the program, including Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, Wiley, Cornell University Press, Lynne Rienner Publishers, UNC Press, and NYU Press.

Ted Hill, president of Australia-based THA Consulting, will act as the program’s sole authorized agent in North America.

Grant Program to Make Out-of-Print Humanities Titles Available as Free E-Books

Through the new Humanities Open Book Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are offering grants totaling approximately $774,000 to turn out-of-print books on the humanities into free e-books that can be accessed by the public.

The program, part of the NEH’s agency-wide initiative “The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square,” will allow publishers to “identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license.”

Recipients of the first 10 grants for projects include the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Numismatic Society, Cornell University, Appalachian State University, and Wesleyan University.

Ferlinghetti, Katzenberger Win PubWest’s 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Elaine Katzenbeger have been named the 2016 recipients of PubWest's Jack D. Rittenhouse Award for lifetime achievement.

Ferlinghetti is the co-founder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, as well a critic, activist, and author of the 1958 poetry collection A Coney Island of the Mind (New Directions). Katzenberger, a former bookseller at City Lights, is the executive director and publisher of City Lights Books and the program director for the City Lights Foundation.

PubWest, a trade association for small and medium-sized book publishers in North America, established the award in 1990 to thank and honor publishers, retailers, educators, and writers who have made a significant contribution to book publishing, specifically in the West. Katzenberger will accept the awards at the PubWest Conference 2016, scheduled for February 4-6, at the La Fonda on the Plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico.