Media Release
AUCKLAND, 8 December 2008. The book, a cultural staple for centuries, is about to receive a digital makeover. The Digital Publishing Forum, formed by book publishers, authors and their copyright agency CLL, this week embarks on an ambitious programme to ensure that New Zealand is ready for the challenge.

“The shift in how we buy and consume books is going to have a major impact on New Zealand, both culturally and economically,” says Forum director Martin Taylor. Books rank as New Zealanders’ favourite cultural activity, according to the 2002 Cultural Experiences Survey. Buying books and going to the library are more than twice as popular as any other cultural activity, including buying music, visiting museums, or going to concerts or movies. Read more »

British Railway Enthusiasm by Ian Carter

Manchester University Press, 2008. Reviewed by SCOTT HAMILTON

Sociologists have a reputation for writing dull books. Walk into a big bookshop like Borders or Dymocks and you’ll find shelf after shelf devoted to the writings of historians, but precious few tomes with their origins in sociology departments. For many readers, the very word sociology conjures terrifying visions of vast and incomprehensible tables of statistics and pages of jargon-ridden prose.

If anybody needs proof that sociology can be entertaining, as well as informative, then they could do worse than consult the oeuvre of Anglo-Kiwi academic Ian Carter. In a career spanning nearly four decades, Carter has written about subjects as different as the Scottish peasantry, the poetry of Robert Burns, the life and times of the founder of New Zealand’s symphony orchestra, and the British novel. Carter researches his books with a fervent thoroughness, and sprinkles them with hundreds of footnotes, but he enjoys a readership on both sides of the academy’s ivory walls, because he knows how to turn his research into engaging writing.

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Victoria University’s Stout Research Centre is hosting an international conference on the relevance of nationalism in today’s literature later this week.

Conference organiser Professor Lydia Wevers says cultural nationalism has been at the centre of literary history in New Zealand, as in other literatures. Read more »

Theme 4 of Te Ara, the online Encylopedia of New Zealand.

General Editor: Jock Phillips; Theme Editor: Allan Gillingham

Reviewed by SIMON NATHAN
Te Ara, the Online Encylopedia of New Zealand, is being built up progressively, with a block of new content being added annually. The fourth section or theme is called ‘The Settled Landscape’, and deals with how humans have modified the land, clearing the forest and converting most of the lower altitude country to farmland. The emphasis of this theme is mainly on farming of both animals and crops. The 97 new articles cover a range of topics from superphosphate to animal diseases (which includes a chilling selection of illustrations). But it isn’t all technical stuff, as there is a delightful group of articles on Country Life.

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NZ Books Abroad: Bestsellers for November

NZ Books Abroad is a Wellington based internet bookseller that specialises in New Zealand books for an international audience.

Kiwi Ukulele: The New Zealand Ukulele Companion
Art Icons of New Zealand: Lines in the Sand
A Coming of Age: Thirty Years of New Zealand Film (Book and DVD)

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Awa Press Media Release

Small New Zealand publisher knocks Lonely Planet off its perch

A visitors’ guide to Antarctica produced by small Wellington publisher Awa Press has beaten Lonely Planet to the top spot on Amazon, the world’s largest online bookseller. Read more »

Poem of the Week: The C.O’s by Donald Baxter (brother of Archibald and uncle of James K Baxter)

Originally published in Harry Holland’s Armageddon or Calvary: The Conscientious Objectors and ‘The Process of their Conversion’ (1919). Republished in Field Punishment No. 1: Archibald Baxter, Mark Briggs & New Zealand’s anti-militarist tradition by David Grant with paintings by Bob Kerr. (Portrait of Archibald Baxter right.)

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Press Release: Canterbury University Press
A comprehensive account of the human and natural history of the Chatham Islands will be published by Canterbury University Press this month.

Chatham Islands: Heritage and conservation, edited by Dr Colin Miskelly, is a wide-ranging exploration of the islands featuring contributions from a team of experts working in the fields of history, geology, marine and land ecology, and flora and fauna.

First published by CUP in association with the Department of Conservation (DOC) in 1996 and a finalist in the 1997 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the 2008 edition has been updated and expanded to include two new chapters, 190 new photographs, an eight-page glossary, and 10 text boxes covering previously overlooked species groups such as fungi, spiders, land snails and the endemic skink. Read more »

Press Release: Victoria University of Wellington
Novelist and screen writer Paula Boock will be the 2009 Writer in Residence at Victoria’s International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML).

Ms Boock has worked as an author, publisher and screen writer. Her books have been published in Australia, the UK and USA, and the television drama series she has written for have screened in numerous countries.

Over the last eight years she has worked on a range of television drama projects, and recently formed Lippy Pictures with Donna Malane to produce their television feature film ‘Until Proven Innocent’ and a 13-part children’s time travelling series for TVNZ. Read more »

Easy on the pocket, easy vegetable gardening – growing your own groceries by Dennis Greville

Hyndman, $20. Reviewed by DAVID GEARY

I confess, I’m a very green gardener. The sort who just bungs things in the ground to see what will happen. Then is deeply disappointed when the plants wither and die, get monstered by weeds, or fail to even bother to show. Which makes this is the perfect book for me. I winced my way through it, feeling awful for all the poor plants I’ve tortured over the years. And, as this book suggests, it could have all been so easy.

Dennis Greville has come up with an appealing and practical guide to do exactly what his title promises. It’s good basic stuff for any beginner, but I imagine will also have the odd good tip for those who already know a Crosby’s Egyptian Flat is a kind of beetroot. (But why?) Read more »