I’m sketching out new ventures for Berkshire Publishing, which means digging through old notes. I came across this e-mail from Ed Keating, VP of the Content Division at the Software & Information Industry Association, which I kept with my business plans because it makes me smile and reminds me of what really counts, and of [...]

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David Christian’s This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity is available directly from Berkshire (with discounts on multiple copies -  students can order together and save 10-30%, see below), from Barnes & Noble bookstores across the United States, and at bn.com and Amazon.com. Copies ordered from Berkshire will come from the third printing, which [...]

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Sushi isn’t future food but I guess sea plants are. Bill just cc’d me on a message to the scholar who will write on “Algae” for the Natural Resources volume of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability. He wrote, “One of the editors mentioned to me that algae is both a food source and an energy source, [...]

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I suppose Great Barrington, the small New England town where I run Berkshire Publishing, might be said to qualify as one of the greenest places on earth. Not only because it is so beautifully, lushly, abundantly green right now, but because it’s in the heart of the only region on the planet that has been [...]

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The rhythm of my country life includes evenings with a long-retired world historian, William H. McNeill, who has in many ways inspired Berkshire Publishing. I drive southeast, often with one of my children, to the farmhouse Bill’s wife Elizabeth inherited from her aunts. It takes about 35 minutes. I telephone Bill when I get in [...]

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Please add as a comment here your ideas and questions  for online aggregators and for print publishers about sustainability initiatives. Information about efforts in your library system or institution to reduce the energy and resource use of computers and data centers would be helpful to us, and we welcome contact with individuals and groups working [...]

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“Google & the Library” contributed to Google Debate site hosted by EPS in London in those early dates, before the Google Book Settlement By Karen Christensen, Berkshire Publishing Group Our problem is that the people at Google don’t really get books. They want to believe that books are just primitive webpages, nothing but more information [...]

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A few passages from Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded that I was especially riveted by, I think because they are so relevant to the changes we are making in the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History. Simon Winchester has written an astonishing, original kind of world history here – in fact, it might be called [...]

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Tim Coates has been doing battle on behalf of citizens, readers, and authors as he’s tirelessly campaigned for improved public libraries in the UK. Now he’s written a history that seems appropriate for our time and also tells us something about his own efforts. The book is called Delane’s War: 150 years ago a British [...]

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Sorting old papers last weekend, I found letter from London editor about book chapter I contributed to a book about green politics in Europe. I wrote about green lifestyle change, having recently published my first book, Home Ecology. His letter said that he had removed references to meat and butcher shops because “this is a [...]

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Popular 19th-century English novelists were infuriated about IPR infringement – by the United States. I am grateful to James Fallows for reminding me about this parallel, which I knew from reading autobiographical accounts by Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope (yes, in my English major days). Here’s what Fallows writes in Postcards from Tomorrow Square, a [...]

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When Robert Plotkin, our IP lawyer, came to my office and tried to explain this to me a few years ago, I got the gist but still found it hard to explain the concept to someone else. Now the book he came to get my advice about is a reality, and this review of The [...]

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I’m often surprised by the good stuff in my own files, forgotten entirely sometimes and stumbled on by accident. Like this set of questions developed in advance of the only on-site editorial meeting we’ve held, for the first edition of the Encyclopedia of World History. Now that we’re in the thick of the second edition, [...]

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It’s not an attractive thing,  I-told-you-so-ism. And the joy of being proved right by an academic study (“and it took $100,000 to prove X Y or Z, when anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told you!”) is usually dimmed by thinking about the good things one could have done with a similar [...]

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Yes, I was an English major. In publishing, that’s so common that it’s embarrassing, and I have encouraged my kids to major in anything else — preferably in a science. “You can read great literature on your own,” I say, “but you probably won’t learn chemistry or physics.” And I have become a huge advocate [...]

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