Karen’s Letter: Harvest Time in Great Barrington

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Harvest celebrations remind us that winter is on the way. But they also remind us of springtime past because we are reaping our rewards for work done then – when we planted the parsley I’m now packing in olive oil to add to soups on snowy evenings. When winter comes, the saying goes, spring can’t be far behind, and I wonder what Spring 2013 will bring. Like you, I’m planning next year’s budgets and products now, just as when I harvest things from my garden, I make notes for seeds to buy for next year and plans for expanding the rose garden. I often plant this time of year, too, adding to the daffodils and tulips and fritillaria that make springtime such a joy.

We have a major harvest this year at Berkshire Publishing: the 10-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability. This series of volumes – now a complete, integrated single work – took nearly seven years of intense labor by nearly 1,000 people in 70 countries. It provides a critical mass of well-organized, expert-written material that is not available from other sources. The collection creates a frame of reference that makes it easier to get a handle on complex issues and a unique global network of experts came together to  make this possible. They include experts in the fields of business, law, ecosystem and resource management, environmental history, biology, engineering, ethics, and philosophy. And we are busy “planting” for springtime: Berkshire “Essentials” are rolling out, the third edition of the Encyclopedia of World Sport is well underway, and we are developing international education and custom publishing services. We’ve launched Berkshire AcademicPub, a service that provides professors and institutions with the ability to assemble custom materials from over 7 million pieces of pre-cleared pieces of content in over 70 disciplines – click here to read our interview with AcademicPub. And we’re making our backlist available in more ways all the time. For example, the teaching materials company Chegg asked if they could to sell ebook versions of several Berkshire titles that are being used as textbooks – something we expect to see happen with individual volumes of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability.