Publisher’s Pledge to the Library Community
From Litwin Books, LLC
As an academic publisher, we understand our role in the information ecology, and respect the roles of academics and librarians in the same ecological system. To clarify our understanding of our place in that system, we offer the following pledge to the library community:
1. We recognize the free speech rights of librarians, and respect the fact that criticizing a publisher is sometimes part of a librarian’s professional duty. We will not sue librarians for criticizing us.
2. We will attempt to make money by selling books, not by charging authors fees to publish.
3. We will price our titles reasonably, so that individuals as well as institutions can afford to buy them.
4. We will always use acid-free, sustainably-sourced paper.
5. Our books will include bibliographic references and indexes where appropriate.
6. Contributors of chapters in edited volumes will maintain all their rights (the rights we license from them will be non-exclusive).
7. We pledge to balance timeliness, quality, and “timelessness” in our choice of book projects and our processes for bringing them to publication.
8. We pledge to make our full backlist available as DRM-free PDF files to personal and institutional members of Library Juice.
9. We will explore e-book publishing models with a creative approach and an effort to respond to the new logics of changing media, with the interests of scholars and librarians in mind.
Litwin Books is an independent academic publisher of books about media, communication and the cultural record. We are interdisciplinary in scope and intention, and gather together works from a range of disciplines, including media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, information studies, philosophy of technology, archival studies, communications history, history of archives and libraries, and related fields. Our independence from larger institutions gives us the freedom to offer critical perspectives that cut against the grain, as well as occasionally to give a scholar free rein with a work that is outside his or her usual publishing stream.
With our Library Juice Press imprint we follow the same philosophy, publishing books that examine theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science.
Auslander & Fox is our new imprint for general readers, featuring books characterized by originality, wit, and perspective.