Next week, Bill Caraher is going to hang out with some pretty fun guys and talk about punk rock in the  Trump era at Ojata Record in Grand Forks. The event is partly to celebrate the publication of Brian Schill’s new book, This Year’s Work in the Punk Bookshelf, Or, Lusty Scripts (Indiana University Press, 2017), which he and Bill chatted about over on the North Dakota Quarterly page in November and the book that Bret Weber and Bill Caraher wrote, The Bakken: An Archaeology of an Industrial Landscape (NDSU Press 2017).  There will be bands: June Panic and the Semaphores and Mistaken Thieves. There’s a free…

This was a banner year for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota thanks our editors, contributors, and readers. We are really happy to report that we say over 2000 downloads of books from The Digital Press and we managed to sell almost one book a day for the entire year. This is up from last year just a bit and I think shows growing interest in quality, open-access digitally distributed book and the power of print-on-demand to extend our reach. Partly, we can see how the front of the catalogue sells the back of the catalogue (as our…

I’ve spent a good bit of time this week working on projects for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, and just this morning another project appeared in my inbox. These are interesting times both for The Digital Press and digital and academic publishing. This post today is more of an update on what’s going on at The Digital Press and some broader – and perhaps speculative – thoughts on digital publishing. For more like this, and other voices, do come to our panel at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting on Friday, January  Project One First, just yesterday I sent…

The semester is winding down and I’m working a bit now to catch up on some pressing tasks for The Digital Press. So, this week, I’m working on the layout for one of my more complex projects, Shawn Graham’s journal Epoiesen, for which The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota will publish an annual pdf and print-on-demand volume. The articles in Epoiesen have a number of intriguing challenges. First, Shawn provided them to me in markdown (and my impression is that they are submitted in markdown). I’ve been a John Gruber fan for a long time and regularly read DaringFireball and was…

The Black Friday to Cyber Monday holiday is such an orgy of consumerism that we had to invent “Giving Tuesday” to cleanse our collective conscience.  The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is doing its part to soften the blow of the holiday season by making available its entire catalogue of books on North Dakota or Archaeology for free downloads (including Eric Burin’s Picking the President: Understanding the Electoral College (2017), which doesn’t really fit into a category!) (Actually, all book published by The Digital Press are always free). We’re particular excited to announce the open access version of Elwyn Robinson’s History of…

This is turning into a pretty exciting month for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota. Last week, we released Micah Bloom’s Codex and today, we’re excited to announce our support for the pre-order campaign for The Beast produced by Ad Astra Comix and Dr. Patrick McCurdy, from the University of Ottawa. The Beast is a brilliantly illustrated and engaging story of two precariously employed millennials living in the heart of Canada’s oil country.  Go and pre-order a copy today and watch this space for some exciting future developments!  This project continues The Digital Press’s commitment to the sustained study of petroculture in North America and…

As many local readers know, Leon Osborne passed away last week. Many people may be less familiar with his role in helping the community of Grand Forks during the devastating 1997 flood. We were fortunate that he was willing to contribute to David Haeselin’s (ed.) Haunted by Waters which we published earlier this year on the 20th anniversary of the Grand Forks flood of 1997. David offers this reflection on Osborne’s role in the 1997 flood. Leon Osborne was more than just North Dakota’s weatherman. His role in more accurately predicting the Red River’s water level during the Flood of 1997…

Each year, Open Access Week celebrates the work of authors and publishers who make their works available for free and open circulation. From its origins, the Digital Press at the University of North Dakota has worked to encourage open access publishing across its entire catalogue and seek out collaboration with likeminded authors and publishers. For Open Access Week 2017, we are very pleased to announce our collaboration with Epoiesen: A Journal for Creative Engagement in History and Archaeology founded and edited by Shawn Graham at Carleton University in Ottawa. Epoiesen urges its contributors to apply a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license to their works, but also recognizes that…