Electronic Books For Downloading A Crisis Of
Jason Ramgel
Publishers current supply models make it impossible for a library to provide textbooks on behalf of their students. Consequently, students are either forced to purchase expensive textbooks themselves or not have access to critical resources. This is all happening during a cost-of-living crisis when they are struggling to meet their basic needs to support their studies.
Therefore, the supply and pricing of textbooks, particularly eBooks, is one of the most difficult issues currently facing both libraries and universities. Further information on these issues is available in Jisc's Briefing for academic staff on Cost, affordability and availability of core reading materials.
Some publishers provide eBooks for individual private purchase only because that model is the most effective for them financially. An eBook being available for you to purchase via Amazon, for example, does not automatically mean that the Library can buy a copy for our students. We will always do our best to try to find an institutional copy to buy, but sometimes there simply will not be one on offer.
This issue has been picked up by several academic librarians, and the #eBookSOS movement has been gathering momentum on a national (and international) scale. It is now more important than ever that we do whatever we can to reduce our reliance on purchasing eBooks on these restricted models.
The Library currently provides access to more than 800,000 eBooks and in recent months we have acquired a significant number of additional eBooks. We are also actively supporting open access book initiatives across the sector as part of the commitment to open pedagogy and open research.
Whilst acknowledging the issues faced around eBook and textbook supply, the Library is committed to working with publishers and eBook suppliers to negotiate the best possible access for our students, and ensure we obtain the best value pricing and return on investment for the University.
Sometimes an eBook is available, but the price makes its purchase simply unaffordable for us. We will always try to find a solution, negotiating with providers and looking at all possible means of acquiring an eBook, but there are unfortunately instances where, for reasons of price, we might not be able to purchase the book.
The Library purchases content for all of our students and teaching colleagues. As such, we need to ensure we both negotiate firmly with our suppliers to ensure the best value of spend for the University, and that we allocate our resources fairly across all of the student body.
Over the course of the next academic year we will be contacting all of our academic colleagues across the University on issues around supply and pricing of textbooks and eBooks. Your engagement and participation with this will be greatly appreciated, and please contact your Academic Support Librarian to discuss any of the issues and solutions in more detail.
b) Potentially offering and creating our own Salford Open-source textbooks or working with other institutions on this. We can provide specialist advice and potential funding for these initiatives, and will be looking at this as part of the overall eBook/textbook engagement campaign we are running in the 22/23 academic year.
In the short-term, please consider referring to multiple books, chapters, and articles - breaking the reliance on one single essential text wherever possible. This approach spreads use amongst a wide range of materials and allows use of the Library's licence for scanning single chapters from eligible textbooks.
When publishing your work, ask how the publisher plans to sell your book to libraries - will it be given a restrictive licence or will it be sold at a fair price with unlimited access? Use your influence if you can.
It has been 25 years since the publication of A Study of Crisis by the University of Michigan Press. In this preface to the e-book edition, we want to point out several important developments in the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project, which is at the core of this volume.
First and foremost, this is not an update. The e-book is simply an electronic version of the original book, all 1,064 pages of it! But although the volume has been frozen in time, as is the case with all books, the ICB project itself has not stood still. The 1997 publication covered the period between 1918 and 1994, and included data on 412 international crises and 895 foreign policy crises for individual states. ICB has just released Version 14 of the dataset, now covering all crises from 1918 to 2017, including data on 487 international crises and 1,078 foreign policy crises.
After 45 years of leadership of the ICB project, Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld have been succeeded by a new leadership team, Kyle Beardsley of Duke University and Patrick James of the University of Southern California. With this change, ICB is now housed at Duke University and the annual updates are in the hands of Kyle and an able group of Duke graduate students. And after 20 years of service as Project Manager, David Quinn has turned this task over to David Kennedy at Duke.
With this e-book publication, we also introduce an updated Data Viewer available at the Duke ICB website listed above. This impressive tool allows users of the dataset to search its contents by virtually any variable, set of cases, time period, region, crisis trigger, major responses, outcomes, interventions, etc. Readers should also note that an important new suite of variables pertaining to mediation has been added to ICB since the publication of A Study of Crisis. We wish to acknowledge Alexander Jonas' outstanding contribution in updating and maintaining the ICB Data Viewer.
We hope that this e-book edition will widen even further the community of scholars, students, and members of the policy community who have relied on ICB for insights into the onset, escalation, de-escalation, and resolution of crises in the international system.
2022As the e-book "goes to press," we note the passing of Michael Brecher on January 16, 2022, at the age of 96. An obituary to Michael can be found at the ICB website referenced above. May his memory be a blessing.
About two years ago, a friend of In Case of Crisis, as esteemed reputation expert and educator, observed that there was very little in the way of authoritative textbooks that examined crisis management best practices in the digital age.
The problem was that most of the many books on the subject adequately addressed the core principles of the preparation and response to emerging threats, but very few took into consideration the dizzying speed at which social media drives a crisis and the game-changing context of a digital communications world.
Ron had mentioned that 500 is a good sales target for a text-book. Our book was free to download, but we were not promoting it via traditional book selling channels, so 500 seemed to be a credible target.
Below is a checklist of different methods that you can try to locate an e-version of a print book in our stacks. Many publishers are making ebooks temporarily available during the COVID-19 crisis. Librarians can also look into purchasing an ebook to add to our collections accessible to Tulane affiliates.
Many academic presses are making their publications temporarily available online. Check the website of the publisher of the book you're looking for and/or consult these lists of publishers responding to the COVID-19 crisis:
"Nowhere to Hide presents a nontechnical analysis on the origins of the 2008 Global Crisis. It was written for people who might ask: 'Why did no one see this crisis coming?' Beyond the nontechnical analysis, the authors inadvertently highlighted aspects that have been glossed over in the ongoing discussions about the Global Crisis, namely: explanations on why the crisis occurred is a crisis in itself. First of all, neoclassical economics may be the theory of apologists of liberalization and deregulation but the theory itself was not the cause of the crisis. Many jump to the conclusion that what the theory posits is what reality should conform. So there lies the problem: the mismatch between economic theory and economic reality. There lies another problem: the inability to see that what can hold at the micro level may not hold at the macro level. Why the gap? The first answer concerns political economy. The problem is when the theory is mixed with a form of libertarian philosophy that stresses individual freedom and entrepreneurship at all levels, thereby producing a blend of thinking that rejects government intervention as one of the possible solutions to economic problems. The second aspect is the teaching of economics. Most teachers forget that neoclassical economics is an ideal theorization of economic processes in the advanced economies. Teaching it is therefore problematic because the framework does not fit the realities in developing economies. The theory needs to be modified" (Philippine Daily Inquirer).
"The ongoing problems of Greece and the euro zone provide a timely reminder that the recent global financial crisis is not over. Indeed, increasingly frequent financial crises may now be 'the new normal' in the global economy, with attendant implications for Asia. Dr Michael Lim Mah-Hui, an experienced international banker, and National University of Singapore Business School's Professor Lim Chin have produced an extraordinarily useful guide to understanding the phenomena at work. The slim volume explains, in language (mostly) intelligible to the layman, what happened, the causes and how we will continue to be affected. Dr Lim and Prof Lim expertly draw together, and neatly connect, the various explanations that have been given of the crisis, which originated in the United States. The challenges for Asia that the authors identify include the limits of export-led growth; the dangers of free capital flows; and foreign exchange reserves now over-invested in the US. This thoughtful book provides a sobering look back that is also a warning about what is still to come, if we, and the world, do not change" (The Straits Times).
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