Episodi

  • Are Libraries the Hidden Book Market? with Erin Cox of Words & Money
    Apr 28 2026
    What if the most powerful tool in your book marketing strategy isn't social media — it's your local library? In the debut episode of The Publishing Playbook, host Sarah Russo of Page One Media sits down with publishing veteran Erin Cox to unpack one of the industry's most overlooked opportunities: libraries. With a career spanning publicity at Scribner and HarperCollins, agenting, and her current role as publisher of Publishing Perspectives and co-founder of Words and Money, Erin brings rare, 360-degree expertise to the conversation. Together, Sarah and Erin break down how libraries actually buy books, why they're a powerful (and underutilized) marketing channel for authors, and the misconceptions that are costing publishers real money. Whether you're a debut author, a seasoned writer, or publishing-curious, this episode will change how you think about getting your book into readers' hands. Words & Money: https://www.wordsandmoney.com/ Publishing Perspectives: https://publishingperspectives.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    29 min
  • Kirsten Clark, "Practical Project Management for Librarians" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
    Apr 26 2026
    Librarians continue to work under budget constraints while still needing to increase the user experience and remove barriers to library resources. Learning to evaluate the best options for managing projects to accomplish goals while balancing with the reality of day-to-day work needs is integral to overall success.In Practical Project Management for Librarians (Bloomsbury, 2025), Kirsten Clark takes readers through the process of learning how to balance the goals of the project with the reality of working in libraries today, what key questions can help move readers effectively through the project process and choose the right tools, best practices to ensure sustainability in project plans as well as outcomes, and how to incorporate diversity, inclusion, and accessibility principles into your project management. This practice guide provides step-by-step instructions to determine what project management tools and techniques match the needs of the particular library project and person/team's skills level, while also providing these in the context of libraries' specific cultures and norms. Guest: Kirsten Clark is the director of Library Enterprise Systems at the University of Minnesota Libraries, USA, where her department oversees systems for five system campuses as well as ensures consistent and transparent application of access policies for students, faculty, researchers, and community users. In a career that has spanned working for small liberal arts colleges to research universities, she has led projects within a variety of library areas including research and instruction, collection development, access and information services, and information technology and systems. Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    55 min
  • Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon, "Reading Media: How to Do Textual Analysis" (NYU Press, 2026)
    Apr 25 2026
    Reading Media: How to do Textual Analysis reinvigorates one of media and cultural studies’ most foundational methods at a moment when it is most needed, showing its continuing vitality by adapting it to new media environments, cultural objects, and scholarly questions.The volume insists that the close study of meaning, form, and representation remains central to understanding media’s power. With contributions from leading and emerging scholars, the book offers a diverse toolkit: from narratological and semiotic analysis of film and TV, to historical poetic accounts of TikTok, multimodal analysis of Afrobeats music videos, and postcolonial criticism of games. Essays extend the scope of textual analysis to unexpected objects—such as plastic waste, memes, and refugee-authored media—while others demonstrate how texts operate across platforms, genres, and transmedia franchises. Beyond offering new and improved approaches to textual analysis, each chapter illustrates its approach using a specific case study, functioning both as a step-by-step how-to guide and as an example of textual analysis in action.Reading Media advances a vision of textual analysis that is rigorous yet flexible, attuned to both aesthetics and politics, and responsive to today’s media environment. Essential for students and scholars in media, communication, and cultural studies, Reading Media both reaffirms and renews textual analysis as an indispensable way of engaging with the mediated worlds that shape contemporary life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    45 min
  • Laura Horak, "Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds" (U California Press, 2026)
    Apr 23 2026
    Since the 1990s, a largely underground upwelling of trans creativity has helped new trans identities, communities, and political movements come together. In Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds (University of California Press, 2026), Dr. Laura Horak provides an entryway to the wildly diverse and creative cinema made by trans creators, including those who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Overlooked until now, this rich collection of media ranges in genre from romantic comedies to horror films and asks essential questions about how to be human and how to craft a livable life in a world on fire. Okay.Using the fundamentals of film studies, Horak reveals the innovative approaches taken by trans and gender-nonconforming artists to explore how we relate to other people, what it's like to have a body, and how we survive in an oppressive society. These filmmakers tackle the challenging paradox of representing trans lives when greater visibility is associated with ever-increasing levels of harm. In the process, they produce art that emphasizes trans survival and resilience and imagines a more expansive world for trans communities. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    36 min
  • Sarah Murray, "Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI" (NYU Press, 2026)
    Apr 22 2026
    Powered by Smart traces the techno-cultural evolutions that made artificial intelligence feel more familiar than futuristic. From wearables and streaming platforms to home voice assistants and AI toasters, smart is an inescapable feature of postdigital life. Today, thousands of products and platforms define smart as routine automation and friendly digital kinship. Yet smartness was not always so digital. Sarah Murray uncovers the century-long process through which smart became synonymous with seamless interaction between bodies and machines, showing how this intimate interfacing helped to normalize today’s algorithmic world.Offering a critical, feminist prehistory of everyday AI, Powered by Smart reveals how the pursuit of convenience, comfort, and efficiency has long been a gendered campaign. Smartness has often been associated with women — from early switchboard operators and industrial designer Lillian Gilbreth’s test kitchens to Jane Fonda’s Jazzercise empire and Disney’s computer-housewife PAT in Smart House. These moments illuminate how machine intelligence has already been made ordinary, and how the smart ideal was built over time through domesticity, discipline, and desirability.Moving across factory floors, suburban kitchens, exercise trends, and digital homes, Murray shows how twentieth-century innovations in wearability, solutionism, and recognition laid the groundwork for our contemporary tolerance of — and attachment to — AI. Far from a sudden technological revolution, everyday AI emerged through decades of cultural conditioning of smart life as a caring, attentive endeavor that cast human–machine harmony as both natural and necessary. Powered by Smart reframes artificial intelligence not as the next frontier of progress, but as the logical extension of a much older dream of efficiency made ordinary and personal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    55 min
  • The Information State: How is the State Surveilling and Manipulating us These Days?
    Apr 22 2026
    In this episode of International Horizons, RBI Acting Director Eli Karetny interviews Jacob Siegel, writer, Army veteran, and author of The Information State. Siegel traces how military information operations, post‑9/11 surveillance programs, and Silicon Valley’s rise converged to create a new public‑private regime of control over information, attention, and consent. He discusses the intellectual roots of technocratic governance from Francis Bacon and Leibniz through progressivism, World War I propaganda, and cybernetics, and explains how the “information state” differs from classical authoritarianism. Finally, Siegel reflects on Trumpism, the tech counter‑elite around figures like Elon Musk, and how AI may usher in a more “Pharaonic” and quasi‑spiritual form of politics beyond traditional expert‑driven technocracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    54 min
  • Wade Bishop et al., "A Critical Look at Information Science and Librarianship in a New Age" (Emerald Publishing, 2026)
    Apr 21 2026
    A Critical Look at Information Science and Librarianship in a New Age: Constellation of Insanity (Emerald, 2026) fosters a platform for information scientists to engage in reflection and contemplation regarding the profound questions of our era. By drawing insights from pioneers in the field whose contributions were once marginalized or, in some instances, overlooked within the realm of information science, chapter authors strive to re/center the field's focal point. Chapter authors draw from a diverse array of frameworks including critical theory, deconstruction, queer theory, borderlands, among others. What sets this book apart is its direct confrontation of the status quo and aggressively re/claims intellectual space for “others”. This is the only book to critique the entire discipline of Information Science from as many angles as possible in one volume and as far outside of the traditional organizations. Guest: Wade Bishop is a Professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. His research foci include research data management, data discovery, geographic information science, as well as the study of data occupations, education, and training. He has published many works evaluating the services and resources of academic and public libraries. He earned an MLIS from the University of South Florida School of Information and a PhD from Florida State University’s School of Information. Renate Chancellor is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Access, Ethics, & Belonging at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She holds both a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is affiliated with the Syracuse University Lender Center for Social Justice. Dr. Chancellor’s research is grounded in critical race theory and critical cultural information studies, with a focus on access, equity, ethics, belonging, and social justice in Library and Information Science (LIS). She is the author of seminal biographies of Black librarians, including E.J. Josey: Transformational Leader of the Modern Library Profession and Breaking Glass Ceilings: Clara Stanton Jones and the Detroit Public Librarypractices, which foreground Black leadership and institutional transformation in librarianship. Her current research explores information objects and fugitive epistemology, with particular attention to alternative knowledge systems and practices of resistance. Dr. Chancellor serves on the editorial boards of The Library Quarterly and Education for Information and is the recipient of numerous honors, including the ALISE Excellence in Teaching Award (2014) and the Norman Horrocks Leadership Award (2012). Joe Sánchez is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Studies at Queens College (CUNY). He studies the information worlds of BIPOC high school students, subcultures and information, and undergraduate research experiences for underrepresented students. He earned a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He serves on the editorial board of Library Hi-Tech, the advisory board of the Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program, the American Library Association (ALA) Spectrum Doctoral Fellows Program, and ALA’s Committee on Accreditation. He is a Mellon Fellow and a Google/ALA Fellow in the Libraries Ready to Code Program and a Founder of the iSchool Inclusion Institute (i3). Host: Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    41 min
  • Qi Ai, "Feng Xiaogang's New Year Films: Industry, Regulation, Humour and Authorship" (Routledge, 2025)
    Apr 20 2026
    Feng Xiaogang's New Year Films: Industry, Regulation, Humour and Authorship (Routledge, 2025) offers not only an in-depth study of Feng Xiaogang as a cinematic auteur but also a comprehensive and informative discussion of the industrial transformation of mainstream Chinese cinema under party-state regulation from the 1990s to the 2010s. Ai Qi is a lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, Shandong Normal University, China. Qi holds a Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Nottingham, UK. His current research mainly focuses on Chinese cinema, new media and cultural studies, non-human celebrities in the digital age in particular. Recently, he published an article on Capybara, discussing why this animal species becomes popular online with attention to Chinese Sang culture. Victoria Oana Lupașcu is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at University of Montréal. Her areas of interest include medical humanities, visual art, 20th and 21st Chinese, Brazilian and Romanian literature and Global South studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications
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    59 min