Where to start?
Dulam Bumochir’s book from UCL Press, The State, Popular Mobilisation and Gold Mining in Mongolia looks promising. Not familiar w/the author, but love the press and the topic!
Chicago has a monthly free e-book deal (‘free’ in the sense of ‘harvest your email’ free). This month’s offer, Pictures from an Institution looks interesting. They are also offering their top novels for just a few bucks, including UH emeritus prof Lee Siegel’s Love in a Dead Language.
I love NYU’s monthly specials. Their press hits some weird sweet spot with me where they have titles on topics I care about but never have time to read. This month they have an Earth Day theme, and are offering titles which tend to focus on environmental justice. I highly recommend them if you study that are, or are even just curious. The price is perfect for exploratory reading. Just check to make sure your library doesn’t have it online for you already!
Melville House is doing ’round 2′ of its academic books give-away, offering Malik’s The Quest for a Moral Compass, Molander’s The Anatomy of Inequality, and White’s The Science Delusion for free download. You need an academic email address and the code (moral, inequality, and delusion respectively).
Also, if I can take a moment for a slightly critical note, let me provide an example of a less-than-ideal response to COVID-19: Harvard University Press’s Loeb Classical Library has made its online books free to schools and universities. You just need to email them for more details. I appreciate the impulse to help, and I recognise the high quality of Loeb editions and of the website more generally, but I think Harvard should have just opened up the collection to anyone who wanted to read it. Most of the texts are already thousands of years old and there are open access translations of them already. I know Loeb’s editors add value to these texts in a real way but asking schools to go through a process to get access to these is putting your light under a bushel, in my opinion. Most of these free offers are really attempts to build marketing lists already, and I doubt there are hordes of Seneca heads who are going to bulk download your work in some unethical way. And if there are then… isn’t that success for an imprint whose goal is to get these ancient authors into modern hands?
Ok there have been some scholarly publications which I want to highlight which have come out soon but I’ll take a break for now and come back with more later.
Alex Golub 