Council Awards are established by TAA’s governing body and administered by the Council of Fellows and Awards Committee (referred to as the ‘Awards Committee’ for short). Beginning in 2019, the Awards Committee undertook an effort to rethink most of the awards, to develop clearer distinctions among them, and to rewrite the criteria used for determining winners. Council Awards are intended to recognize individual achievements in writing or in service to TAA or fellow authors. Unlike the Textbook Award program, they do not aim to judge the quality of a single work, but rather to recognize the accomplishments of authors and industry professionals, in different stages and aspects of their careers.
Member Spotlight: Paul M. Vitanyi
TAA member Paul Vitanyi is a professor emeritus at the University of Amsterdam, CWI fellow at the Netherlands National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), and is both a textbook and academic author in the computer science discipline.
His most recent publication is the fourth edition of An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and Its Applications published by Springer.Â
Member Spotlight: Jamie Pope
TAA member Jamie Pope is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University and is a textbook author in the nutrition writing discipline.
Her most recent publication is the second edition of Nutrition for a Changing World (Scientific American and Macmillan Learning) published January 2019. Earlier in her career, she was author or co-author of several popular press books in the weight management arena.Â
Welcome new members to TAA: December 2019
With membership in TAA, you are not alone. You become part of a diverse community of textbook and academic authors with similar interests and goals. We are pleased to announce the addition of 57 new TAA members who joined us in December 2019.Â
Reflecting on 2019
Before we set down our pens on the year that has past and turn the page in our journals to the new one ahead, we offer a final post for 2019.Â
It’s been a busy year for us here at the Textbook & Academic Authors Association. Nearly 600 new textbook and academic authors have joined us, 11 webinars were hosted, 31 textbook awards were given, about 150 members convened in Philadelphia for our annual conference, 29 TweetChat events were held, and more than 200 new articles were published on the blog.
As we look forward to the exciting things on the horizon for 2020 and beyond, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the things that made 2019 great at TAA.
Preparing for ripples, waves, and tsunamis in textbook and academic publishing
Recently, we’ve seen shifts from print to digital, the rise of open educational resources and open-access journals, the consolidation of large publishers into mega-publishers, fundamental changes in how authors are compensated, and other significant changes to the nature of authoring. As we wait to see which of the ripples coming over the horizon dissipate and which become large—perhaps overwhelming—waves, what can we authors do to remain afloat?
Three main strategies can help academic and textbook authors continue to succeed as changes in textbooks, journals, or scholarly publications come along: vigilance, honing core skills, and agility.