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Meeting of the International Committee of independent publishers in Paris, October 4-6th, 2012

Publishing countries : France

The International Committee of Independent publishers will gather in Paris from 4th to 6th for the yearly meeting with the Alliance Board members. This year, some Alliance partners are invited on the first day, to think about the next International Assembly of independent publishing which will take place in 2013 and 2014. The meeting will be also the opportunity to make a report of the language networks activities since the last Committee meeting in June 2011, to talk about the Digital Lab, about governance issues…

The Alliance warmly thanks the Centre national du livre for welcoming the meeting on October 4th and 5th.

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On 21 September 2012, let’s celebrate B Day!

Follow on an hourly basis the activities held on B Day 2012 on the B Day Facebook page, on the eldiab blog and on the Facebook page of the Alliance.

The Arabic network to the SILA in Algeria_interview_September 2012

The Arabic network to the SILA in Algeria_September 2012

Posters campaign of the Colombian publishers collective REIC

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Meeting of the Alliance Portuguese-speaking network in Lisbon, September 27 – October 1, 2012

Publishing countries : Portugal

After Paris in 2007, and Rio de Janeiro in 2009, the publishers from Brasil, Angola and Guinea-Bissau are gathering in Lisbon. The event will be the opportunity to assess the network activities since 2009; to define a roadmap for the next years; to remind the stakes for independent publishing and bibliodiversity in the Portuguese-speaking area; to think about digital publishing and to share some experiences in this field… Beyond the internal meetings, the publishers will take also this opportunity to meet some Portuguese publishers and to consider fair partnerships between different continents (copublishing projects, copyrights transfer, etc.).

The Alliance thanks the French Institute of Portugal (IFP), the Portuguese association of publishers and bookshops (ANEL), and the bookshop Ferin for their warming welcome and their availability.

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The B-day is coming! (September 21)

On September 21 will be celebrated the International Day of Bibliodiversity. Since 2010, each year, some actions are organized in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, to promote independent publishing and bibliodiversity: bookcrossing, meetings, book picnics, posters.

You are more than welcome to participate to the events this year in Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Algeria, Italia... and in many other countries!


Here the video B Day 2012!

All the actions will be soon be on the Alliance website and on the Alliance facebook page.

You can also follow the B-Day on twitter, in Spanish: @diadelab.

This year, the logo of the Day B also exists in Italian

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My Farewell from heaven

Author(s) : Hamed Abdel SAMAD ; Traduit par B. BINIAZ
Publishing countries : Germany, France
Language(s) : Farsi

A co-publishing of the English-speaking network: Forough publications in Germany and Khavaran publishing in France.
Book translated from German into Persian.

Year of publication: 2012 ; Date de publication : 2012 ; ISBN: 978-3-943147-15-5

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Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars

Author(s) : Vandana SHIVA
Publishing countries : South Africa, Australia, India
Language(s) : English
Price : Rs. 375 (India) / $AUD: 32.95

Wars in the 21st century are wars against the earth; against natural resources like water, soil, forests, minerals, seeds. The global corporate economy based on the idea of limitless growth has become a war economy and the means it uses are instruments of war. Trade wars. Waters wars. Food wars.

In a compelling and rigorously documented exposition, Vandana Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power, by demonstrating its flawed assumptions and devastating fallouts.
Consumerism lubricates the war against the earth, corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. It promotes technologies of production based on genetic engineering, geo-engineering and toxins; industrial development that entails the enforced appropriation of land, rivers, mountains; agribusinesses that deplete nature’s diversity; land-grab in Africa, Asia, South America. Exploitation of this order incurs the kind of ecological and economic debt that is unsustainable, unbailable and unbearable.
Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival; and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism of interdependence and earth democracy.

Vandana SHIVA is a world-renowned environmental thinker and activist, a leader in the International Forum on Globalisation (IFG) along with Ralph NADER and Jeremy RIFKIN, and of the Slow Food Movement. Director of Navdanya and of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, and a tireless crusader for farmers’, peasants’ and women’s rights, she is the author and editor of a score of influential books.
Vandana Shiva is the recipient of over 20 international awards, among them the Right Livelihood Award (1993); Medal of the Presidency of the Italian Republic (1998); the Horizon 3000 Award (Austria, 2001); Save the World Award (2009); Sydney Peace Prize (2010); Calgary Peace Prize (Canada, 2011); the Thomas Merton Award (2011); and the John Lennon-Yoko Ono Grant for Peace.
Vandana Shiva is currently working on a three-year project with the Government of Bhutan on how to achieve their objective of becoming an organic sovereign country, the first in the world.

Vandana SHIVA received the Fukuoka Grand Prize Laureate, 2012.

Year of publication: 2012; 267 pages; ISBN: 81-88965-75-8 (India) / ISBN: 9781875559275 (Australia)

Couverture version Australie

Australian cover of the co-publishing.

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Seeking Palestine (À la recherche de la Palestine)

Author(s) : Penny JOHNSON; Raja SHEHADEH (Eds.)
Publishing countries : Australia, India
Language(s) : English
Price : Rs. 395 (Women Unlimited, India)

A co-publication of the Alliance’s English-langage network. Two co-publishers : Spinifex (Australia), Women Unlimited (India).

Abstract:

“Palestine-in-exile,” says Rana Barakat, “is an idea, a love, a goal, a movement, a massacre, a march, a parade, a poem, a thesis, a novel and, yes, a commodity, as well as a people scattered, displaced, dispossessed and determined.”
How do Palestinians live, imagine and reflect on home and exile in this period of a stateless and transitory Palestine, a deeply contested and crisis-ridden national project, and a sharp escalation in Israeli state violence and accompanying Palestinian oppression? How can exile and home be written?
In this volume of new writing fifteen innovative and outstanding Palestinian writers—essayists, poets, novelists, critics, artists and memoirists—respond with their reflections, experiences, memories and polemics. What is it like, in the words of Lila Abu-Lughod, to be “drafted into being Palestinian?” What happens when you take your American children, as Sharif Elmusa does, to the refugee camp where you were raised? And how can you convince, as Suad Amiry attempts to do, a weary airport official to continue searching for a code for a country that isn’t recognised?
Contributors probe the past through unconventional memories, reflecting on 1948 when it all began. But they are also deeply interested in beginnings, imagining, in the words of Mischa Hiller, “a Palestine that reflects who we are now and who we hope to become”. Their contributions—poignant, humorous, intimate, reflective, intensely political—make for an offering that is remarkable for the candour and grace with which it explores the many individual and collective experiences of waiting, living for, and seeking Palestine.

Editors:
Penny Johnson is an independent researcher who works closely with the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, where she edits the Review of Women’s Studies. Recent writing and research on Palestine has focused on weddings and wars, wives of political prisoners, and young Palestinians’ talk about proper and improper marriages. She is an Associate Editor of the Jerusalem Quarterly.
Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is the founder of the pioneering non-partisan human rights organisation, Al Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and the author of several books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. He is also the author of the award-winning Palestinian Walks and A Rift in Time: Travels with My Ottoman Uncle. His new book, Occupation Diaries, is published in August 2012.

Endorsements:
“How can an essentially sad story give such pleasure? The answer is in these narratives: these stories, memoirs, poems are a pleasure and an education; personal, vivid, original, sometimes witty, always accomplished and always honest. They are a testimonial to the human spirit, and to the growing contribution of Palestine to literature.” —Ahdaf Soueif

ISBN: 81-88965-73-1 (Women Unlimited, India), 978-1-74219-823-1 (Spinifex, Australia).

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The “Fair Trade Book”

The label “Fair Trade Book” is attributed by the International Alliance of independent publishers to works published in the context of international publishing agreements that respect each other’s particularities: fair co- publishing. These fair copublishings enable the sharing of costs linked to intellectual and physical production of books and therefore ensure an economy of scale; an exchange of professional know-how and a common experience, while respecting the publishers’ cultural contexts and identities; and a distribution of works on a broader scale by adjusting prices for each geographic zone.

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Communiqué from the Alliance on the Tunis meetings, 27 May 2011

Publishing countries : Tunisia

15 publishers from 8 countries (Algeria, Argentina, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, France, Morocco, Tunisia, Syria) met in Tunis, from 12 to 15 May 2011, to discuss e-publishing. The meeting was organised by the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, with the support of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie.

The publishers who met in Tunis wished it to be known that these meetings took place in a peaceful and secure environment. The warm welcome we were given, despite the curfew then in place, enabled us to organise meetings of a high standard, from both a professional and a human perspective.

We wished to show our solidarity with our Tunisian partners in this way, by inviting associations, NGOs, organisations and institutions, tourists and the simply curious to rediscover Tunisia – a Tunisia where freedom is in the air.

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Bibliodiversity Observatory

Freedom of publishing under threat in Canada?, April 2008

An incredible censorship attempt is endangering the very existence of the publisher Écosociété (Quebec – Canada); more than 60 publishers from 30 countries have declared their undivided support for the Quebec publisher and are calling on the pinstigators of the “Noir Canada” affair to respect the rights of freedom of expression and publication.

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How to respond to a call for tenders in the textbook industry?, 2008

Through a step-by-step approach, with examples and a pedagogical method, Stéphane Marill gives a precious “vade mecum” for any publisher wishing to respond to a call for tenders in the school textbook industry.

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Protecting the book, 2006

Why did the large majority of European countries choose to protect the book, setting its price through trade agreements or legal measures? How were these protection mechanisms, which make the book into a cultural exception permitted by the European Commission, gradually implemented? Markus Gerlach offers a broad analysis the price-fixing of books in Europe: he begins by relating the background of this measure and then analyzes the economic effects. In the end he shows the extent to which the price-fixing of books, apart from its cultural and economic importance, also assumes an eminently political dimension.

“Protéger le livre” by Markus Gerlach (in French) - available in Spanish (“Cómo proteger el libro”), in Portuguese (“Proteger o livro”) and in Italian (“Proteggere il libro”).

Year of publication: 2006, 160 pages, 15 x 21 cm, ISBN 10: 2-9519747-2-8; ISBN 13: 978-2-9519747-2-2

Collection État des lieux de l’édition

Proteggere il libro_in Italian

Cómo proteger el libro_in Spanish

Proteger o livro_in Portuguese

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Éditeurs indépendants : de l’âge de raison vers l’offensive ? (Independent Publishers: moving from the age of reason on to the attack?), 2006

Far from being a caricature, developing a reasoning based on his personal conception of publishing, Gilles Colleu explores some of the characteristics of a typical independent publisher.
What do we mean by independent publisher? Are they necessarily small concerns? Can a major group be independent? In a context of concentration and increasing dominance of financial considerations, how can publishers remain independent while playing their crucial role of putting fresh ideas forward?

Gilles Colleu is a former student of Jean-Marie Bouvaist and has taught alongside him on the Master course at Villetaneuse University. He is now an associate professor in the publishing professions department of the IUT in Aix-en-Provence. He founded the Vents d’ailleurs publishing house and manages it with Jutta Hepke, and for the past 20 years has acted as a consultant to publishers.

In this work, he stresses his conviction that publishing needs to be rooted in a long cycle of cultivation, to build a coherent catalogue and long-lasting business.

NB: pages 94 to 97 of this work feature a full, fresh definition of independent publishing, suggested by the International Alliance of Independent Publishers.

Year of publication: 2006, 160 pages, 15 x 21 cm, ISBN 10: 2-9519747-2-8; ISBN 13: 978-2-9519747-2-2

Collection État des lieux de l’édition

La edición independiente_in Spanish

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Éditer dans l’espace francophone (Publishing in the French-speaking world), 2005

A thorough report by Luc Pinhas, in French

Why do books have such restricted circulation in the French-speaking world? Which way does the flow go and which are one-way streets? What current legislation encourages publishing and the marketing of works? Are public policies sufficient? What setbacks are encountered in the marketing of works? Luc Pinhas draws a comprehensive portrait of the state of publishing, including legislation, circulation, distribution and marketing of books in the French-speaking world. This dossier, featuring entries on many themes and geographic locations, provides a complete overview of local realities, illustrated with telling examples. After analysing measures that states, associations and syndicates of publishing and book-store professionals have implemented, the author puts forward some proposals to fuel a much-needed debate. To achieve this and to hear what the main players had to say, especially with regard to the South, a fruitful survey was conducted at the Ouagadougou book fair in November 2004, in partnership with the international Association of French-speaking Bookstore Managers (AILF) - [http://www.librairesfrancophones.org/]

Year of publication: 2005, 288 pages, 15 X 21 cm, ISBN: 978-2-9519747-1-X

Collection État des lieux de l’édition

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Call to French-language authors, publishers and institutions, March 2007

Publishing countries : Ivory Coast

African literature in French is today better represented and better known in Europe than in Africa, where its distribution remains hampered by many obstacles. However, there are solutions, which require the mobilisation of various stakeholders in the book industry. One solution is co-publishing, based on a joint trade agreement. The publication of “L’Ombre d’Imana” by Véronique TADJO, a groundbreaking example of pan-African co-publishing, proves that it is possible, through joint action, to create the conditions necessary for a (re)appropriation by Africa of its literature. To make this possible, the Alliance is appealing to everyone, authors, publishers and institutions alike, to join forces and promote the bibliodiversity at the heart of the francophone spirit. This appeal is endorsed by many authors and book industry professionals.

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