Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Interesting University Press Ebooks via NYPL
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2019 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Hey New York Public Library patrons!
Today I looked at NYPL's "E-Book Central" and discovered University Press Scholarship Online. Click "Connect to database" and enter your NYPL barcode number and PIN, and you can read a bunch of books from university presses for free in your browser (or, if you accept certain additional terms, download PDFs chapter-by-chapter)!
Most of the university press books I looked for weren't in there, but I definitely saw some interesting titles, such as:
- MIT Press: Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum, about "the production of noise modeled on an existing signal in order to make a collection of data more ambiguous, confusing, harder to exploit, more difficult to act on, and therefore less valuable" -- and the chapter "Closer to the Metal" by Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman, in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (I met Finn a zillion years ago and always find his writing interesting)
- again MIT Press: The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger
- University Press of Mississippi: Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming, edited by Melissa Ames, about how a bunch of shows "rely upon temporal and narrative experimentation" (The Wire, Damages, Lost, Arrested Development, it goes on and on)
- Oxford University Press: Bipolar Identity: Region, Nation and the Kannada Language Film by M.K. Raghavendra
- Princeton University Press: The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible by Lance Fortnow
- MIT Press: Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries by Gina Neff
- Edinburgh University Press: Masculinity and Popular Television by Rebecca Feasey
- From University of Chicago Press, two books I noticed because Harry Brighouse (author at Crooked Timber) coedited or coauthored them: The Aims of Higher Education: Problems of Morality and Justice and Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making
- Oxford University Press: Echoes of Mutiny: Race, Surveillance, and Indian Anticolonialism in North America by Seema Sohi, which I first heard about when reading about the history of anti-Asian racism in the US and South Africa and British surveillance of South Asians in the United States who advocated Indian independence in SAADA.
(You may be eligible for an NYPL card even if you don't know it yet: "Any person who lives, works, attends school or pays property taxes in New York State is eligible to receive a New York Public Library card free of charge.")
