Announcement from BWB
Announcing
the publication of a superb selection of Sir Paul Callaghan’s writing. With the
support of the Callaghan family, we release Paul
Callaghan: Luminous Moments on the first anniversary of his death, to
celebrate the life of a remarkable New Zealander.
This
release also marks the launch of BWB Texts – a new short-form digital imprint
from Bridget Williams Books. As Catherine Callaghan has commented:
‘... as a person who embraced new
technologies, [my father] would have enjoyed knowing that his work was being
published digitally, reaching new audiences. He was a communicator to the end,
and in this small way we are enabling him to keep talking to us.’
Paul Callaghan: Luminous Moments (www.bwb.co.nz/books/paul-callaghan-luminous-moments) brings together some of
his most significant writing. Whether he describes his childhood in Wanganui,
reflects on discovering the beauty of science, sets out New Zealand’s future
potential or discusses the experience of fatherhood, Sir Paul Callaghan offers
eloquent narratives that will endure in this country’s literature.
Meeting
with the cancer that ended his life, he documents for us all ways of living
well in the face of illness. As his daughter writes in her moving foreword: ‘He
became his own scientific experiment.’
BWB
Texts (www.bwb.co.nz/texts) offer a new form of
reading for New Zealanders. Commissioned as short digital-only works, BWB Texts
unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past,
present and future New Zealand writing.
Publishing
Wednesday March 20 2013, RRP$4.99, ISBN 9781927131800 (EPUB), 9781927131817
(KINDLE). Available direct and DRM-free from www.bwb.co.nz, and from major retailers
including Amazon, Kobo and eBooks.com
Author
information
Sir
Paul Callaghan was born in Wanganui in August 1947 and died in Wellington in
March 2012. He received international recognition for his scientific research
in the field of nuclear magnetic resonance. He was founding director of the
MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, based at
Victoria University of Wellington. In 2011 he was named New Zealander of the
Year for his outstanding leadership for more than thirty years as a scientist,
teacher, visionary and communicator.
What are
BWB Texts?
A
BWB Text is a short, digital-only piece of high-quality New Zealand writing,
produced swiftly and distributed globally online. Read on smart phones and
e-readers, tablets and desktop computers, BWB Texts connect an exploding online
readership to some of New Zealand’s best authors, reading and ideas.
BWB
Texts draw on the publishing expertise of Bridget Williams Books to bring
readers an exciting mix of New Zealand reading: cutting edge commentary sits
alongside reflective narrative, debate alongside history, articles follow
memoir, and information precedes stories.
Starting
with Paul Callaghan: Luminous Moments,
more BWB Texts will be released in the coming weeks including: Maurice Gee’s Creeks & Kitchens: A Childhood Memoir,
Rebecca Macfie’s Report from Christchurch
(in association with the New Zealand
Listener), Kathleen Jones’s ‘I think
... I am going to die.’: Katherine Mansfield at Fontainebleau, Hamish
Campbell’s The Zealandia Drowning
Hypothesis and Sir Tipene O’Regan’s New
Myths and Old Politics.
Why are
BWB Texts important?
Debate — new readers, new thinking
BWB
Texts provide a new meeting space, connecting our histories, technologies,
shifting readers, emerging and established authors, and our shared futures.
Quality — serious writing amidst the
online noise
The
internet is disrupting the quality and nature of our reading. BWB Texts help
connect important ideas and a readership confronted with the noise of modern
media.
Silence — the challenges facing media
BWB
Texts represent a response to these challenges, one that draws on these
technological shifts to nurture great writing, both as BWB Texts and within the
wider BWB publishing programme.
Global — immediate and crossing
boundaries
Produced
within weeks and worldwide in distribution, BWB Texts broadcast New Zealand voices
and stories across boundaries.
How will
BWB Texts work?
The
BWB Texts programme is inspired by emerging overseas publishing models focused
on short form digital-only works, often referred to as ‘e-singles’. Sharing
similar characteristics as these offshore initiatives, BWB Texts are short
digital-only works, produced quickly to ensure topicality, retailed at low
cost, and distributed to the widest range of devices possible. BWB Texts are
crafted in-house at BWB using a digital production workflow powered by Infogrid
Pacific, with covers from Base Two.
The
strength of BWB’s commissioning strategy based on providing excellent research
and writing about New Zealand is widely recognised. BWB Texts build from this
expertise, using the flexibility of this new approach to provide readers with a
broad sweep of topics: New Zealand history; contemporary issues; biography and
autobiography; other New Zealand narrative non-fiction (for example, travel
writing and science).
BWB
Texts are available directly and DRM-free from our website (www.bwb.co.nz), in
addition to a wide range of retailers including Amazon, Kobo and eBooks.com.
Bundled sets of BWB Texts will also be made available. School, public and
tertiary libraries in New Zealand and abroad will be able to purchase copies
via distributors ebrary, EBL and Wheelers.
Who is
behind BWB Texts?
BWB
Texts was instigated by publisher Tom Rennie and journalist Max Rashbrooke, in
partnership with BWB’s director Bridget Williams. The trio became a quartet
with Geoff Walker bringing years of New Zealand publishing experience to the
team as commissioning editor alongside Max Rashbrooke. Together, we have
fashioned a contemporary vision drawing on many years of strong publishing
experience.
Acknowledgement
We
would like to acknowledge the funding support of the BWB Publishing Trust (www.bwbpublishingtrust.org.nz) that makes this new
digital imprint possible.
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