I left my heart at MIT Press

I had breakfast this morning with an editor at MIT Press. It was an interesting time, in part because it highlighted something I never really paid much attention to: I've been a serious consumer of MIT books for some 20 years. In graduate school, I had to read a lot their science studies and history of technology books: you couldn't have an STS course syllabus without something from the Inside Technology series. Then, I went through a phase of consuming their architectural history list. More recently it's been their computer science and design books-- mainly the trade books, but a few of the more technical ones as well.

Still, when the question came up of whether I'd think about sending a proposal for the end of cyberspace book to them, I thought: yeah, the computer science and design side would be a good fit, but my loyalty is still with the STS list.

I doubt I could say such a thing about many presses. Do university presses realize that readers have these kinds of relationships with their products? And do they try to do anything with that? More generally, how many few tangled bonds of loyalty to products that could be translated into respect for companies or institutions, if only the relationships were made explicit and visible? Do people feel loyalty to Sony Pictures, or Touchstone, or any media company other than Disney?

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Comments

[megan]

I haven't had this experience with MIT Press or any university press (I have a lot of their books, but I don't approach fan status yet with any one in particular), but I do know a lot of people - especially software practitioners - who would call themselves "fans" of the O'Reilly book company and their books. In this case, I would define "fandom" as preferring Ora books over others in the genre, giving Ora recommendations to others when asked and even if the topic is unfamiliar ("What would be a good book on programming language XYZ?"), collecting them when new versions come out (how many editions do we have of the Camel book now?), getting the books signed by authors, going to conventions put on by the publishing company, etc. They definitely have a fan following.