Issue 41 - November 2007

Is there a European public space (yet)?

This was the key qustion of a one-day conference that took place at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna earlier this month. This is also the framework question for projects such as eurozine, Transitions Online, sign&sight, europtopics that started as genuinely European and transnational in both content and format.

For us at Next Page coming from the book sector, it is indicative how much overlap there is between the debates that take place in publishing and those in media. Rather than focusing on the “European” alone, the conference inevitably honed in on the key issues that shape the way knowledge and information is produced and distributed in the contemporary situation. Namely, new business models of media and the new possibilities for intellectual property arrangements, peer-produced content, local languages vs (or in conjunction with) English , Google and its alternatives, and last but not least - what does media independence and quality mean nowadays.

After just a single day of discussions, one cannot expect any grand conclusions or agreements on joint actions. There was, however, a shared perception that a continuous antagonization between the “old media” and the “new media” is not going to bring neither of the two sides, nor the common European public space, any further.

The conference was jointly organized by Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb, eurotopics.net, eurozine and IWM, with the support of the European Cultural Foundation.

Next Page Releases Final Report on "What Arabs Read”

Next Page is pleased to announce completion of the second and final phase of “What Arabs Read”. The second phase queried 4 000 total respondents in Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Algeria in July – October 2007 on a broad spectrum of readership issues including habits, preferences, language competencies, pricing, accessibility and channels. To download the complete report visit www.npage.org.

New books published

Vera Ageeva, Women’s Space: Feminist Discourse of Ukrainian Modernism, translation from Ukrainian by O. M. Melnik (Idea-Press, Moskva 2008), supported by the East Translates East Publications Project

Ageeva’s study offers a historical perspective on feminist and gender aspects of Ukrainian literature. The author analyses literary works by women-authors from the 19th and 20th century (such as Lesya Ukrainka, Maria Bashkirceva, Olga Kobylianskaya) as the focus is on the Modernist period. By unraveling the differences between Modernist centers such as Paris, London, Vienna, Munich, compared to Kiev and Lvov, Ageeva manages to embed the phenomenon of Ukrainian women’s writing into a European context. This double move – of differentiation and integration – is a successful mode for such a comparative study, which aims to break through the stereotypes of a “small”, “national” literature, in order to extend and enrich the European literary map.