Books in print and forthcoming books

As Canadianists, we are often faced with the need for up-to-date information about Canadian books – the exact title, the price, whether a particular work is still in print. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to find this kind of information on the Web. The logical source – ”Canadian Books in Print” – is not freely accessible. The only solution is to try a variety of sites. What follows is a list of the ones that seem to be most useful. As we would like to keep revising this site, any tips would be welcome: please send them to vurm@phil.muni.cz.

 

Bookstores

Probably the easiest way is to search a book vendor’s Website. Of course these are not comprehensive, and they tend not to include less well-known books as well as books published by small presses, but they do include a lot of the books we’re interested in. Two of the largest on-line sites are:

http://www.chapters.ca
http://www.indigo.ca


Publishers

If you know the publisher, you could also go to his/her Website. The directory of Canadian publishers’ Web sites is as follows:

http://www.publishers.ca/members.html


National Library of Canada

One special service offered by the National Library of Canada is particularly useful for obtaining information about books that have appeared in the past few years. The ”Forthcoming Books” lists are processed by the National Library’s Canadian Cataloguing in Publication (CIP) program. Approximately 1600 publishers participate in the CIP program; in addition, the major publications of the federal government are covered, as are publications of the provincial governments of British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Ontario. Each month brings a new list of forthcoming titles, and these are also archived on the Web site, going back several years. The books are listed according to category, and within each category alphabetically by author, so it is easy to find what is new in the field you are interested in. This site can be found at

http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/forthbks/efbintro.htm



Books on Canada

The Association for the Export of Canadian Books publishes an annual catalogue with a good selection of books published the previous year, both in English and French, that covers the whole field of Canadian Studies. Five sents of these books are then sent in the form of a travelling exhibition to Canadian Studies events round the world. Many of you will have seen this exhibition at the Brno conference, or at the annual conference of the Association of Canadianists in the German-speaking Countries (GKS) in Grainau, and so know that it is a very handy source of information on some of the most recent books of interest to Candianists. To access the last four years of the catalogue, entitled Books on Canada, enter the Association’s website at http://www.aecb.org and then click on “Outstanding Canadian Books” (“Le prestige des livres canadiennes” in the French version). The entries on the individual books have brief descriptions of the contents, and give all the details needed for ordering them (publisher, price, ISBN number and so on).