No, we didn’t carry off a whole swag of book prizes (though we should have!) but actually we came back home pretty satisfied the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, held a couple of weeks ago in Philadelphia. I didn’t hear any delegate total announced this time but – despite the recession – the conference bustled and the NIAS Press stand got its fair share of attention.

Although we had a number of interesting new titles on display, the most attention (I think) was given to Robert Cribb’s Digital Atlas of Indonesian History, an advance copy of which just made it to the conference on time. Here of course it helped that people could ‘get their hands dirty’ using the real thing (on the laptop seen here behind Marie).

While Marie was chained to the book exhibition for much of the conference, I scurried between panels, met with authors and generally hustled. On the Friday afternoon, we took part in a publishing roundtable that saw a good conversation between a broad group of publishers, librarians and authors. Ostensibly, the topic was ‘Getting Published’ (a subject close to our heart) but in fact the roundtable roamed across far more issues than this, most of which however were tinged by the impact of moves towards electronic publishing.

Further roundtables are planned at subsequent AAS annual meetings. We look forward to taking part in these and trust that as many of you as possible will also participate. Before then, however, we shall be part of a ‘seriously brilliant’ panel and master class on getting published at the upcoming Euroseas conference in Gothenburg in late August. If you can make it there, you will find this dual event well worth attending.