The publishing landscape is changing rapidly. AI-generated books,
self-published titles, and automated reprints of public-domain material are
increasingly appearing alongside traditionally published books.
Some of these are legitimate
publications, but many others are of poor or inconsistent quality. They may
have limited editorial oversight, unreliable metadata, poor formatting, or
production quality, or offer little added value compared with content already
freely available.
The growing number of such
publications can create significant challenges for title selection and
collection development, particularly when large quantities of titles enter the
market without the editorial and quality-control processes traditionally associated
with professional publishing.
To help our customers identify
these publications more easily, we have introduced an “Uncertain relevance
publisher” tag on our website. The tag identifies titles from publishers whose
output we believe warrants additional scrutiny when making selection decisions.
The tag is intended to support
informed selection rather than automatically exclude individual titles. We
continuously monitor developments in the publishing market and regularly review
and update the publishers covered by the tag.
Last week, our sales manager Joleen attended LundOnline 2026 in Lund (14–16 October), representing Erasmus Boekhandel at one of the key forums for scholarly communication in the Nordic region.
LundOnline is a biennial conference organised by the Department of Scholarly Communication at Lund University Library, bringing together academic librarians, publishers and other stakeholders to discuss developments and challenges in academic publishing. This year’s programme covered open access and sustainability, national consortium strategies, AI in scholarly publishing, and the implications of CoARA for research evaluation. These are all topics that sit at the heart of how academic libraries are evolving as collections and procurement change.
It was a valuable few days of conversations with librarians from across the Nordic region. If you’d like to continue the conversation, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Erasmus Boekhandel, in partnership with Casalini Libri, announces that
the Torrossa Digital Library now includes ebooks and ejournals from more than
750 publishers across Europe and beyond.
The publisher list reads like a map of scholarly publishing itself:
long-established university presses such as Oxford University Press, Princeton
University Press and Il Mulino sit alongside major international houses like De
Gruyter, Bloomsbury, Wiley, and Brepols, and specialist imprints covering
everything from classical archaeology to contemporary art history. French,
Spanish, German, Italian and Dutch publishers all have a strong presence,
including L'Harmattan, Franco Angeli and Duncker & Humblot to name a few.
The
750-publisher mark reflects sustained growth for the platform, with new
publishers added on an ongoing basis across the humanities, law, social
sciences and the arts. For research libraries and institutions building or
expanding collections, it marks Torrossa's continued emergence as a significant
resource for academic publishing.