Thoth Archiving Network Pilot at Cambridge
Cambridge University Library (CUL) is piloting participation in the Thoth Archiving Network, which will allow small presses to use a simple deposit option to archive their publications in multiple repository locations, creating the opportunity to safeguard against the complete loss of their open books catalogue, should they cease to operate.
This is a pilot repository site hosting open access books by a range of publishers depositing content in Thoth. This site is maintained and managed by the Open Research Systems Team at Cambridge University Library (CUL).
More information about this pilot and the Open Book Futures Project is available at this page.
Open Book Futures
Recent Submissions
Education 2.0: Chronicles of Technological and Cultural Change in Egypt
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-17) Herrera, Linda
Education 2.0 offers a compelling portrait of Egypt’s bold attempt to overhaul its public education system amid sweeping political and technological transformation. Drawing on extensive oral history interviews, this book traces the launch and rollout of the ‘New Education System’ initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2018, designed to modernize curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment in the digital age and change the ‘culture of learning’. The volume moves fluidly from macro-level state planning to the lived experiences of teachers and students, exploring the promises and pitfalls of top-down reform.
Conducted partly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the research captures Egypt’s first large-scale experiment with hybrid and distance learning. Interviews with key actors—from policymakers and tech developers to students and educators—reveal competing visions, unintended consequences, and the challenges of culturally transforming education systems in a middle-income country where private tutoring is rife, the sector is chronically under resourced, and politics overshadows policy.
This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers interested in education reform, digital transformation, and the role of the state in shaping learning futures in the Global South. It is also an excellent case study for courses in Middle East studies and comparative and international education.
Perceptron
(punctum books, 2025-11-21) Dobson, James E.; Mosteirin, Rena J.
Perceptron is a work of experimental poetry and a critical biographical reading of Frank Rosenblatt (1928–1971) and his 1957 invention, the Perceptron. The Perceptron was the first widely publicized and used machine learning device and the origin of much contemporary neural network technology. Rosenblatt was a psychologist, a computer engineer, a musician, an amateur astronomer, a sailor, and a poet. The Perceptron was born from an interdisciplinary mix of ideas and was so far ahead of its time that it was widely misunderstood by other scientists and the public.
This mechanical invention, imagined as an alternative to general purpose digital computers, and its algorithmic implementation as a simulation of the device was deeply rooted in mid-twentieth century neuroscience and psychological theories of behavior. Introduced to the world by one newspaper under the headline “Shades of Frankenstein!” in 1958, following a public demonstration in Maryland sponsored by the US Navy, the Perceptron was a radical new approach to designing computer systems. What made it different was its design as a simplified model of animal vision systems. The Perceptron could perform pattern recognition and matching from a collection of simple visual objects. It was innovative and impressive, but it was also constantly oversold by its financial supporters, the press, and by its inventor.
Perceptron traces, contextualizes, and celebrates the ideas that would become embedded in this early thinking machine and that animated the excitement and promise that would eventually turn to frustration and failure during Rosenblatt’s tragically short lifetime.
Allocation, Distribution, and Policy: Notes, Problems, and Solutions in Microeconomics
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-04) Bowles, Samuel; Chen, Weikai
Microeconomics has been transformed in recent decades by the increasing use of game theory, behavioral economics, evolutionary modeling, network economics, mechanism design and attention to limited competition and asymmetric information. Bowles and Chen provide problem sets and exam questions (with carefully explained solutions) based on the new microeconomics, engaging learners with applications to income distribution, limited competition in goods and labor markets, climate change, and other public policy topics.
Background notes explain the underlying concepts, their origin in the thinking of the great economists of the past, applications to macroeconomics, and relevant empirical evidence.
This work provides a problem-based and policy oriented approach to teaching microeconomics, development, labor, environment, public economics and topics in business, management and public policy to upper level undergraduates, masters and doctoral students.
The Intertwined World of the Oral and Written Transmission of Sacred Traditions in the Middle East
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-06) Fedeli, Alba; Khan, Geoffrey; Lundberg, Johan
In the medieval Middle East, the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism and Islam were transmitted in written and oral form. The means of written transmission and the textualisation of the oral reading of these scriptures exhibit many parallels, which reflect cultural contact and convergence across the various religious communities. This volume is the outcome of a project, funded jointly by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that aimed to bring together strands of research related to various aspects of the transmission of these sacred texts in order to reach a deeper understanding of the intertwined world of the three major religions of the Middle East at their formative periods of development during the early Islamic centuries.
A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib: In Search of Universal Betterment
(Open Book Publishers, 2025-11-07) Webster, Charles
The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era’s religious, political, and scientific ferment.
This volume goes beyond previous studies in both scope and depth, drawing extensively on archival sources and offering new interpretations of Hartlib’s network and influence. Organized chronologically, it explores the wide-ranging social, economic, and ideological pursuits of Hartlib and his collaborators—many of them renowned figures in their own right—and his close alignment with the Cromwellian cause.
Providing the most complete portrait to date of the Hartlib circle’s emergence and impact, this study sets a new benchmark for scholarship and invites renewed engagement with one of the early modern period’s most visionary projects of knowledge, reform, and communication.
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