MIT Press Launches BITS Series

MIT Press is pleased to announce the launch of the MIT Press BITS series. MIT Press BITS are short digital excerpts from books in selected areas of intellectual inquiry. The series launches with 50 BITS on subjects ranging from robotics to architecture, from psychoanalysis to game studies.

BITS are carefully chosen from both classic MIT Press titles and recent releases. They are 1-3 chapters in length. BITS are offered in subject area groupings, a mixture of the classic, cutting-edge, and quirky. At launch, the BITS topics are: Architecture in Search of Itself, Buddhism and the Brain, Classics, Consciousness, Energy, Free Will, Gaming Experience, Memory, Sustainability, and Women in Technology.

"Each BIT provides a taste of the feast that is MIT Press content," says Katie Hope, MIT Press marketing director. "They are DRM free, readable on any screen, and priced from $2.99-$4.99. BITS allow readers to satisfy their curiosity about an author or topic they recognize or to discover entirely new work. We see BITS as an innovative pathway for the exploration of ideas."

A few examples of BITS include:

• Slavoj Zizek, "the wild man of theory" famously mixes astonishing erudition and references to pop culture in his dissections of current intellectual pieties. In The Puppet Called Theology, he considers religion from the viewpoint of Lacanian psychoanalysis, pondering a dialectical materialist theology and comparing monotheistic and polytheistic violence.
• Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. The Secret Life of Verbs offers Pinker's look back at his early work and two pivotal chapters from Learnability and Cognition.
• From an essential text for the aspiring architect, To Be or Not to BeAn Architect offers realistic, unvarnished advice. Roger K. Lewis, a practicing architect and planner, professor of architecture, and architecture columnist offers reasons for becoming an architect as well as reasons for not becoming an architect.
• Why does rationality matter for democracy? In Neither Slave Nor Master, Michael Lynch offers a spirited defense of reason and rationality in an era of widespread skepticism. Lynch investigates how our reason is affected by emotion and intuition, discussing, among other things, fMRIs of the brains of George Bush supporters, the Platonist ideal of reason, and Huck Finn's moral dilemma.
• Competitive video and computer game play is nothing new; what is new in the world of digital gaming is the emergence of professional computer game play. InComputer Games as Professional Sport, T. L. Taylor explores how a form of play becomes a sport, with professional players, agents, referees, leagues, tournaments, sponsorships, and spectators.

MIT Press BITS stand alone and can be read on their own, but they may also serve as an entry point to the full-length book. For readers who want to keep reading, each purchaser of an MIT Press BIT will receive a discount code (good on the MIT Press website only) for 40% off the price of the entire book in e- or print form.

Visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/BITS/index.html for more information.

SOURCE MIT Press

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