Ateneo de Manila University Press tops both Aklatan all-Filipino online book fairs besting the 26 participating publishers last August 16-18 and the 31 last September 25-27.
Held in partnership with e-commerce platforms Shopee and Lazada, the fairs served as a virtual hub for Ateneo University Press to reach a wider audience. The September book fair was a milestone as it marked the introduction of a new entry in the platform’s list of top-performing categories—local history books.
Lazada, whose book section is formerly dominated by categories like romance, children’s books, literature, and educational books, announced Thursday that “history books” is the new top-performing book category on the platform. It was determined through consumer engagement and other in-app activities during the second Aklatan book fair.
Photo from Ateneo Press
Ateneo University Press had several local history books available during the book fairs. First on the list of top-performing AUP history titles is the recently reissued and annotated Ricardo Manapat’s landmark work, Some Are Smarter Than Others: The History of Marcos’ Crony Capitalism. Other in-demand history titles were Primitivo Mijares’ The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910, Wataru Kusaka’s Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor, and Resil Mojares’ Interrogations in Philippine Cultural History.
The newly launched, The Philippines is Not A Small Country by physician, medical anthropologist, and columnist Gideon Lasco made a similar groundbreaking online buzz. Alongside it were works by sociologist Nicole Curato and historian Lisandro Claudio, A Duterte Reader: Critical Essays on Rodrigo Duterte’s Early Presidency and Taming People’s Power: The EDSA Revolutions and their Contradictions respectively.
Ateneo University Press has been known for publishing well-written and extensively researched academic and scholarly Filipiniana titles nationally and globally recognized. These works are highly regarded contributions to scholarship, research, and education. Ateneo University Press was awarded Publisher of the Year by the Manila Critics Circle in the last three consecutive years: 2017, 2018, and 2019.
Such recent achievements widened Ateneo Press’ engagement in social media and strengthened its resolve to continue publishing books that pioneer ideas backed by rigorous research so as to provide context and initiate and sustain critical conversations between its authors and their community of readers and citizens.
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