With “Getting to Know Each Other,” we invite you to join us on a journey of discovery as we spotlight the individual presses that comprise our community. Through a couple of questions and a glimpse at their book covers that reflect the essence of each member, we aim to celebrate the unique contributions and perspectives that collectively form our association.
VUTIUM Press, publishing house if the Brno University of Technology, is second university press from the Czech Republic to join the AEUP. Our questions were answered by Jana Kořínková, director of the press. Thank you and welcome aboard!
Can you present your press history and mission?
VUTIUM Press is an academic publishing house of the Brno University of Technology (BUT), Czech Republic. Since its founding in 1996, it has focused mainly on publishing university textbooks and technical literature, but also on books on art and architecture. Thus, VUTIUM Press covers a wide range of topics that correspond to the focus of the university’s eight faculties and its three institutes. The authors are mainly in-house researchers, but we also publish or co-publish works of external authors or translations of publications coming from abroad. VUTIUM Press has also been producing and distributing the BUT quarterly, which once a year takes the form of an English yearbook called the News at BUT.
At present VUTIUM Press offers over eighty different titles, both printed and electronic, mostly in Czech but some of them also in English. We distribute books in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Over the years, our books have been awarded for their content and graphic design. Since 2021, four years in a row we have been successful in the Most Beautiful Czech Books graphic design contest.
Being an academic press operating under a technical university, our mission has also been to support publication activities of minor and highly specialized fields. Our motto could be to certain extent (and with certain level of exaggeration) summed up with the phrase: “We don’t popularize science, we do it”.
What are your expectations from AEUP and how do you wish to contribute to the future of institutional publishing in Europe?
We expect new opportunities in networking to keep up with the current trends in publishing but also learning from each other’s good practice and beware of the bad one. We are open to all possible exchange of experience. We value e-books but also believe that printed publications represent tangible heritage that will survive us, especially if they are well-designed.
As a multiple winner of awards for high-quality graphic design, VUTIUM Press can provide an expertise on successful collaboration with young graphic designers.
If you were to choose only three of all you published titles as representatives of your press, what titles would you choose?
We have chosen three recently published titles that illustrate the scope of our activities:
