Most publishers now have online strategies, not only for publishing books, but also using blogs, Twitter, Facebook for marketing. There's certainly no shortage of information about new books. This week I got the first of a new quarterly email newsletter for economics books from Cambridge University Press, which does a nice job of presenting new and topical titles. Quarterly is a good frequency – I always regret signing up for anything which emails me weekly or even daily, as some benighted marketing departments do.

The book of the month in this issue tickled my fancy, too: Scarcity and Frontiers by Ed Barbier. It has praise from one of my favourite economists:

'Edward Barbier's interpretation of the economic history of nations, seen through the lens of natural resource exploitation, is not only bold but brilliantly executed. The scholarship is immense and the analysis is acute. This is a terrific piece of work.'
Sir Partha Dasgupta, University of Cambridge

The development literature has lighted on the 'curse of…' – oil, diamonds, whatever, as a key problem in spurring conflict and inhibiting development; but a treatment of the role of natural resources in the round seems very timely.