ArcNews is quite an amazing publication. By far the most widely distributed publication in the GIS industry, close to 750,000 copies of ArcNews are printed four times a year (and even more people read the articles when they visit ArcNews Online…).

ArcNews content consists primarily of ESRI product stories, and user success stories. But for the last two or three years, ArcNews editor Tom Miller has been working with a number of outside authors on a series of articles of a different type, written by academicians and scientists, and dealing with trends in geography, geospatial matters, and GIS. We recently collected a number of these articles and assembled them in to a convenient e-book, titled Essays on Geography and GIS. In the three months since it was released, it has proven to be by far our most popular Best Practices e-book. It’s available in PDF format, and you can download it for free.  Articles in the e-book include:

• What Holds Us Together
• Exploration in the Age of Digital Earth
• Dynamics GIS: Recognizing the Dynamic Nature of Reality
• Living Inside Networks of Knowledge
• What Historians Want from GIS
• Bring Back Geography!
• The Fourth R? Rethinking GIS Education
• Nature, the Human Network, and the Role of GIS
• People–Nature: The Human Network, Parts I and II

Tom notes that “The original publication in ArcNews of these invited articles has had a tremendous ‘ripple effect,’ affirming, inspiring, and stimulating many students and professionals in both the academic and GIS communities.”
And it continues. “Implementing Geographic Information Technologies Ethically” by Harlan J. Onsrud, professor of spatial information science and engineering at the University of Maine, was published in the Fall 2008 issue of ArcNews. The winter 2008/2009 issue, which will be mailed to subscribers in the next few weeks, features an article by Harvey J. Miller called “Transport 2.0: Meeting Grand Challenges with GIScience.” And for the winter 2008/2009 issue of ArcNews and beyond, Tom is actively working on additional articles for this series.

If you have an idea for an article in this series, I would encourage you to contact Tom.