MIT Press Expands Book Awards, Honoring Textbooks and Children’s Titles Alongside Faculty Works

The future of academic publishing, at least as imagined by one of the world’s most influential university presses, now stretches from an open-access textbook on computer vision to a picture book about measuring a bridge with a human body.

On March 10, the MIT Press announced the winners of its 2026 Faculty and Alumni Book Awards, adding two new categories that signal a push to reach readers far beyond the traditional scholarly monograph audience. The awards, which will be presented April 9 on the MIT campus, now honor not only faculty and alumni titles, but also textbooks and children’s books.

The four winning works span deep-sea drilling, industrial history, artificial intelligence and elementary-school math. Together, they offer a snapshot of how a major university press is redefining what counts as an “academic” book — and whom it is for.

The 2026 winners

The Faculty Book Award went to The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution, by David A. Mindell, a professor of aerospace engineering and the history of engineering and manufacturing at MIT. The Alumni Book Award was given to Mysteries of the Deep: How Seafloor Drilling Expeditions Revolutionized Our Understanding of Earth History, by geologist and MIT alumnus James Lawrence Powell.

In a newly created Textbook category, the press recognized Foundations of Computer Vision, an 840-page introduction to the field by MIT electrical engineering and computer science faculty members Antonio Torralba, Phillip Isola and William T. Freeman. A second new category, the MIT Press/Candlewick Children’s Book Award, honored Measuring Up: How Oliver Smoot Became a Standard Unit of Measurement, a picture book by MIT graduate and children’s author Jenny Lacika, illustrated by Anna Bron.

“The MIT Press Faculty and Alumni Book Awards recognize the many ways MIT authors inspire readers of all ages,” Janice Audet, editorial director at the MIT Press, said in the announcement.

Audet added that the new categories help the press “honor works that advance scholarship in their disciplines or effectively engage the public.”

A young awards program with a widening scope

The awards program itself is relatively new. Launched in 2025 with support from an anonymous donor, it is designed to recognize MIT faculty and alumni whose books, published by the MIT Press, “most successfully provide a clear cultural, professional, and publishing contribution to the academic community or reading public,” according to the press. Eligible titles must have appeared in the previous three years, and winners are selected by a committee from a shortlist of nominated books.

The inaugural 2025 awards went to The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines, by David Autor, Mindell and Elisabeth Reynolds, and The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World, by Michael D. Smith. Both focused on how technology transforms work and institutions — a theme that carries into this year’s slate.

Industrial policy, deep time, and the public good

Mindell’s The New Lunar Society draws a line from an 18th century club of industrialists and scientists in Birmingham, England — whose members included James Watt and Benjamin Franklin — to present-day debates over climate change, automation and manufacturing policy. The book argues that the virtues that guided the original Lunar Society, including empiricism, collaboration and a concern for the public good, can be repurposed for a “next industrial revolution” constrained by carbon emissions and labor shortages.

Mindell, who has led more than two dozen oceanographic expeditions and cofounded a navigation technology company, contends that industrial capacity is closely tied to the health of democratic societies. In an MIT profile when the book was released, he said the goal was to show “how you do technology and democracy together” by embedding social and environmental concerns into decisions about factories, supply chains and automation.

If Mindell’s book looks upward to a reimagined industrial future, Powell’s Mysteries of the Deep looks downward — and backward — to the ocean floor. The Alumni Book Award winner is a narrative history of scientific ocean drilling, from 19th century voyages like HMS Challenger to modern programs that send specialized ships to bore into the seabed.

Powell, who earned his Ph.D. in geochemistry from MIT and later served as president of Reed College and the Franklin Institute, describes how cylinders of sediment extracted from far below the seafloor helped confirm plate tectonics, reconstruct ice ages and pinpoint the asteroid impact associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs. The book emphasizes how these records of deep time have also revealed the pace and consequences of past global warming events, offering context for today’s climate crisis.

“By studying the climate swings of the past, we gain a clearer understanding of what lies ahead,” the MIT Press notes in its description of the book. Powell, who has written extensively on climate science and previously served on the National Science Board, uses the history of ocean drilling to argue for sustained investment in large-scale, international scientific collaborations.

An open-access computer vision textbook

The most technically dense of the awardees may also be the most widely accessible. Foundations of Computer Vision, the winner in the new Textbook category, was released in 2024 as both a printed volume and a free digital edition funded by MIT Libraries. The book introduces students to the algorithms that enable computers to interpret images and video, from edge detection and 3D reconstruction to the neural network architectures behind facial recognition and image generation.

Torralba, Isola and Freeman, all members of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, designed the text for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students. It covers classic topics in computer vision alongside recent advances in deep learning, such as transformer models and diffusion-based generative systems. The authors also devote chapters to statistical models of images, the process of conducting research, and issues of bias and fairness in vision systems.

“Computer vision now affects everything from medical diagnosis to self-driving cars and surveillance,” the authors said in a faculty Q&A about the book. “We wanted to give students not just the tools, but an understanding of their implications.” The textbook has already been adopted in courses at universities in North America and Europe and is frequently recommended in online technical forums.

In recognizing a textbook that is freely available online, MIT Press is also highlighting its broader commitment to open access. The press has been a prominent proponent of making scholarly work freely available, launching initiatives such as Direct to Open, which funds monograph publishing through collective support from libraries, and shift+OPEN, which helps journals transition to open-access models.

From campus lore to elementary classrooms

The fourth winner takes the press in a different direction entirely, toward the picture-book shelves of elementary school libraries. Measuring Up, published under MIT Kids Press, retells a legendary 1958 student prank in which members of the MIT Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity used pledge Oliver Smoot as a human ruler to measure the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River.

The bridge, they concluded, was 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus one ear. The markings were repainted over the years, and the “smoot” became a local unit of measure referenced in MIT lore and even in some mapping software. Lacika’s book uses the story to introduce young readers to the idea of nonstandard measurement and unit conversion, pairing playful text with Bron’s retro-tinged illustrations.

Reviews in children’s literature outlets have praised the book’s classroom potential. The Horn Book Magazine called it “engaging” and noted that back matter explains MIT “hacks,” alternative units of measurement and how smoots convert to metric and imperial units. School Library Journal described the art and writing as smartly executed but observed that the book “feels a little like MIT propaganda,” underscoring a tension between education and institutional branding.

“Measuring Up” is part of a broader strategy. In 2020, MIT Press and Candlewick Press, a major children’s publisher based in Massachusetts, launched joint imprints MIT Kids Press and MITeen Press to produce science- and technology-themed books for young readers. An advisory board at MIT helps identify topics and authors and vets manuscripts for scientific accuracy, while Candlewick oversees editing, design and distribution to schools and bookstores.

A sign of where university presses are headed

The expansion of the awards program to include a children’s category explicitly ties that outreach to the institute’s internal recognition system. It also reflects a wider shift among university presses, which historically focused on specialist monographs but now increasingly publish general-interest titles, textbooks and youth literature as they seek broader audiences and more diverse revenue.

The Association of University Presses, which has roughly 160 member presses worldwide, has documented these changes as part of a sector adapting to declining library budgets, the rise of digital media and debates over access to publicly funded research. MIT Press, with its combination of technical focus, strong institutional backing and high-profile open-access projects, has often been at the forefront of those shifts.

By honoring a policy-minded industrial history, a climate-focused earth science narrative, an open computer vision textbook and a campus lore picture book in the same ceremony, the press is offering its own answer to a larger question facing scholarly publishers: Who are academic books for?

On April 9, when the awards are formally presented in Cambridge, the authors will share a stage. Their audiences may be separated by age, geography and expertise — from children learning to count their own “smoots” to students training neural networks and readers trying to grasp sea-level rise — but all are now part of a widening circle the press is seeking to reach.

As the MIT Press put it in describing the awards’ purpose, the goal is to recognize books that “advance scholarship” or “effectively engage the public.” This year’s selections suggest that, for one university press, engaging the public now means writing for almost everyone.