Entries tagged with “academic” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Neat TOC-Inspired Videos on the Future of Learning
Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009
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Last May, Rutgers Univeristy English Dept. Chair Richard E. Miller sent in a nice note about how the 2008 TOC Conference had inspired him and his colleague, Paul Hammond:
The conference that my collaborator, Paul Hammond, and I attended in New York this winter was transformative for us. We returned to the university with a very clear sense of what we needed to be doing to bring the humanities to the table for discussions about the future of higher education.
Richard sent me a follow-up note recently, and though regrettably he won't be attending this year, he's posted a delightfully optimistic video discussing the present and future of writing, reading, learning, and publishing:
I am sorry that Paul and I won't be attending TOC this year. Last year's event was one of the most influential, transformative experiences I've had at a conference. Alas, in a story I'm sure you're hearing everywhere, the collapse of the economy and the state of New Jersey's educational budget makes it impossible to fund the trip this year.
The most recent work that Paul and I have completed reflects how much TOC has influenced our thinking about the future of academic publishing. I presented this at the Modern Language Association's national conference late in December. Paul and I have presented it together at Apple's national sales meeting in November and will be presenting it at national meetings of Apple CIO's in February and in April. We'd love to know what you think of it.
It's called "This is How We Dream."
Part 1:
Part 2:
(Here's Part 1 and Part 2 if you can't see the embedded videos.)
Vanishing Paper in Higher Education
Peter Brantley
November 3, 2008
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Christopher Conway has a thoughtful essay at Inside Higher Ed on the seemingly inevitable trend towards digital text consumption:
It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable 'readers' or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don't think anyone's nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario."
To Chunk or Not To Chunk?
Laura Dawson
October 16, 2008
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This is excerpted from a column I wrote for the most recent issue of The Big Picture, my free newsletter about technology and the book industry.
As we're proceeding with Start With XML, I'm thinking a lot about chunking.
Chunking, at least as we're talking about it, means carving up your content into chunks and distributing those discrete pieces of it. Travel content (distributed over GPS, the web, and in book form) and recipes (distributed via Epicurious and AllRecipes.com as well as in book form) are the most obvious examples of this. Textbook publishing does this as well - certain assets can be used in the main text, in supplementary workbooks and lab manuals, as individual activities to be downloaded to an iPod, or embedded in e-books.
And as we talk about chunking, it's clear that there are certain types of content that don't immediately lend themselves to that kind of carved-up distribution. Novels, for example. Narrative nonfiction such as memoirs. Philosophical or political works, where tracing the author's thought from beginning to end is important.
The truth is, we may not quite know what will chunk readily and what will not. There are some blue-sky ideas right now - tagging content within narratives, to be pulled out later and stand on its own - but we just don't know yet if readers are interested in that kind of thing.
But publishers can't afford NOT to prepare for the unknown. There has never been uncertainty like this in publishing - uncertainty in stock prices and supply chain issues (paper prices, transportation/shipping costs, the costs of composition and conversion), uncertainty in revenue-generation, uncertainty as to who's going to buy what in which format - and it's not going to get any clearer for quite some time.
And you can't chunk at all if you haven't tagged - you can't even begin to think about chunking if you haven't tagged. Tagging is never a bad strategy - you will never regret doing it. But the risk of NOT doing it - the risk of not being ready for the next wave of consumer demand whatever that demand may be - means that you can't afford not to do it.
College Bookstores to Offer Ebooks through Kiosks
Mac Slocum
September 26, 2008
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Seven college bookstores will soon offer movies and ebooks through in-store kiosks. From the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.
A kiosk-based system targeted at college students will struggle to compete against digital options like iTunes and P2P networks, but Ars Technica says movies are the first step in a broader initiative:
... it's part of a plan to get electronic distribution channels up and running in advance of the availability of digital textbook material. If all goes well, the first digital textbooks and supplementary class material will appear there starting next summer. Left unsaid, however, was whether this material would be protected by DRM; it's a safe bet that it will.
News Roundup: Sony Reader Arrives in UK, Google Scanning Newspaper Archives, Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use
Mac Slocum
September 12, 2008
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UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release
Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom:
Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September.
As I'm sure all of those working in the digital publishing departments of trade publishing houses will agree, it's nice finally to have a major high street bookselling brand pitch itself into the ebook ring so wholeheartedly - and the Sony device is the most compelling (and competitively priced) there is of the dedicated devices so far available here in the UK. I must say it did make my heart leap just a little bit to see huge POS displays promoting the Sony Reader and the associated ebook catalogue from Waterstones in the Tottenham Court Road and Picadilly branches, and it was fun to go in and do some underground detective work to discover that the Waterstones staff seemed quite clued up about it all. (Continue reading)
Google Scanning Newspaper Archives
Google is extending its scanning efforts to newspaper archives. From the New York Times:
Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.
Google ... will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers. (Continue reading)
Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions:
But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says, because they fear that colleges will pay for copyright licenses instead of asserting their rights under fair-use doctrine. "We debate back and forth whether this is the best model for us," he says. "As we move toward more licensed products, are we giving up basic rights under the law?"
Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
Peter Brantley
September 10, 2008
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The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions:
But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says, because they fear that colleges will pay for copyright licenses instead of asserting their rights under fair-use doctrine. "We debate back and forth whether this is the best model for us," he says. "As we move toward more licensed products, are we giving up basic rights under the law?"
Digital Textbooks are for Professors, Not Students
Mac Slocum
September 4, 2008
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Alex Reid says digital textbook publishers are targeting the wrong customer: it's not about students -- they don't like textbooks in any format -- it's about professors. From Digital Digs:
The person you need to sell is the professor. S/he's the one who orders the book. Then it's up to the professor to explain to the students why they need to use the text. If professors say they're not using a digital textbook b/c students say they don't like them, ask them why they use any text at all. I defy anyone to find a single textbook that a student body would say they would choose to read.
Game Re-creates Lost Oakland Neighborhood
Peter Brantley
August 12, 2008
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My hat's off to the release of a superb project out of the UC Berkeley Journalism School that re-creates a "lost" and once vibrant neighborhood of Oakland, 7th Street:
There's much more to be done -- developing a curriculum so grade school students can use the game to learn about 7th Street and the blues and jazz scene (we got a small grant to help with this); installing some computers we're buying for the West Oakland Senior Center and the West Oakland Library so folks there can access and play the game; getting older folks and young kids to play the game together as an experiment in cross-generational learning; building out the next phase of the game, in which the player will be challenged to organize the community to stop the projects that destroyed 7th Street, such as BART, the post office, the freeway and the public housing projects; and filling in more of the current game world by adding more characters and places the player can interact with.
Survey Results: Students Rely on Digital Tools for Research
Mac Slocum
June 25, 2008
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Results from Ebrary's 2008 Global Student E-Book Survey show that students working on research projects use digital reference tools more often than print materials. From Publishers Weekly:
Respondents say they use Google and other search engines as well as e-books more than print books for research assignments; online encyclopedias and Wikipedia are only slightly less used than print books, according to the survey. Print books, however, are deemed the most trustworthy sources, as well as far better for cover-to-cover reading.
Post-survey analysis included in the Ebrary report notes a gap between the resources students trust and the resources they use:
While four of the top five trusted resources are print, four of the top five resources students reported using are electronic (Google, e-books, e-reference, and Wikipedia). Students will use whatever information resource most efficiently gets the assignment done within acceptable parameters for the desired grade.
Local Focus through Community Newspaper Book Reviews
Peter Brantley
April 22, 2008
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It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses are located, and if we all were to organize ourselves in such a fashion as to help our local newspapers run reviews of these books written by people in our own communities, we can thereby help offset at least some of the damage done by the disappearance of reviews from the major city dailies. Naturally, I have an interest in this idea's catching on elsewhere because I feel a conflict of interest in having any of our Penn State Press books reviewed by the CDT [Centre Daily Times], at least while I'm serving as coordinator. So I hope some of you will piggyback on our effort and get in touch with your own local paper's editor to see if there might be interest in creating such a "user-generated" book review operation in your community. Our CDT editor is really keen about this initiative, and I wouldn't be surprised if editors elsewhere would echo that sentiment.
News Roundup: Online's Share Increases, New York's "Amazon" Tax, Open Source Textbooks, Edits Shown in Pan Macmillan Ebooks, Penguin UK's Simultaneous Print-Ebook Plan
Mac Slocum
April 18, 2008
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Amazon Growth Fuels Online's Book Market Share
Online retailers claim 21-30 percent of the consumer trade book market, according to two recent surveys. Publishers Weekly says much of this growth comes from Amazon. (Continue reading ...)
New York Eyes Amazon Affiliates in Tax Move
From the New York Times:
... people owe taxes on what they buy regardless of whom they buy it from. But the seller only has an obligation to collect those taxes (and thus the only time taxes are ever actually paid) when the seller has a physical presence in the state of the purchase. The state is proposing defining Amazon’s affiliates -- Web sites that earn commissions by referring customers to it -- as a physical presence. (Continue reading ...)
Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows
Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement:
Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for the original material. This allows instructors to customize e-textbooks and offer them to students for free online or as low-cost printed versions.
Pan Macmillan Plans Ebooks Showing Edits and Changes
Pan Macmillan is releasing ebooks with extra sauce. From thedigitalist.net:
The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will be issued in a uniquely up-to-date edition, in the author’s latest version, with corrections, changes, and new material, and a foreword in which he considers the process of composition and revision. (Continue reading ...)
Penguin UK to Release Print and Ebook Editions Simultaneously
Beginning in September, print and ebook versions of Penguin UK's new titles will be available simultaneously for the same price. Digital editions will be made available in .epub format through Penguin's Web sites and via retailers. (Continue reading ...)
Open Source Textbook Adoption Grows
Peter Brantley
April 17, 2008
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Inside Higher Ed notes the slowly growing open source textbook movement:
Colleges and individual faculty members continue to experiment with putting course information and material online, and "open textbooks" typically are licensed to allow users to download, share and alter the content as they see fit, so long as their purposes aren't commercial and they credit the author for the original material. This allows instructors to customize e-textbooks and offer them to students for free online or as low-cost printed versions.
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