Personanondata

MediaWeek (V5, N4): Research Works Act, Aussie Fiction + More

2012-01-23T21:24:00.002-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Ed looks at the Research Works Act: (Chron)

Whatever the executive branch decides to do about open-access mandates, it's not at all certain that the Research Works Act stands much chance of becoming law. In 2009, a similar bill, called the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, failed to make it out of committee.
This is an election year, which makes it "a very difficult year to move any sort of legislation, let along legislation that has acquired a certain amount of controversy," Mr. Adler said. A lot of Congress's attention has been absorbed by higher-profile proposals, such as the widely unpopular Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act, or PIPA. Those bills have created considerable resistance in the tech industry and among advocates of an open Web. Rep. Issa has been one of the legislators most vocally against SOPA.
Still, the introduction of the Research Works Act has public-access advocates on the alert, and it has once again exposed the persistent differences of opinion among scholarly publishers over federal mandates and how to approach the complex issues they present. University presses in particular are caught between wanting to take advantage of the resources of a big group like the Association of American Publishers, their own commitment to spreading scholarship widely, and the need to find a way to stay in business while honoring that commitment.

Seems and annual call for the teaching of more Aussie Classics (Brisbane Times):

Mr Heyward's comments follow a Sunday Age report last August that Melbourne University students had started their own Australian literature studies because there was no comparable course offered by the university.
Barbara Creed, head of the school of culture and communication at Melbourne University, said this was an unusual situation in which the course lecturer had left unexpectedly, and the university had been unable to offer a dedicated Australian literature subject as a result. However, ''The Australian Imaginary'' was back on the syllabus this year.
Professor Creed said that, although there may not be many courses designated specifically as Australian literature, the texts were nonetheless covered in a wide range of other courses, including creative writing, indigenous studies and film studies.
But she agreed with Mr Heyward that more Australian texts need to be adapted to film or television, where they will have a far broader audience reach. Whenever a novel is adapted to screen, she said, there is a boost in sales of the book as a result.

From the Twitter:

Self-Published Authors Still Rarely Make the Jump to Publishing Houses: PBS MediaShift

Apple and digital publishing: A textbook manoeuvre The Economist

Bibliophilia: Punches, matrices and fetishists: The Economist

Salman Rushdie: a literary giant still beset by bigots: Guardian

Is the International Herald Tribune about to breathe its last? Guardian

5 Universities to Test Bulk-Purchasing of E-Textbooks in Bid to Rein In Costs Chronicle

Universities look to get discounts on e-textbooks for students: Inside Higher Ed:

An Apple for the Teacher

2012-01-19T22:26:00.001-05:00

To the average Apple aficionado, today’s spectacle on Apple’s entry into the education space would have seemed just par for the course. Hype is about everything Apple does in these coordinated announcements and today was no different. To the average textbook publisher today’s hype would have seemed of another world; that another entity – Apple yet? - would view the staid, traditional and, let’s face it, relatively small textbook publishing business as an opportunity to do big things must seem odd. I also thought, there was some irony today because a company I recognize as possibly one of the first brands ever to enter my consciousness - KODAK - declared bankruptcy. KODAK sold film and processing and their cameras (hardware) were secondary to the revenue they got from film. In context of today’s announcement Apple’s model is the opposite and it is unlikely textbook companies and other content providers will see themselves as the ‘KODAK’ in this relationship. How healthy that approach may be for publishers only time will tell.

According to the National Association of College Stores the average price of college textbooks approaches $70. Many people make value judgments about college textbook pricing but how does this very real data point jive with the desire of Apple to sell much cheaper college textbooks? According to the presentation today, Apple plans to hold pricing of k-12 texts at less than $15. Why would traditional publishers participate in a model that undercuts their business model to such an extent? While I admit to assuming their pricing strategy will be consistent from K-12 to college, my conclusion is based on a primary premise of their presentation which was that textbooks are expensive. In education today, what is clear is that there’s significant interest in ‘reinventing’ education from the content perspective and who can argue with the attention that a company like Apple can bring to a slow moving business like textbook publishing? How sustainable their attention will be is another matter entirely. Let’s not forget that the hype that preceded the Google bookstore and the Apple iBook store did not result in any appreciable changes in the business. Apple’s motivations are also suspect: They are motivated by selling more hardware (unlike KODAK) and are only interested in content to the extent that it is cheap and plentiful and helps to drive hardware sales. A content model with imposed low pricing, just like iTunes, will help sell more units. I don’t believe Apple’s 30% cut of $14.95 will ever be significant relative to their sales of iPads at $500 a pop (give or take).

While the twitter feed this morning was overwhelming at times it was interesting that some very critical questions were quick to arise regarding Apple’s new self-publishing platform. Fundamentally, the platform does (will) attempt to address a desire by educators for more control in the content they assign for their students. That’s a good thing. This desire/need of faculty is very much in nascent form; however, this may have more to do with expectations - what they see as their options given the concentration of content around less than five large publishers – than true desire to create their own material. Motivated faculty will want to build their own content for their classes and if they can do this cost effectively and easily so much the better. Whether they will do this on the Apple platform remains to be seen.

Offering an ‘open’ platform for faculty and others to build their content poses many potential problems. (Since this is an Apple platform technically it isn’t ‘open’). The functionality of the platform could be very impressive but, what’s the guessing the ‘store’ becomes full of crackpot theories, spurious pedagogy and denier/revisionist historians unless Apple ‘censors’ (a more polite favorite word could be ‘curate’) the content. And, if they censor, what will the basis of the censorship? I am a believer in self-publishing, and it often throws up gems on the trade side, and there is no reason why it won’t on the education side; however, the cost may be a lot of dross (or worse). Frustration will simply drive people way.

One of the other items quickly identified as a potential problem was the management of copyright; specifically, what’s to stop someone uploading content that they don’t have rights to? The user will be contravening copyright in using material if they haven’t cleared it appropriately and plan to pay the copyright owner for use. Most publishers price their content at a level that inclusion in a product that can’t be priced above $15.00 makes the (legal) inclusion uneconomical. So, that begs the question: Who will clear content properly if they categorically won’t make it up in volume? If there is a check on copyright what will the process be that enables the use of this content which at the same time doesn’t cause the entire self-publishing process to unravel?

There are more questions over this Apple initiative in addition to those I raise above; however, I believe the only objective Apple wants to achieve is to sell more hardware. The Education initiative is a smokescreen and we shouldn’t forget that Apple sold a school management platform named PowerSchool that they developed to Pearson in 2006. At the time, they didn’t find the education market attractive enough even though PowerSchool was considered an impressive tool. Interestingly, some commentators on the twitter felt the Apple education announcement represented an attack on Blackboard and other LMS platforms. I’m not sure I see that either.

I believe the involvement of Apple in education will be a good thing for all the players in education and will spur new investment and new initiatives. I am especially happy that our company (AcademicPub) has already addressed the most critical observations that commentators had on the Apple announcement. Without being a complete shill for the product I think we stand-up pretty well. Maybe we should go into the hardware business.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No3) JStore, Reg Hill, Hockney, Research Works Act + More

2012-01-16T21:29:00.000-05:00

JStore is experimenting with a new access model (IHeD)

Under the new program, unsubscribed visitors will be allowed to check out three “items” from the JSTOR archive every two weeks, which they will be able to read for free. In order to prevent piracy, the texts will be displayed as image files (so that text cannot be copied). Users will not be able to download the files.

The depletion of the traditional professoriate has produced a new demographic of unmoored scholars who might not have “the consistency of access that they want,” says Heidi McGregor, a spokeswoman for JSTOR. The goal of Register & Read would be to better serve that population — as well as others that the organization might not have even known about.
Seventy journals are participating in the pilot, including Ecology, American Anthropologist, PMLA, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Finance, and the American Historical Review.

Since 1995, JSTOR, which aggregates the back issues of more than 1,000 scholarly journals, dating back hundreds of years, in its digital archive, has made its bones selling subscriptions to libraries — charging its largest clients up to $50,000 per annum. The organization says that business model is still working, despite reports that many libraries are cutting expenditures. JSTOR has operated at a 5 percent surplus in each of the last five years, according to McGregor.

An appreciation for Reginald Hill who died last week. Read his books, they are great (Telegraph):

I once saw Reginald Hill, who died last week aged 75, being interviewed on stage alongside John Banville. Banville was explaining how every day he would decide whether to rattle off a few thousand words of one of his “Benjamin Black” thrillers or to wring from his brain a paragraph or two of one of his “literary” novels. Hill responded mildly that every morning he too said to his wife over breakfast, “‘now, shall I work on my Man Booker Prize-winning novel today, or my bestselling crime novel?’ But you know, it’s funny, every day I come down on the side of the bestselling crime novel.”

Hill loved Literature with a capital L. He drew the themes for his novels from the works of Francis Bacon, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Emily Dickinson; A Cure for All Evils (2008) updates Jane Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon and gives it an ingenious conclusion. But, having “decided to grow out of” reading crime fiction in his teens, he discovered after a “decade of maturation” that many crime writers “were still as interesting and entertaining as the ‘serious novelists’ I now revered”. All of his 40-odd books are crime novels or thrillers: the genre proved flexible enough to accommodate all he wanted to say about the times he lived in.

The Hockney Show at the Royal Academy has been overwhelmed with Culture Vultures but one critic at the Telegraph doesn't get it:

Whether or not we accept this argument, the simple truth is that the show is far too big. Like a sprawling oak in need of a tree surgeon, it required a stronger curator prepared to lop off the deadwood. I could happily have done without the watercolours recording midsummer in east Yorkshire in 2004, or the suite of smallish oil paintings from the following year.

Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I don’t understand paintings like these. Fresh, bright and perfectly delightful, they are much too polite and unthinkingly happy for my taste: if they offer a vision of arcadia, it is a mindless one. Moreover, they resemble the sorts of landscapes that we expect from amateur Sunday painters. Hockney is anything but that – yet whatever game he is playing here eludes me.

The iPad drawings from 2011 are similarly irksome. Some people get excited because they were made using a piece of fashionable technology (a tablet computer with a touch screen). Yet the technique is surely immaterial – as Hockney says, an iPad is just another tool for an artist, like a brush.

The Guardian worries that all state funded research would be locked away under the Research Works Act (Guardian):

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.
...
But what's good for science isn't necessarily good for science publishers, whose interests have drifted far out of alignment with ours. Under the old model, publishers become the owners of the papers they publish, holding the copyright and selling copies around the world – a useful service in pre-internet days. But now that it's a trivial undertaking to make a paper globally available, there is no reason why scientists need yield copyright to publishers.

The contribution that publishers make – coordinating editors, formatting, and posting on websites – is now a service that authors can pay for, rather than a bargaining chip that could be worth yielding copyright for. So authors making their work available as open access pay publishers a fee to do so, and the publisher does not own the resulting work.

On the CITE blog they report on an initiative lead by NACS Media Solutions (National Association of College Stores) to help college stores grow their custom content businesses (CITE):

To be clear, this initiative is not about “dumb custom” – i.e., the “custom that is not customized.” For example, taking a book, ripping off the cover, putting in the faculty syllabus (maybe), and putting a new cover on with the school and faculty member names on it would be considered "dumb custom." Our focus is on “smart custom” – i.e., custom aggregated content that is aligned or matched to student learning outcomes. Smart custom is created in partnership with faculty and linked to course descriptions, syllabi, and accreditation targets for student learning outcomes. It is in recognition that one of the biggest complaints of students is that the faculty member does not use large portions of the course materials required, and also considers where course materials are headed in the future with increasingly custom course material offerings.

There is ample evidence to show that by building custom (and by that I mean smart custom, not dumb custom) stores can lower the cost of course materials for students, increase the value of the course material product for students, increase faculty satisfaction, increase store and publisher revenues, and create an opportunity for competitive advantage. It is a strong win for nearly all players. It is a sound strategy for building market share and driving traffic. The strategic timing for focusing on custom is now as the percentage of custom is poised to grow and many of the college store's traditional and future partners are focused on customized learning solutions.

From the twitter:

Has Microsoft Word affected the way we work? The Guardian

Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA OReilly

Predictions 2012: The Search for Attention

2012-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

There’s little more to say about eBooks these days: The migration is now embedded into business operations across the industry. Yes, there remain some issues and problems day-to-day but it would seem that the issue of most concern to publishers for the past five years (trade particularly) is now subsumed under business operations as usual. And that bores me.

Sure, we could argue about the future purpose and value of a publisher but most (if not all) the big trade houses are doing better now than they were three years ago and continue to sign the big authors and sell lots of units. The amount of attention given to the self-publisher model is disproportionate to its viability as a solution better than that delivered wholesale by a traditional publisher. Yet, to some, the counter argument or disruptive solution is always more interesting and therefore garners more attention. There will be more big success stories in self-publishing but the larger point isn’t about replacing the old model with the new—it’s more about incorporating the new model into the old. Where self-publishing was derisively termed ‘vanity publishing’ 10 years ago, it could now be considered a vital component of a better, more efficient publishing industry.

This set of predictions was harder to conceive that those in prior years and I am not sure why that it is. I’ve been going through this exercise since 2007 (the year I started this blog) and so went back over some of the things I suggested in years past. For example, in 2007, I said:

Several major US colleges will teach various social science courses entirely in simulation. The courses will not be taught in traditional lecture form but entirely within the software simulation.

Now, five years later, there have been some experiments in this area but my comment was uttered in a time when everyone was building a home in the simulation game world and, at the time, it seemed inevitable we would all be spending half our lives in SecondLife. Clearly that never happened, and on the other hand, during 2011, I spent many weeks looking into the medical simulations ‘business’ which is very impressive and continues to push the boundaries of real simulation in education and training. What’s important here is that simulations solve several business, operational and administrative issues for schools and hospitals which drives the business case for their adoption. That might not have been the case for SecondLife (at least in a comprehensive sense).

The anticipated benefits of simulated learning will only be realized if they solve a business problem(s). As I saw during my short research project, in medicine and especially nursing, there are very real addressable problems that simulations solve for educators and administrators. Some of the simulations centers I visited are almost exact replicas of hospital wards and operating theatres. It is quite incredible. The money poured into hardware at these centers is significant (and growing) but the next big change in simulations training will be how traditional medical content is integrated into delivery in the simulations context. No easy thing, but the merging of the practical and the theoretical is viewed as critical by educators and practitioners. The medical segment is representative of how education publishing in particular still has significant challenges to address as their industry deals with changes in technology, delivery and performance measurement.

The following year (2008), I incorrectly predicted “McGraw-Hill will reorganize its business much as Thomson [Cengage] has done. MGH education could be sold to private equity.” The impact of the sale of MGH in 2012 is unlikely to drastically change the publishing landscape in the short term, but there may be larger structural changes across the entire business that will be more interesting. As we know, Apple is set to make an announcement soon which is rumored to be about educational publishing. If that’s true, it might stimulate some fundamental changes in education similar to the impact iTunes had on the music business.

Sticking with education, in 2009 I suggested that the Obama administration would make wholesale changes in education policy and become more ‘federalist’ in approach. As some ‘celebrate’ the ten-year anniversary of ‘No Child Left Behind,’ the administration is pushing more (or allowing more) responsibility to the states for education policy while at the same time providing more assistance to ‘failing’ schools so they can improve. If anything, the Obama administration may be more ‘activist’ with their assistance versus the prior administration and this policy (or set of policies) is likely to aid education publishers in the provision of the next generation of assessment tools, which will be oriented more toward remediation and intervention (and which I touched on in 2010).

Last year, I focused my prognostications on the concepts of curation and community:

The growth of intimacy assumes that users will seek closer relationships with their core community of friends, workers or communities of interest in order to make decisions about the content they access, the products they use and the entertainment decisions they make. Book publishers, retailers and authors will need to understand how to actively participate in these communities without ‘marketing’ or ‘selling’ to them. Facebook is obviously the largest social community but, within Facebook, there are a myriad of smaller ‘communities’ and, within these communities, the web becomes highly personal. The relationships among the participants becomes ‘intimate’ in the sense that the participants share knowledge, information, even personal details that in a traditional selling or marketing environment would never be breeched by the vendor. The dynamic of selling becomes vastly different in this context and publishers must find a way to understand these new communities, the influencers that dictate behavior and the motivations that contribute to selling products (and services potentially).

I still believe the above to be a trend even though it hasn’t developed as quickly as we might have expected. I fully expect the concept to mature over the coming years.

Which suggests a lead-in to a theme for my 2012 predictions: Where 2011 was about the community providing a filter for its ‘members,’ 2012 will be more about the community helping focus/apportion the attention of its members. In a screen-based entertainment world, publishers will struggle to assert their right to a user’s time against competition that includes every media option out there from games to TV to social networks. This is different than the former paradigm because all media usage is rapidly migrating to tablet and applications-based consumption. And this includes television.

With both major book retailers actively engaged in the tablet wars, it seems inevitable that tablets will be the predominant delivery mechanism for publishers’ content, including trade and education content. So, if our content is delivered on these devices, how do we establish and hold the user’s attention in an environment where the user can skip from media to media with almost no friction whatsoever.

The answer to this question is partially reflected in last year’s post regarding community and curation. The most significant challenge publishers will face is getting their content shared and linked to and powerful social network marketing programs will be at the center of this effort. This doesn’t only apply to trade content--‘communities’ organized around ‘influencers’ such as academics/professors, institutions, specific courses, etc. will also drive the sharing and linking of educational publisher content. For example, an individual interested in business entrepreneurship might ‘friend’ the Harvard class ‘Entrepreneurship 101’ and use the reading list to guide his or her personal reading.

Another key aspect of the quest for attention revolves around the metadata and the supplemental content publishers produce for all their content. Most of this remains either dis- or un-organized. A lack of depth and accuracy of meta-data is still a deficiency shared by most publishers, even as the need for more meta-data expands. On the whole, publishers are probably getting further behind. The thing that will help publishers win a larger share of attention will be multiple ‘entry points’ that enable the user to interact with their content and allow influencers to share and link to it. Not only do meta-data files need to be robust and detailed, but users need to be able to easily find references, indexes, TOCs, links, etc. and reviews as well as alternate views of the content (audio, video, even perspectives). Not only do these various elements provide ‘hooks’ which users can grab in multiple ways, they will also serve to build loyalty and authority for the content itself. And this could ‘index’ the content so that it scores high-ranking positions when consumers seek the content you are selling. Thus, the entire process feeds on itself.

Searching for Attention will represent a significant challenge for all content owners but particularly publishers, as content amalgamates via the tablet platform. Not for nothing, I think I’d rather go on that journey with B&N and Amazon versus Apple or Google because at least they are booksellers. Whether that’s enough remains to be seen.

Here are some additional trends to watch for over the next year or two:

The MGH deal aside, there’s a good chance we will see additional movement in the ownership of segments of the education business. Cengage will have little difficulty with their refinancing (doesn’t mean there won’t be any pain) but educational units on the periphery (medical, legal, etc.) may witness more consolidation in the coming year.
With the ‘settling’ of eBook content and processes within many publishing houses, we’ll begin to see more experimentation from publishers especially with expanded definitions of traditional book content. We’ll see eBook content – the ‘book’ part as a component of something that looks more like an issue of an online magazine. Obviously, an ‘issue’ where the ‘book’ part is the focus but ancillary material (in the magazine sense the supporting articles) lend deeper meaning, context and even leads to obvious tie-ins and sequels. Essentially, I think we will begin to see the beginnings of the renaissance of the ‘book’ that everyone has been moaning about.
In an area that I am focused on, we will begin to see a rapid movement towards atomizing educational content. Apple may well announce an educational publishing version of iTunes where content is such as chapters, cases and articles are sold in parts as songs are sold versus albums. Watch for a painful realization about pricing. The al a carte approach for content purchasing is something educators and institutions are looking for and initiatives similar to the iTunes model (and AcademicPub) are being welcome because they empower people to make better choices.
In sport, it will be a tight run thing at the top of the premiership this year but I still believe Manchester United will beat out Manchester City for the title. England will come second in the medals table at the London Olympics.

Prior Predictions: 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

AcademicPub Announces Large Roster of Publishing Partners

2012-01-10T02:53:00.000-05:00

Note - I'm Chief Revenue Officer for SharedBook & AcademicPub. This is our most recent press release announcing how successful we have been in building our content library.

AcademicPub™, a dynamic online platform that enables college professors to create custom print or e-books quickly and cost effectively, today announced 22 additional partnerships with trusted publishing partners, accelerating in the New Year the progress it has made since launch.

Feeding a burgeoning collection of disaggregated content from the world's most prominent academic publishers, AcademicPub revealed publishing partnerships with houses on both sides of the Atlantic, ranging from Routledge in the United Kingdom to many of the most prestigious university presses in the United States and abroad.

The announcement was made by Caroline Vanderlip, CEO, SharedBook Inc., parent company of AcademicPub.

"With a seven-year track record of success serving the consumer custom book market, it is exciting to see our proprietary technology solution embraced by the academic publishing community and the institutions we collectively serve," said Vanderlip. "In the end, it's the student who benefits by being able to purchase the highest quality, copyright-cleared materials at the lowest possible price."

Launched in April 2011 with less than 20 academic publisher partners, the AcademicPub Content Library has grown nearly sixfold in only nine months, bumping that number to 111 in these early days of 2012. AcademicPub today unveiled publishing partnerships including: Brookings Institution Press, Columbia CaseWorks of Columbia Business School, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, Georgetown University Press, GlobalData, J. Ross Publishers, Liverpool University Press, Morgan & Claypool, New Academic Science, New York University Press, Princeton Architectural Press, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Transaction Publishers, University of California Press, University of Chicago Press, University of Iowa Press, University of Virginia Press, University Press of Kentucky, Wilfred Laurier University Press, and Yale University Press.

Two prestigious imprints from UK-based Taylor & Francis Group have also been added to the AcademicPub Content Library. They are 160-year-old Routledge, with notable titles in the humanities and social sciences; and Psychology Press, a widely respected publisher of academic psychology books and journals. A complete list of publishing partners in the AcademicPub Content Library may be found here.

The AcademicPub Content Library, allows professors to search and select from more than two million units of copyright-cleared articles, textbook chapters, scholarly research and cases for use in their custom course packs that are dynamically created by the AcademicPub service.

In addition, other components of the AcademicPub Content Library include The Textbook Collection, which contains chapters from structured textbooks in multiple disciplines; The Scholar Collection, through which professors and researchers can add their independently authored materials to the Content Library and set the royalty payments they would like to receive; and The Open Educational Resource Collection, which provides easy access to publicly available sources such as Connexions or material from the U.S. Government.

About AcademicPub
AcademicPub, Sharedbook Inc's technology platform for higher education, assembles, composes, prices and delivers custom textbooks - in eBook and/or print format. AcademicPub allows for immediate creation and inclusion of copyright-cleared content from anywhere, such as web articles, self-generated lectures or from the AcademicPub Content Library. Digital or print distribution generates a fast and easy way for educators to provide an engaging educational experience, with lower prices and up-to-the-minute materials for students. More information and free registration for faculty is available at www.academicpub.com. Headquartered in New York since 2004, SharedBook Inc. is privately held and can be found at www.sharedbook.com.

MediaWeek (V5, N2): 1962 it was a very fine year, Daytona Textbook Migrations, Protecting the Franchise, Touch Technology + More.

2012-01-09T23:54:00.000-05:00

More Intelligent Life on what was going on in 1962. (They missed one important fact).

Even Khrushchev’s decision to allow the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch” (November), to highlight the evils of Stalin’s labour camps, made little impression in the West. No one can have foreseen how Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” (September) would inspire the environmental movement. Nor did anyone spot the future impact of Anthony Burgess’s nihilist novella “A Clockwork Orange” (May): “clumsy...tawdry...aimless” – the Times. The author came to hate it too, but the film, made and then withdrawn by Stanley Kubrick, gave it a lasting resonance.

And even after the Canadian academic Marshall McLuhan began to be hailed as a visionary for understanding the significance of the electronic media, no one grasped the importance of the prediction in his 1962 book “The Gutenberg Galaxy”: “A computer as a research and communication instrument could enhance retrieval, obsolesce mass library organisation, retrieve the individual’s encyclopedic function and flip into a private line to speedily tailored data of a saleable kind.” Most of us would not hear the word “internet” for another three decades.

No one guessed that the first James Bond film, “Dr No” (October), would spawn 23 more, and counting. Roy Lichtenstein’s cartoon strips and Andy Warhol’s soup cans landed on the art scene (November), but left the establishment unimpressed: “like a joke without humour told over and over again”, said the New Yorker of the soup cans, “until it carries a hint of menace”. At least Warhol got some attention, which was more than could be said when Bob Dylan gave the first public performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” at Gerde’s Folk City downtown in the West Village (April). Let alone when the Rolling Stones played their first gig, at the Marquee Club in London (July)

An ambitious eTextbook migration at Daytona State College is momentarily abandoned (INed)

Well, actually, it's more complicated than that. Daytona State has not abandoned its e-textbook initiative, but it has tempered its approach. And while Spiwak’s departure may have weakened the college’s enthusiasm for the transition to digital, a recently completed report on a yearlong pilot at Daytona State, comparing the satisfaction and success of students using all electronic texts with students using all print, has also complicated the picture.

The findings of the study, in which college officials collected data through surveys and focus groups over four semesters, suggest that making the transition to electronic content could pose challenges — especially if the college tried to force the transition by giving students and faculty no choice, as some for-profit institutions have done.

“Avoid top-down mandates,” the study’s authors wrote as their top recommendation. “Institutions that require all instructors to simultaneously go e-text might be courting disaster.”
The majority of the students in the study who used exclusively e-texts came away dissatisfied. While they appreciated that there was no possibility of losing or forgetting their textbooks when they could be simply summoned to a device, the students told officials that they found it fatiguing to read off a computer screen (the students used netbooks, rather than e-readers, due to the unavailability, at the time, of certain key texts on the Amazon Kindle).

There's a new bill before Congress to protect publishers interests in publishing government funded reseasrch. From the AAP press release:

The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works. Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies’ planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.

Here is the bill sponsored by Rep's Issa and Maloney.

Fellow traveller John Dupuis (Confessions of a Science Librarian) has a round up of some of the commentary on the proposed bill and includes this comment:

This is a rather bald-faced attack on the open access movement, attempting to restrict all kinds of sharing mechanisms and open access publishing ventures. Institutional and disciplinary repositories and open access mandates seem particularly to be the targets. Essentially, it wants to give a free hand to the scholarly publishing establishment

From NPR: The Touchy Feely of Technology. A look at how touch technology seen in tablets is helping to change several industries. Here is an excerpt specific to education but the article is more expansive than this (NPR):

Now that the iPad does exist, people are finding a lot of practical applications for it. Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington County, Va., has a growing cache of iPads, about 100 for 600 students. The school uses its tablets for everything from writing to math to reading graphic novels. But NPR's Larry Abramson reports that in one classroom the iPad has been a real game changer.

Special education assistant Lesley McKeever uses an iPad to get her student, an affectionate autistic boy who can't speak, to learn to connect words with images by touching the right picture on the screen. Touch technology has been so helpful for students with autism that Arlington County provides enough iPads for every student in the special education classroom.

These days it's the iPad that's hot, but Apple's been an educational pioneer from the start.

According to Apple, more than 2,300 school districts in the U.S. have iPad programs for students or teachers. But the benefits of having iPads in the classroom don't come free. Teachers say you have to invest time into the technology in order to get something out of it, which means much of the iPad's usefulness will depend on the applications both teachers and publishers discover as adoption grows.

From Twitter:

Google Snaps Up 200+ IBM Patents, Including One for a 'Semantic Social Network' Mashable

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg on the sale of Sterling Publishing business (WSJ)

Medical marijuana entrepreneur Christ asks justices for access to UM Law Library http://bit.ly/vvTXzG Not a headline you see often.

Education Department releases new data on academic libraries-Inside Higher Ed: Academic Libraries in Flux

Noises Off: the play so funny it made people ill Guardian

Welcome to 2012!

Albrecht Dürer Bust the Publisher Model

2012-01-04T09:29:00.000-05:00

A fascinating article from the Christmas Economist last week on Albrecht Durer who may have been one of the first self-publishers to build a real business.

For Dürer, this was an unusual incident. Then 50, he had been for some years the most famous artist in northern Europe; but he was not in essence a court painter. He thought of such people as “parasites”, hanging round great men, waiting for a commission to fall from the lordly lips. He, by contrast, was an independent businessman. He made his money not by grovelling, but by selling copies of the woodcuts and engravings printed, since 1495, at his workshop in the centre of Nuremberg. He was not even a member of a guild, for there were no artists’ guilds in the city: he was a free individual, unaffiliated, making money and a reputation purely for himself.
...
It was easy to meet demand, however high he fanned it. Though the fundamental work, carefully incised in mirror-image with knife or burin on the wood or copper plate, was every bit as laborious as drawing, it could then fly out in hundreds of copies. Dürer or his assistants just inked a wood or copper plate and cranked a lever. Thanks to the printing press he had bought, he was never in thrall to a publisher; his book of extra-large printed woodcuts of the Apocalypse, which had made his fame in Nuremberg, was the first to be both illustrated and published by a great artist.

He could now replicate and communicate his art. In 1520, for example, he sent a whole set of prints to Raphael’s studio in Rome (he had hoped to impress Raphael himself, but the master had just died), and expected prints of Raphael’s work in return. Artists no longer needed to meet, or ship precious works along dangerous roads, to show each other what they could do. Dürer was not the first artist to exploit the joy of the new medium, but he was the most assiduous and influential—and the best.

Predictions 2011: The Growth of Intimacy (Revisited)

2012-01-02T01:01:00.000-05:00

I am re-posting these in advance of thinking about 2012 but in re-reading the post I could almost stand pat on this effort for 2012. This was originally posted on Jan 3, 2011.

Things might have been worse: As 2009 came to a close, there wasn’t a lot of optimism about 2010 yet; as the year unfolded, things were neither worse nor better than they had been. And now, there is even some excitement spurred on by the launch of the iPad and the rapid growth of eBook sales. Certainly any analyst, technology company or consultant publicizing his or her [proprietary] forecast of eBook and eReader sales for the next decade was almost guaranteed to gain some attention, especially as each successive forecast sought to outdo the prior reports.

Encouraged by the boosterism, many pundits think this is ether the end of book publishers or a new dawn. I don’t think it’s either, but the transition from print to electronic could mimic the transition music made from vinyl to disc which stuffed record company profits in the short term (only to entirely undercut the industry for the long). It is too early to tell how book publishing will survive this transition, but it is entirely possible that we will look back on these ‘transition’ years as ones in which publishers missed an opportunity to connect directly with their readers, having limited their ‘opportunity’ merely to replicating the book experience on the screen.

Change and progress is glacial in the book industry while, all around the industry media markets and products advance at break-neck pace. Evidence of massive and rapid change surrounds the publishing industry: This time last year, tablet computers were utilitarian business equipment; now, with the iPad, they are status symbols and, for millions, a gateway page to life online. In 2009, few televisions were web enabled but this year this is a standard feature opening up the web for living room leisure activity on a big screen. Content produced by publishers is now showcased in these channels and on these devices, yet book publishers continue to be bit players in the evolution of eContent and indications are this is unlikely to change appreciably in the future.

Some of the macro changes I mentioned last year continue to roll out into the mainstream, such as the migration toward subscription models for education content and trade reference, collaborative content and data sharing in academic publishing and an adoption of the rent vs. buy model for content. And while none overtook the business in any wholesale manner, all continued to grow in significance during 2010 as they will in 2011.

The Growth of Intimacy

In 1961, Newton Minow (newly installed as Federal Communications Commissioner) made a famous speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he described television programming as a ‘vast wasteland’ and he suggested those in attendance watch a day of television where,

You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western badmen, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials--many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few.

The web may be all of this in spades but, increasingly, the web user is demanding guidance and intermediaries who will then aid in their selection of appropriate and meaningful content. As I’ve discussed before, curation will become a marketable skill set and audience building around specific interests and specialties will be increasingly valued by content users. Just as publishers may have purchased publishing companies with defined title lists in years past, they may now consider purchasing “communities of interest” (and their associated apps and Facebook pages, etc.) to which they can market content/products. These communities may become the ‘imprints” of tomorrow with defined – even built in – product development, marketing and selling channels.

The growth of intimacy assumes that users will seek closer relationships with their core community of friends, workers or communities of interest in order to make decisions about the content they access, the products they use and the entertainment decisions they make. Book publishers, retailers and authors will need to understand how to actively participate in these communities without ‘marketing’ or ‘selling’ to them. Facebook is obviously the largest social community but within Facebook, there are a myriad of smaller ‘communities’ and, within these communities, the web becomes highly personal. The relationships among the participants becomes ‘intimate’ in the sense that the participants share knowledge, information, even personal details that in a traditional selling or marketing environment would never be breeched by the vendor. The dynamic of selling becomes vastly different in this context and publishers must find a way to understand these new communities, the influencers that dictate behavior and the motivations that contribute to selling products (and services potentially).

This is the next level of social networking: It isn’t enough to have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. Authors and publishers need to engage deeply where it matters in order to build awareness, build their brand (if necessary) and establish selling channels. In the case of Facebook, the company already has a vast amount of book-related information broadly collected from their community and undoubtedly the sales volume that results from the discussions on Facebook is large. Most importantly for vendors, the ‘conversion’ rate from an ‘intimate’ recommendation to purchase is likely to be far higher than from any other source or marketing activity. Finding and understanding the applicable nexus within these communities that delivers the widest possible ‘conversion’ rate will be critical if publishers are to participate in the growth of intimacy.

While publishers may think the ‘growth of intimacy’ will have more relevance to trade publishing, this may not be the case. As LexisNexis and some other professional publishers have proven that a social strategy that encourages users to act as curators for other users has significant value in building and supporting the publisher value proposition and brand. I see this evolving in education as publishers encourage academics and students to participate in social networks focused on specific topics and content. But a word of caution: Building a social network simply to facilitate the sale of your content or textbooks will never work. A critical aspect of Facebook is that it is vendor agnostic and thus provides the latitude for the community to come up with the right solution or product.

With reference to Minow, it won’t be the ‘broadcasters’ that ‘[could] do better’ as he suggested, but it will be the consumer that will find a way to get to the content they value using their web of ‘intimate’ relationships. Curators (or docents) will become critical for users in this discovery process and, if publishers aren’t connected to this network a meaningful way, they will be consigned to the vast wasteland of skateboarding dogs and porn.

The growth of intimacy will be a recurring theme for all content producers over the coming years and addressing the various aspects of this trend may result in important changes in the way publishers develop and market their products.

Here are some additional trends to watch for over the next 12-24mths:

Prices for dedicated eReaders will fall to $30-50 and will increasingly be used as “fee-with-purchase” subscription promotions with newspapers and magazine subscriptions or combinations thereof.
That newspapers will be moving toward a paid subscriber model is rapidly becoming old news (with the NYTimes expected to launch their service in January); however, to raise their value proposition, newspapers will be more interested in limited content syndication partnerships that lower the number of outlets with access to specific content, thus raising the exclusivity for the content and the value proposition for consumers. Rather than the same story appearing in hundreds of outlets, consumers will be looking for exclusive insights, analysis and commentary that can’t be found elsewhere. (Again, a ‘curation’ theme going on here).
Tentatively, ranking “best social sites” will attempt to do the same thing that bestseller lists do in reflecting interest and popularity. The parameters will be unclear (or experimental) initially but this data – organized as a ranking – will become a valid measurement of commercial success and reader interests in the same way that bestseller lists do today.
Print will increasingly be diminished by publishers - not directly because of electronic versions, but by their dismissive attitude to the quality of paper and bindings. Shoddy quality will serve to undermine value as paper rapidly yellows, bindings split and pages fall out.
The popularity of eBooks and eContent will also chip away at the Byzantine (or British Empire- like) organization of many international publishing companies, which effectively splits rights by country and region rather than by language. We will start to see international publishing companies completely rethink the ‘local office’ formula where in different editions with different pricing, layouts, covers, release dates, etc. are produced by local staffing. Instead, publishers will begin to dismantle these operations and replace them with ‘centers of excellence’ where specific offices prove their expertise in specific functional or content areas and provide these services to the rest of the worldwide publishing operations. Direct customer-focused staff will remain but the duplication of functions – driven primarily by the content normalization that eContent imposes – will result in the elimination of functions across the global enterprise. Publishing companies will become stronger as a result, since they will be able to aggregate expertise in specific areas and distribute it broadly across their operations.
International ownership of publishing companies is par for the course but we haven’t seen entities from China, India or the Arab world make a material impact on English language publishing. That will change as these markets mature and local investors determine they needn’t be simply buyers of English language materials but they could own the producers of this content as well. Most of these markets are still untapped: the market for English language content continues to grow and the supply of content locally produced and distributed internationally is still in its infancy. There are over 5mm college graduates in China each year versus less than 2mm in the US. This represents a vast market opportunity for all types of content and it is more than possible that a Chinese investor will buy a large English language publisher to address both supply and demand in this market. The same scenario could be true of the Indian and Arab markets. Watch for a big news takeover during 2011.

Lastly in sports: Last year I predicted that Manchester United would win the Premier League title over Arsenal but, in fact, United lost by a point to Chelsea. The point was effectively lost in a late season loss to Chelsea but, this year, Chelsea look well out of it. So again I predict United will win the title over Arsenal. I also predicted that England would win the Ashes series in Melbourne which they did last Tuesday. Hooray!

Thanks for your support and I hope your 2011 is better than 2010.

Related:

Predictions 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

Images from 2011

2011-12-30T06:20:00.000-05:00

View this in the full view mode (bottom right). There are also comments on each image. As always visit my flickr page to see lots more.

My Year in Reading 2011

2011-12-28T04:37:00.000-05:00

As I have on prior years, I've followed the lead of The Millions and thought about the books I read this year. In terms of quantity 2011 was a slower year for me mainly because I slogged through a book that had remained on my shelf unread for 10 years or so. This was Q by "Luther Blissett" a novel about the insurgencies and guerrilla warfare that followed Martin Luther's declarations in the 1500's. It was a dense novel and one of those that would have been better drunk in several long sessions rather than piece meal prior to falling asleep in bed. Nevertheless, while I found it a difficult read I still think about it and coincidentally an article in the year end Economist last week wouldn't have interested me at all if I hadn't read Q. The Economist article suggested that social networking as we know it today was similarly prevalent in the Reformation driven by easy access to printing technology.

"Scholars have long debated the relative importance of printed media, oral transmission and images in rallying popular support for the Reformation. Some have championed the central role of printing, a relatively new technology at the time. Opponents of this view emphasise the importance of preaching and other forms of oral transmission. More recently historians have highlighted the role of media as a means of social signalling and co-ordinating public opinion in the Reformation.

Now the internet offers a new perspective on this long-running debate, namely that the important factor was not the printing press itself (which had been around since the 1450s), but the wider system of media sharing along social networks—what is called “social media” today. Luther, like the Arab revolutionaries, grasped the dynamics of this new media environment very quickly, and saw how it could spread his message."

Another slower read was also a book that sat on my shelf for a while was the Claire Tomalin bio of Samuel Pepys. She's a vibrant and interesting writer and I'm looking forward to reading her bio of Dickens.

As I mentioned above, 2011 was a down year in terms of volume: My total this year was only 19 books against 27 in 2010, 22 in 2009, 17 in 2008 and 25 in 2007. It has been my desire over the past five years or so (and it has taken me that long) to clear out as many of my unread books as possible. I am happy to say that I've done very well at that task.

The book I most enjoyed this year was The Northern Clemency which wasn't technically on my shelf but Mrs. PND had been telling me for a while that I would really enjoy it.

Here is my full list and these are in my 'bookstore' (PND Bookstore)

The Dealer and the Dead - Gerald Seymour

Found Wanting - Robert Goddard

Piece of My Heart - Peter Robinson

Life - Kieth Richards

Field Grey - Philip Kerr

Innocent - Scott Turow

Close to Home - Peter Robinson

Q - Luther Blissett

The Northern Clemency - Philip Hensher

The Tenth Man - Graham Greene

Strange Affair - Peter Robinson

Friend of the Devil - Peter Robinson

Snowdrops - A. D. Miller

The Fear Index - Robert Harris

Prague Fatale - Philip Kerr

The Cut - George Pelecanos

Deniable Death - Gerald Seymour

Blood of Victory - Alan Furst

Samuel Pepys - Clair Tomalin

In the UK there was a lot of hype about Snowdrops by A.D. Miller which was a Booker nominee. It was a good read and entertaining but it wasn't on the same level as Hensher's Northern Clemency which was short listed for the Booker in 2008.

Looking to 2012, I've already added another of Hensher's titles (The Mulberry Empire) from PND senior's shelf, Wolf Hall from Mrs. PND and my own selection Amanda Foreman's A World of Fire about the American Civil War from the English perspective. In addition to those I've already got 10 others and Mrs. PND got me six very nicely bound Dickens classics from Penguin for Christmas, so it will be another busy reading year. Just how we like it.

Media Year (Vol 4, No 52) The Year in Review

2011-12-26T15:41:00.002-05:00

Looks like I only missed three editions this year:

Week 51: ChromeBooks, Durrell eBooks, Hitchens & Dogs, Unbound & Vogue

Week 50: Khan Academy, Academic Libraries, Harvard Business School, Consumer Reports + More

Week 49: Revamping GED, HS Corporate Marketing, Book Blogging, Pretty Books + More

Week 48: Orwell on Police Actions, Dickens and Economist Book Festival + More

Week 47: Lobbying for On Line Learning, Loan Bubble + More

Week 46: WW I Archive Goes Online, Mrs Beeton's 150, Silicon Valley's Daily, Cookbook Aps +More

Week 45: The New A&R, Problem Biographies, Scan your Books, Education, Libraroes + More

Week 44: Books in Browsers, Photography, Drivel + More

Week 43: Tom Waits, Children's Books, The Booker, "Close the Libraries", Textbooks & Education + More

Week 42: Frankfurt, CS Forester, Martin Amis + More

Week 41: Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Week 40: Scholarly Models, Literary Translations, Library usage Data, Fading Creative Class +More.

Week 39: Robert Harris, Dickens, Cultural Decline (or not), Colm Toibin + More

Week 37: Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

Week 36: Amazon Digital Library, Piracy, Newspaper Disruption, Private Blackboard + More

Week 35: Distance Learning, Libraries and E-Books, Digital Textbooks + More

Week 34: Content Management Systems, Student Knowledge, Textbook Rentals, Archives + More

Week 33: The Chronicle of Higher Ed on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11

Week 32: Digital Storytelling, Report on Graduate Earning Power, Citation of Wikipedia, Forsyth's Jackal + More

Week 31: Financial resutls: Pearson, Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier

Week 30: Arundhati Roy, JSTORE Illegal Downloads, Kaplan's $1.6mm Bill, High Journal Prices, Three Rules of Reviewing + More

Week 29: Library of Congress, Bertelsmann, Michelin Guides, Bookstores, P.G. Wodehouse, Education Funding Report + More

Week 28: Hacking May Cost $100mm, Potter's Last-Not so Fast, Blackboard, Harvard & Social Hot water, Catch22 + More

Week 27: ProPublica's Newspaper Apps, Hemingway, EMI + More

Week 26: Books In Print, Journal Publishing, Joyce, Education and Technology, Area 51 and more.

Week 24: Georgia Copyright Case, Blackboard, HW Wilson, David Mamet's PR Campaign + More

Week 23: Romance or Not, Grief in The Killing, The Value of College, Nordic Crimewave + More

Week 22: Patriot Act, ALA Preview, Revolution Writing + More

Week 21: End of World Edition - An Essay on Privacy, Books & Marketing, Libraries + More

Week 20: Ebooks in the Classroom, Writers Life, Libraries Matter, Bob Marley

Week 19: EBooks on Campus, Jeffrey Archer, LexisNexis Sued, Archiving the Web

Week 18: Higher Ed, Author Promotion, Harper Lee, Libraries + Others.

Week 17: Morrissey, King James, Big Content, Sneering at Genres, Hitch, + More

Week 16: Alberto Vitale, Arab Market eBooks, B2B Magazines.

Week 15: Borders, Indigo

Week 14: Long Distance Learning, OpenSource Textbooks, CCC, Harpercollins

Week 13: Bookclub for the Homeless, Plagiarism or "Creative Reuse", Hollywood, Gallimard, Jean Auel

Week 12: Hay Festival, Reviewers, Heart of Darkness, Alice in NYC,

Week 11: UK Copyright, The Killing, History in the UK.

Week 10: Spy Magazine, Hiaasen, Casino Royale, Curious George and Ryan Giggs

Week 9: Information Concierge, Future of Education Publishing, Blackboard, The $16K/mth Sideline, Blurbs, Marilyn Monroe

Week 8: Demise of Research Libraries, Online Education, Sir John Soane, Cuban Bookfair

Week 7: Underused eBook features, UK Tuition, Mills&Boone, Coin Art

Week 5: Eadweard Muybridge, Open Courseware, Education Aps, Lexis, Mother Russia, Taschen

Week 4: Changing Higher Ed. Book Awards, Pippi, 007, Forecasting Technology, Michael Lewis

Week 3: UK Libraries, Perceptions of US Libraries, Pearson Acquires, Wolters Kluwer Partner, Libraries in the Cloud

Week 2: ISBN Identification, UK Libraries under threat, Historian Hobsbawm, The Internet and Authors

Week 1: Digital Media Experiments, Murakami, Literary Illusion and Political Correction, Predictions, Cliche

The Economist on Euphemism

2011-12-22T20:23:00.001-05:00

The economist has an amusing article on those things people say but what they really mean.
http://www.economist.com/node/21541767

"American euphemisms are in a class of their own, principally because they seem to involve words that few would find offensive to start with, replaced by phrases that are meaninglessly ambiguous: bathroom tissue for lavatory paper, dental appliances for false teeth, previously owned rather than used, wellness centres for hospitals, which conduct procedures not operations. As the late George Carlin, an American comedian, noted, people used to get old and die. Now they become first preelderly, then senior citizens and pass away in a terminal episode or (if doctors botch their treatment) after a therapeutic misadventure. These bespeak a national yearning for perfection, bodily and otherwise."

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 51): ChromeBooks, Durrell eBooks, Hitchens & Dogs, Unbound & Vogue

2011-12-20T18:28:00.001-05:00

Google's Chrome Lending program is set for a series of tests (DigitalTrends);

Google has been working with public libraries recently in order to circulate its Chromebook concept. At least three libraries have been working towards lending out Chromebooks to patrons for a period of time.

Most notably, the Palo Alto, California Library will begin making Chromebooks available for loan in January; patrons will be able to check-out the Google devices for up to one week. The pilot project is a first-of-its-kind, though the library had previously made Windows laptops as well as Chromebooks available to patrons in the Downtown, Main and Mitchell Park libraries for two-hour checkouts with library cards.

Along with Palo Alto, September brought Chromebooks to New Jersey’s Hillsborough Library where patrons were allowed to use the netbooks for four-hour time slots, with an additional two-hour renewal period. Also, Wired points out the Multnomah County Library has been testing 10 Chromebooks at five libraries in Portland, Oregon, though patron’s access has been limited and supervised.

Also Wired.

I had to read a Gerald Durrell book in middle school (in Oz). News his titles are being released in eBook format (Telegraph):

Pan Macmillan has launched a new digital imprint offering 10 Durrell titles as e-books, with five to follow in the New Year. The mixture of fiction and non-fiction includes Beasts In My Belfry, Catch Me A Colobus and Ark On The Move - the latter inspired a television series of the same name.

The advent of e-books could be a godsend for authors whose books are no longer in print. While reissuing backlists as physical books is a costly process, reviving them for Kindles and other e-readers is comparatively cheap.

Pan Macmillan is billing its new imprint, Bello, as a means of “reviving 20th century classics for a 21st century audience”. Other authors on the launch list include Vita Sackville-West and DJ Taylor.

Christopher Hitchens in quotes from The Telegraph: My favorite:

“[O]wners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realise that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are gods.”

Is Unbound books the next big thing? (Or was it based on all those stories last year?) Here's the crux of the issue from the Observer:

So far, the company has had nine books funded (of which only Jones's and Fischer's have actually been published), with another 10 in the pledging phase, including a sci-fi novel by Red Dwarf star Robert Llewellyn. Traffic has been impressive: last month, the site attracted more than 200,000 unique users. Pollard reports that interest from authors has been "huge". And, surprisingly, agents have been enthusiastic.

If you are into fashion then perhaps you would want to subscribe to the new Vogue content database (NYT)

There are roughly 2,800 issues in the archive (Vogue was published weekly until 1912, and has been monthly, with the exception of some war years, only since 1973) and so it holds the potential for endless examination. The entire contents are searchable, so it is possible, for example, to see all of its Cher covers at once. (There were five, all published between 1972 and 1975.)

The covers alone provide a window into the evolving design of Vogue and its distinct looks under different editors: the elegant, iconic and occasionally abstract or surreal covers of Edna Woolman Chase; the frosted confections of Diana Vreeland; the peppy close-ups of models’ faces from the Grace Mirabella years; the celebrities in lavish settings from Anna Wintour.

Vogue, which developed the site with the trend-forecasting company WGSN, has positioned it for professional use, with an annual subscription price of $1,575. (Vogue provided temporary access for review purposes.) For designers or scholars researching fashion history, or, paradoxically, for those nostalgic for the way magazines used to be before the Internet, it may be worth the price. I could tell you more, but I am currently distracted by an article from Nov. 15, 1949, called “When I Entertain,” by Wallis Windsor.

From Twitter:

Georgia O'Keeffe's visit to Hawaii SFGATE

Cal Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg proposes slashing textbook prices via legislation.LINK

OCLC Report: Libraries at Webscale, by Michael Cairns http://bit.ly/sOobkz

We Need A Sales Rep or Two!

2011-12-20T12:56:00.004-05:00

In my capacity as Chief Revenue Officer at SharedBook/AcademicPub I am looking for some good sales reps so get in touch if you know of anyone. Here is the job description (Monster):

SALES REPRESENTATIVE:

Are you interested in consulting with colleges and universities to help them find the best technology to meet their goals? Are you self-motivated, tenacious, persuasive and enjoy the sales process? If you possess these attributes and are seeking an opportunity to work for a dynamic and entrepreneurial company, this is the opportunity for you!

Due to the introduction of new product offerings, SharedBook/AcademicPub is looking for a results-driven Sales Representative who will be responsible for identifying and closing new sales opportunities to prospective university customers.

Description:

The Sales Representative will be responsible for selling the company’s AcademicPub suite of products to the higher education schools that fall within their respective territory.

This person will:

Achieve specific monthly and annual sales goals and objectives for their given territory
Generate new and repeat sales and manage the customer/prospect pipeline
Be instrumental in developing new business
Deliver presentations to key school personal and be able to successfully close a sale
Develop and maintain a full pipeline of prospective clients and manage territory in assigned region
Manage the entire sales process from lead generation/prospecting through execution of project
Work closely with senior sales staff to achieve sales goals
Have a proven ability to conduct needs analysis sessions with university personnel and then formulate solutions around those needs
Develop strong sales relationships with Deans, Provosts, CTO's, CIO's, etc. of the largest education institutions in the US
Be responsible for reporting pipeline, account plans, territory management activity in a timely accurate manner
Consistently deliver the highest customer service possible
Work primarily out of home office but spend up to 75% of time in market and with potential customers during high season
Locations: NY, FL & TX.

Qualifications needed are:

BA/BS or equivalent preferred
2+ years’ experience successfully selling to faculty, administrations and institutions in the higher ed. market
Excellent written, oral and presentation skills with fastidious attention to detail
Ability to work independently with minimal supervision
Up to 50-75% travel required (dependent on selling season)

The ideal candidate for this opportunity will have an entrepreneurial spirit and be committed to building a client base from the ground up. This company's products are fairly new and may not have been sold in these areas before, so this will be a very unique situation geared toward highly motivated sales performers that are passionate about education!

This position offers a base salary in the $40k range and a potential of an additional $30-$40k at goal. This position will be a field position in which the candidate will be working from an office inside their home when not traveling

Apply via MONSTER

Milan Cathedral 1961

2011-12-16T08:53:00.003-05:00

Milan Cathedral August 1961

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

The PND seniors went to Milan and Florence for their honeymoon and this is one of the images from that trip. Unfortunately, when I visited Milan in 2004 I didn't know this image existed in our archive otherwise I would have my own more recent image. However, if memory serves from that trip the building is now far cleaner and the area in front of the cathedral is less like a bus depot and more like a pedestrian precinct.

Is the college bookstore doomed?

2011-12-14T07:03:00.000-05:00

Rehash originally published August 30th, 2006:

Some recent examples suggest that print books continue to be the format of choice for college students but is this because they like the format or because the tangible item can be resold at the end of the semester? Is the problem really that no demonstrably better alternatives yet exist to replace the print version; i.e., electronic titles that offer a better learning experience? Clearly, e-books garner a lot of attention and investment from publishers and as I have discussed in an earlier post the opportunities in e-Content for publishers, students and administrators are potentially significant yet no one appears to have cracked the content code.

Electronic delivery of content will materially change the business model for students, institutions and publishers. In my view, the main reason this has not happened yet is that publishers and institutions are dealing with legacy issues that preclude a (willing) change in their business practices. Content creation in all but a few subject areas is an iterative process; meaning that few titles are created from scratch for each new edition. Indeed for some subject areas many have suggested that new editions are only created to mitigate the used book issue. While publishers recognize that the creation of e-books is critical, with few exceptions, they are not willing to start over and create a true e-book course product but are satisfied to convert existing titles to e-book format.

The institution on the other hand receives revenues from the sale of textbooks either directly or via trade agreements with store managers such as Follett and Barnes & Noble. As such, they have remained paradoxically disassociated from the annual chorus of criticism regarding textbook pricing. Assuming e-books become fundamental to course content, where will the bookstore fit in the relationship between publisher and institution?

Any number of publishers and vendors have or are developing models for direct delivery of content to students. Two vendors, Missouri Book Service (MBS) and Vitalsource have developed platforms which involve publishers and bookstores in the process. Intuitively, as a publisher, you might be encouraged to engage students directly and publishers are doing just that via services such as SafariX and Primus+ (McGraw Hill). MBS has been testing their program which integrates the sale of e-books into the retail bookstore for the past three seasons and has seen steady increases in the number of publishers and the amount of adoption of the content. In working with MBS, a publisher will not have to deal with certain college store issues such as returns and exchanges, campus debit cards and student financial aid. Centralized order process operations at publishers would find these issues difficult to deal with. E-Content in the MBS Universal Digital Textbook program is discounted 30% below the print price. The restrictions associated with this content have drawn some negative reactions particularly because the password expires at the end of the semester and the student has nothing of value to resell or reuse. As suggested above, the additional value for the user in this example may be more related to ease of use (weight) than much else because the e-content is a replica of the print version.

In the MBS solution, they protect their franchise and maintain a revenue stream for the bookstores. MBS is also creating a digital platform so that many publishers can make their titles available to students which in turn could create a competitive advantage for MBS in the provision of e-Content to students. Assuming a competitor wanted to challenge MBS for a store contract the challenger would have to match the platform capability and the content.

Vitalsource has taken a different approach to distributing e-Content to students and offer content creation through distribution help to reach students. They have had some success and are working with Wiley, Thomson West, Elsevier and others to deliver content. Their tools allow integration of ‘local’ content, unbundling of content and linking to related reference products. It isn’t clear what their relationships with bookstores is in the institutions where the product is sold; however, MBS recently added the Vitalsource format to their delivery platform.

MBS, Vitalsource, SafariX and others are generally offering discounts for the purchase of e-Content versions of the course material. There is tremendous hesitation to offer unlimited use of the e-Content because publishers believe they will create a problem greater than the used book issue. Not surprisingly, students have been slow to adopt these offerings. In my view a risk to publishers is that new entrants to the market will create new and innovate publishing products that rely on new but dynamic content that creates a profoundly different experience for students than an e-Content version of a textbook. Some of these new approaches are starting to find their way into general use and it is services like Blackboard/webCT that have created a platform for delivery of some of this content. Blackboard has an agreement with Merlot where you can find some interesting course material.

In the long run, publishers and or e-Content platform providers will have to pay to gain access to students at Higher Ed institutions. Institutions will either create their own open platforms or license from a vendor but this platform will become the store front. There may be a physical store on campus but it will not be the focus of textbook sales. As much as gaining knowledge of student purchasers is important to publishers in their drive to form long term learning relationships, institutions also realize the value of this information and will not be interested in stepping out of the chain.

OCLC Report: Libraries at Webscale

2011-12-12T23:30:00.000-05:00

OCLC have released a report they've been working on this year looking at the impact of the web on our rapidly changing information environment. I was asked to participate as an interviewee, which I found intellectually stimulating, and I'm looking forward to reading the full report (79 pages).

Here is a summary of the purpose of the study and report:

The document examines some of the ways in which the Web has impacted information seeking, and how new cloud-based, Webscale services are now at the center of many users’ educational and learning lives. This document contains views of library leaders and insights from trend watchers who write about the future of the Web.
Included are short essays that express the views of:

Leslie Crutchfield, author, speaker and leading authority on scaling social innovation and high-impact philanthropy

Thomas L. Friedman, reporter and columnist, and author of The World Is Flat and That Used to Be Us

Seth Godin, Internet marketing pioneer and author of We Are All Weird

Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Vice President of Research and Enterprise, and Dean of the Graduate Research School, Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Ireland

Steven Berlin Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Kevin Kelly, cofounder and Senior Maverick of Wired magazine

James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian at Columbia University

Findings from The European Commission on Information Society and Media (ERCIM) on the how cloud computing is impacting the Web

The OCLC Global Council on the challenges and opportunities facing libraries today and in 2016

We interviewed dozens of library leaders about the future of libraries and key challenges and opportunities they face today and will face in 2016. Their ideas and quotes are presented and distilled in the report and to provide specific thoughts as to the need for “radical cooperation” in library services. Librarians from a wide variety of library types, across a worldwide geography were consulted. Surprisingly, though, their top concerns and aspirations were often in agreement, regardless of library size, location and type.

Download the full report here.

Pearson Rakes in $700MM from FTSE Sale

2011-12-12T11:50:00.000-05:00

Pearson continues to shed non-core assets announcing today that they have sold their 50% interest in FTSE International Limited to The London Stock Exchange. As they have done in the recent past, the company appears to have secured very good value from the divestiture. Over the past two years, Pearson has quietly restructured their business, selling non-core businesses at high multiples, reorganizing internally and buying new businesses that expand their content distribution and service capabilities.

From the press release:

FTSE is a world-leader in the creation and management of more than 200,000 equity, bond and alternative asset class indices. With offices in London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Madrid, Milan, Mumbai, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Sydney and Tokyo, FTSE works with partners and clients in 80 countries worldwide.

Pearson and London Stock Exchange Group currently each own 50% of FTSE. Under the terms of the agreement, London Stock Exchange Group will acquire from Pearson the 50% of FTSE that it does not own and continue to use the FTSE name. The transaction is expected to close by the first quarter of 2012.

In 2010, FTSE reported total revenues of £98.5 million and total EBITDA of £40 million. At 31 December 2010, FTSE had gross assets of £100.8m.

Pearson expects FTSE to make a total post-tax contribution to Pearson’s adjusted earnings of approximately £18 million or 2.2p per share in 2011.

The transaction follows the sale of Pearson’s stake in Interactive Data last year for $2bn. It marks Pearson’s exit from companies that are primarily providers of financial data and strengthens the FT Group’s focus on global business news, analysis and intelligence, increasingly delivered through subscription models and digital channels.

In her quote CEO Majorie Scardino emphasized that the sale will enable the company to continue their strategy of buying digital and service oriented businesses that compliment their core businesses. “For Pearson, the transaction further strengthens our financial position at a time of significant macroeconomic turbulence. We are freeing up capital for continued investment in a proven strategy: becoming more digital, more international and more service-oriented in education, business information and consumer publishing.”

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 50): Khan Academy, Academic Libraries, Harvard Business School, Consumer Reports + More

2011-12-11T19:07:00.001-05:00

An interesting profile of The Khan Academy and its founder Salman Khan from Inside Higher Ed and what is most interesting is less the videos than the opportunity to provide assessment tools that monitor and measure comprehension. (IHEd):

One root of the problem is the fact that the college degree is issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential, says Khan, who holds four degrees himself. This is tantamount to investment banks rating their own securities, he says. Meanwhile, the accrediting agencies that are in charge of making sure those “ratings” are legitimate do not currently focus on what students coming out of those institutions measurably know.

That is why, when an audience member at Khan’s Future of State Universities talk asked whether Khan Academy was interested in credentialing, its tutor-in-chief answered with an enthusiastic yes-but. Khan told Inside Higher Ed that he does not want to turn his free, online trove -- whose 2,700 videos could theoretically be organized into course-length sequences -- into a credential-granting institution. What he does want to do is advocate for the creation and mainstreaming of credential-granting institutions that exist wholly separate (“decoupled,” in Khan-speak) from the institutions (including his) that do the teaching.

In Khan’s ideal world, this would mean an independent third party that tests specific competencies and awards credentials corresponding to knowledge areas in which a student can demonstrate mastery -- like the MCAT or standardized tests like a bar exam for calculus, physics, or computer science. “It would be much more useful, speaking as employer, if they show they’re just at the top of the charts on a certain skill set that we really want,” he said.

Barbara Fister writing in Inside Higher Ed questions whether more public space in academic libraries is what students really want ( IHEd)

Though the conventional wisdom these days about library spaces is that students want to be social, that group work and collaboration are how kids learn today, and that digital texts and digital tools will get used but printed collections won’t, students often disagree.I’ve heard more librarians talk about student demands for quiet and solitary spaces for study in the past year, perhaps because the information commons idea has become so standard it’s no longer an innovation. Recently a small group of students at the University of New Brunswick protested because their spiffy new library was too noisy, too public, and the books were squirreled away at the periphery. It wasn’t clear from the article that students wanted to read the books, but they wanted a quiet, serious place to study, and books were part of their idea of such a place.

A recent Project Information Literacy study found that students minimize technology use and try to unplug from their overly distracting social networks when working on projects or studying for exams. Last month, a couple of student speakers at a symposium on the future of the academic library went even further. They yearned to be disconnected at times, and speculated that if a section of the library was purposefully taken off the grid, with no wifi and no computers, it would be the most popular site on campus for stressed students who needed to focus and get things done. I just noticed that the most recent issue of American Libraries has an essay proposing that libraries consider having gadget-free zones. Ironically, the print copy comes with a QR code you can use to retrieve the essay online.

From The Economist, Harvard Business School is experimenting with a different model for teaching students (Economist):

Long before he became dean, Mr Nohria lamented the failure of business schools to fulfil their mission of turning management into a profession similar to law or medicine. Asked what should be expected from someone with an MBA, he replies that “obviously, they should master a body of knowledge. But we should also expect them to apply that knowledge with some measure of judgment.” MBA students have long been sent on summer internships with prospective employers, but HBS, like most business schools, did little else to help them with the practical application of management studies.

What happens in the second year of the new course is still being worked out. But the first year has three elements. First, team-building exercises. Students take turns to lead a group engaged in a project such as designing an “eco-friendly sculpture”. They learn to collaborate and to give and take feedback. These exercises are loosely based on ones used in the US army.

Second, students will be sent to work for a week with one of more than 140 firms in 11 countries. Already the new intake have had conference calls with these companies, ranging from the Brazilian soapmaker to a Chinese property firm, and gone off-campus to conduct product-development “dashes” like the one in Copley Mall. This sort of structured learning-by-doing is a world away from HBS’s traditional encouragement of students to “go on an adventure” outside of classes.

The NYT takes a look at how Consumer Reports is doing on the web. Not particularly insightful the numbers are interesting however ( NYT):

Consumer Reports started its Web site in 1997; by 2001, it had 557,000 subscribers. That number has grown to 3.3 million this year, an increase of nearly 500 percent in 10 years. It has more than six times as many digital subscribers as The Wall Street Journal, the leader among newspapers.

And in August, Consumer Reports started generating more revenue from digital subscriptions than from print — a feat that must make it the envy of the print world struggling to make that transition. Even more amazingly, Consumer Reports has enjoyed success on the Web without losing print subscribers — those have held steady since 2001 at around four million.

“Five years ago, the Web site was just the magazine put online, word for word,” says Kevin McKean, Consumer Reports’ editorial director. Formerly, products were tested in batches, but today testing occurs whenever a new model is released. Results are quickly available online, instead of being held up for the once-a-year roundup of reviews of a particular product category in the magazine.

From the Twitter:

OCLC WorldShare Platform: OCLC Brands and Strengthens Its Webscale Strategy (Link)

Novice Monks on a Boat, Bangkok

2011-12-09T18:53:00.001-05:00

Novice Monks on a Boat - Chao Phaya, Bangkok 2001

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

It's all hustle and bustle on this river that flows through Bangkok and there are all manner of ferries and passenger boats chis-crossing the river in all directions. It's certainly not uncommon to be on one of these ferries standing next to one or a group of these young men wrapped in their golden robes while you both admire the intense activity all around you.

Most boys receive religious education in Thailand and when they turn 20 they are eligible for ordination. Temporary ordination is the norm among Thai Buddhists, and most young men traditionally ordain for the term of a single rainy season and then return to lay life and go on to marry and raise a family.

BISG Policy Statement on ISBN Usage

2011-12-07T16:29:00.001-05:00

The Book Industry Study Group after long deliberation and incredibly astute consulting has announced its policy recommendation for the use of ISBNs for digital products (Press Release):

This BISG Policy Statement on recommendations for identifying digital products is applicable to content intended for distribution to the general public in North America but could be applied elsewhere as well. The objective of this Policy Statement is to clarify best practices and outline responsibilities in the assignment of ISBNs to digital products in order to reduce both confusion in the market place, and the possibility of errors.

Some of the organizations which have indicated support of POL-1101 include:

BookNet Canada

National Information Standards Organization (NISO)

IBPA, the Independent Book Publishers Association

CLICK HERE to download

Close readers of this blog will recall the work done by the identification committee of BISG:

In the spring of 2010, BISG's Identification Committee created a Working Group to research and gather data around the practice of assigning identifiers to digital content throughout the US supply chain. "The specific mandate of the Working Group was to gather a true picture of how the US book supply chain was handling ISBN assignments, and then formulate best practice recommendations based on this pragmatic understanding," said Angela Bole, BISG's Deputy Executive Director. "Around 60 unique individuals and 40 unique companies participated in the effort. It was a truly collaborative learning process."

Noted Phil Madans, Director of Publishing Standards and Practices for Hachette Book Group and Chair of the Committee in charge of developing the Policy Statement, "It was quite a challenge to bring some measure of consistency and clarity to what our research revealed to be so chaotic and confused that some even reported thinking ISBN assignment should be optional--a 'nice to have'. This, clearly, would not work."

The initial consulting report was discussed publicly about 12mths ago and I summarized that presentation in this post from January 17, 2011.

These were the summary conclusions from that presentation:

There is wide interpretation and varying implementations of the ISBN eBook standard; however, all participants agree a normalized approach supported by all key participants would create significant benefits and should be a goal of all parties.

Achieving that goal will require closer and more active communication among all concerned parties and potential changes in ISBN policies and procedures. Enforcement of any eventual agreed policy will require commitment from all parties; otherwise, no solution will be effective and, to that end, it would be practical to gain this commitment in advance of defining solutions.

Any activity will ultimately prove irrelevant if the larger question regarding the identification of electronic (book) content in an online-dominated supply chain (where traditional processes and procedures mutate, fracture and are replaced) is not addressed. In short, the current inconsistency in applying standards policy to the use of ISBNs will ultimately be subsumed as books lose structure, vendors proliferate and content is atomized.

Corporate Blogging

2011-12-06T16:20:00.000-05:00

A rehash originally from September 21, 2006:

As boss you are always worried - at least you should be - that your message is getting out to the troops. Getting this out to them and having them embody it is always a challenge. Having quarterly company wide get togethers is great if you can pull it off. I was lucky to do it once every six months even with a small company. The CEO blog is becoming an effective mechanism for not only presenting the corporate strategy and goals but also the person behind the big desk. CNN recently published this article on corporate blogging and Mr. Charkin is getting quite a reputation. While I didn't start this blog while I was at Bowker, I wish I had because it could have been an effective communication tool. While I spent most of my day with my staff, communication at the level of status meetings and product development discussions can be disjointed and somewhat out of context to the strategy. The type of corporate communication you strive for should be integrated, coherent and concise to be ingested and internalized by the staff. It can often be hard to attain this when you are dealing with the minutia in a editorial or IT status meeting. Offering a perspective on the big picture puts the daily activities in perspective which is what the CEO can do as king of the mountain. A blog entry once or twice a week can bring clarity to what everyone is striving for.

The other aspect of blogging is that is can be personal - Richard recently mentioned his cricket team's closing match and Karen Christensen (also mentioned by CNN) discusses all types of things that aren't strictly related to her publishing company. For staff, this makes their boss more human. You can't have a personal relationship with every employee but it is interesting how much commonality exists across the levels of an organization. Blogging if used as a pseudo-corporate communication method has to be kept up and it also should have some standards - good (not perfect) punctuation and no swearing. It wouldn't be terribly funny for the boss to be written for creating a hostile work environment via their blog. There is the confidentiality aspect which some PR departments are concerned about which is legitimate but I would hope blogging CEOs know enough about what they can say publicly or what they should be cagey about.

Bowker is a private company, but early on in my tenure I was paranoid about email messages from me getting to our competitors since there was so much inter mingling of staff over the years; however, as the years went by we were doing so many more interesting and positive things that I ceased to care. I am more surprised that more CEOs don't do this - maybe it has to do with more mundane matters such as an inability to write coherently in a free form manner.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 49) Revamping GED, HS Corporate Marketing, Book Blogging, Pretty Books + More

2011-12-04T01:35:00.000-05:00

The GED test is being revamped (EdWeek):

Situating the GED as a pathway to higher education echoes its original intent. The first exams, in 1942, were envisioned as a way for returning World War II veterans to complete high school and use the GI Bill to attend college. In 1949, the first year statistics are available for nonmilitary test-takers, 39,000 people took one or more of the five sections of the test: reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies. By 2010, that number had risen to 750,000.

The GED is widely used as a high-school-completion tool by those in the military and in prisons, and by dropouts who are too old for the public school system. Although one-quarter of those who take the test are 16 to 18 years old, the typical GED candidate is 26, has completed 10th grade, and has been out of school nine years, according to ACE data.

But while the test has helped thousands move forward, it is dogged by criticism that it doesn’t reflect high-school-level achievement. Officials in New York City, for instance, said last December that the passing score reflects only middle-school-level content and skills. The city is helping pilot a new, accelerated GED curriculum and accompanying supports in a subdistrict of alternative schools.

Even as the GED is overhauled, scholars continue to debate its value.

Report looks at the connection between corporatism and educating children (NonProfit Quarterly)

If you haven’t been around schools and schoolchildren recently, get ready for some stomach-wrenching corporate curricula:

Shell‘s “Energize your Future” curriculum, which reimagines the oil industry behemoth as a leader in alternative energy technologies.

American Coal Foundation’s “The United States of Energy” fourth-grade curriculum, which is quite favorable, not surprisingly, to coal mining and use.

Coal Education Development and Resource’s (CEDAR) curriculum, which encourages coal use and students’ participation in regional “coal fairs.”

Kohl’s department stores’ “Kohl’s Cares for Schools” campaign promoted awarding $500,000 to the 20 schools that got the most votes on Facebook—and everyone who voted found themselves on Kohl’s mailing lists for promotions and advertisements.

Education Funding Partners (EFP) is marketing to schools to sell the naming rights to school cafeterias and auditoriums to corporations such as Apple and Adidas.

Here’s the kicker for all of us in the nonprofit world. Some of the corporate marketing is cloaked in the garb of corporate charitable partnerships (for example, the Kohl’s competition). Some of the marketing is carried out by nonprofit affiliates of the corporate interests (for example, the American Coal Foundation and CEDAR, both 501(c)(3)s). And some of the corporate marketers are corporations whose partnerships for schools and other causes are often lauded as standout examples of corporate philanthropy—Microsoft, Disney, Nike, Google, etc.

Is book blogging dead is the question asked by Jacket Copy (LATimes) in response to a email blast from William Morrow:

"Message is essentially: if you don't review enough of the books we send you, in the timeframe we want you to, you're out," Rebecca Joines Schinsky tweeted Thursday. Schinsky, who writes and edits The Book Lady's Blog, is one of the leaders of the latest generation of committed book bloggers.

"Can you imagine them sending this to Horn Book or The NYTimes?" added Pam Coughlin, who blogs at MotherReader.

Many publishers enthusiastically send books to bloggers, and today's book blogger may rake in free books like leaves after a windy fall day. But it wasn't always that way.
When blogging about first began, publishers, like many other long-established businesses, looked at the form with justifiable skepticism. If just anyone could start a blog, what role could bloggers have?

Eventually, that skepticism faded. People who like to read books, it turns out, were reading things on the Internet. Those things included blogs. They included book blogs. As time passed, many early book bloggers, many of whom focused on literary titles, moved on to other things -- book reviewing, publishing short stories, writing novels, even writing for newspapers.

Two articles about beautiful books from the NYTimes:

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.

“When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,” said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. “It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.”

The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, “1Q84,” arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, “11/22/63,” has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir “Decoded” features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect.

And from the Guardian:

Publishers have started building their marketing strategies around form rather than content. The Everyman Library, which is coming up to the 20th anniversary of its modern relaunch, makes much of its books' elegant two-colour case stamping, silk ribbon markers and "European-style" half-round spines. In 2009, to celebrate its 80th birthday, Faber republished a collection of its classic poetry hardbacks illustrated with exquisite wood and lino cuts by contemporary artists. Not to be outdone, Penguin will next year be reissuing 100 classic novels in its revamped English Library series in what its press release describes as "readers' editions". What other sort could there be, you might wonder? The press release elaborates that these will be "books you will want to collect and share, admire and hold; books that celebrate the pure pleasure of reading". Translated into the material realm, this means cover designs that pay their respects to the classic orange spine of the original Penguin English Library, but modify its iconic "grid" in order to luxuriate in whole-cover retro prints.

It is not just the big publishing conglomerates that are paying more attention to the way their products look. Several boutique outfits have recently been established dedicated explicitly to making beautiful books. Full Circle and Unbound are just two, founded by the veteran publishing stars Liz Calder and John Mitchinson respectively. In their new incarnations as producers of exquisitely crafted books, Calder and Mitchinson spend more time than they probably ever did when they were helping to run companies including Bloomsbury and Orion pondering such arcane matters as cloth-slip covers, numbered limited editions, artwork that really is art, and paper so creamy you long to lick it.

From my colleagues at SharedBook/AcademicPub some articles that garnered their interest:

Dr. Justin Marquis talks about the difference between "custom" textbooks and custom textbooks.

Richard Byrne points to an open math supplement, which reminded us that one of the benefits of using a custom text is that you can choose your own supplements from anywhere on the internet (or even create your own).

Nelly DeSa, a student, writes about the Textbook Pinch.

And finally Ken Ronkowitz at Serendipity35 asks if your students are buying the textbook...

From the twitter:

Thomson Reuters chief Glocer makes his exit http://tgam.ca/DI0Z

Save the UK's libraries? It's beyond me, admits US guru - UK - Independent

Pippa Middleton's Sudden Fame Syndrome:

2011-11-29T20:14:00.001-05:00

Pippa Middleton gets £400,000 for a party planning book. Amusing assessment from the Independent :

The party tome is a classic Sudden Fame Cash-In Book, a low-brow genre even less dignified than the celebrity memoir. Whereas the latter tends to appear towards the end of a lengthy entertainment career, the former tends to be rushed out in haste soon after the author's first exposure to the public's gaze, for fear that their appeal may not survive the year.

The most recent example is Nancy Dell'Olio, who announced two weeks ago that she is to write a "lovers' guide" (with pictures of herself in saucy knickers). Ms Dell'Olio was known for years only as the hyper-maquillaged Italian girlfriend of the England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, but her celebrity was fast-tracked by her appearance on this year's Strictly Come Dancing.

An earlier example of the cash-in author, someone persuaded to produce a book despite having no particular talent or subject, was Christine Hamilton. Known only for her on-camera handbagging of Martin Bell during the 1997 election campaign, when he stood against her husband, Neil Hamilton, she was ridiculed by the press as a classic Tory harridan and Home Counties termagant. So, following the famous advice that when it's raining lemons you make lemonade, she published The Book of British Battleaxes.

MediaWeek (V4 N48): Orwell on Police Actions, Dickens and Economist Book Festival + More

2011-11-27T04:29:00.000-05:00

Conor Friedersdorf writing in The Atlantic asks What Orwell Can Teach us About OWS and Police Brutality

In Burma, Orwell remembers, every British police officer was a target of constant ridicule. "When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter," he writes. "This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves." The next passage captures what it is like to be a man trapped in a system you wouldn't have chosen and don't particularly like:

I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically - and secretly, of course - I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos - all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East...

All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest's guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
Perhaps you know the rest of the story. Orwell gets a call about a mad elephant stampeding through the village. It killed one man. Being the officer in charge, he is expected to do something.

I am sure Niall Ferguson could find a silver lining in there somewhere (Guardian)

An exhibition at the British library makes the claim the Dickens stole a ghost story from a rival (Guardian):

Exhibition tells how Charles Dickens was spooked by ghost tale doppelganger: Bicentennial show at British Library says rival accused Dickens of plagiarism but author said he was amazed by story similarities.

The Economist running a books festival in combination with their annual book of the year round-up. (Economist):

The process starts in mid-November when we e-mail all our reviewers, soliciting their advice. This year, for the first time, we also ran a competition among our readers on Facebook.
The rules are simple: to be included a book needs to have been published in English between January 1st and December 31st 2011.

A handful have already been selected to feature in The Economist’s first “Books of the Year” festival at London’s SouthBank Centre. Among these is “A History of the World in 100 Objects” by Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, which began as a radio programme early in 2010; a new edition of the book is out this month. Also appearing will be Edmund de Waal, who opens the festival with a new illustrated edition of his bestselling family memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes”.

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