As the new Marketing Manager at TSTC Publishing, I understand the need to use the latest technology to reach the masses. I embraced e-mail, desktop publishing (or pagination in newspaper circles), and love Facebook so why am I so reluctant to blog?

Now my new job description actually dictates that I learn to blog and blog often. I’m not even going to try to analyze my blog-phobia. Suffice to say, I spent years, yes, decades telling the tales of others. I came up through the newspaper ranks when objective reporting was just that. We weren’t to give our view of anything unless it was through an editorial. When I became a newspaper editor, I faced the same type of phobia. How do you give out your opinions freely when you’ve been trained to be objective, fair and unbiased?

Now, I’m blogging about the whole process of blogging. For the record, I haven’t got into the texting mode, either. On the one hand, I think it’s great that everyone is returning to the written word after spending mindless generations in front of the tube, that frankly no longer even has a tube in it. Remember when you turned off the TV, and the picture went away slowly until there was only a pinpoint of light remaining? And why did we have to watch that pinpoint until it wasn’t there at all? It also was way too exciting to stay up until the stations signed off on the air at midnight. Now, we’re inundated 24/7. OK, back to blogging.

Or maybe this is enough of a post for a first attempt. Who’s to say how long a post should really be? I’ve said my piece, and now I’m done. Why prolong the agony?

Sheila

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Blogging has been light lately; then again, blogging has been intentionally light for a while as we rethink exactly what audience we both want to reach and serve with this site. However, one thing we have been wanting to do for a while now is get feedback on different cover designs that the graphics interns work up in the office for different projects. To that end, our first experiment with trying this out are some cover roughs our second semester graphics intern Adam Chumley has come up with for a datebook/planner we have in the works.

This project came about because one of the bookstores we work with asked us if we could do a custom datebook for them so we’re taking a stab at it. Datebooks aren’t really anything we’ve done before but as a publisher it seems pretty attractive in one sense: there are only about half a dozen different page styles that just get updated for each month. The usual caveats apply: these are just cover roughs, nothing is set and stone, and, of course, all final designs have to get approval from the appropriate places and so on.

So, with no further ado (other than my apologies in advance for the wonky alignment of the images), here are your five designs (click on the thumbnails to see larger versions) to vote on below:

Label Maker Cover

'60s Psychedelic Cover

Rollerball Gears Cover

Texas Flag Cover

Space Age Cover

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Of course, we’d also like to get feedback from folks about why they liked one design over another or particular elements in designs that they like or don’t like so much. If you’ll take the time to leave a comment below after voting, one lucky commenter will be chosen at random to receive a copy of The TSTC 40th Anniversary Cookbook.

Adam (and I) thank you in advance for your feedback,

Mark

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Just as soon as I did my last post about Issuu, a documenting sharing Web site that we’ve started doing some book previews on, I almost immediately came across Scribd, another site that provides the same basic kinds of online publishing services. I haven’t been able to find exact user/member/subscriber figures for Issuu, but supposedly Scribd is the largest of these sites with +50 million users and 50K documents being uploaded every day. So, I thought I would upload some of the same materials we’d put on Issuu and then track the results to see which one was generating the most views/traffic.

For the purposes of comparison, I’m only using view numbers from files on both sites:

On the one hand, it wasn’t  much of a battle—even with Issuu having a head start as we uploaded all these files there longer ago—as Scribd easily generated the most traffic (that is, in terms of document views). On the other hand, what does it actually add up to? By tracking click throughs—the number of people who went to our e-commerce site from the Scribd page for a particular book—I know that we didn’t generate a single sale from the exponentially greater amount of Scribd views. This confirms something I have long believed but have had much trouble explaining to other folks about their pet publishing projects: people will look at and/or download all kinds of stuff that they absolutely would not pay a single cent for. It’s the classic marketing dilemma: it’s not a matter of how many eyes see your product, it’s a matter of getting your product in front of the eyes that might actually buy it.

Most of our current titles with significant sales are textbooks that generate revenue through adoptions—that is, an instructor chooses to use it for a class being taught—and I’m just not sure how many instructors are cruising Scribd or Issuu looking for new texts for classes. In general, instructors get more than enough info directly from textbook publishers by way of sales reps, direct mail pieces and catalogs, and booth in conference exhibit halls. I wouldn’t say the Scribd-Issuu experiment has been a great failure or anything–after all, you never can tell when all that traffic may generate some key hit somewhere—but I would certainly encourage the tempering of enthusiasm with the idea that there is a direct correlation of traffic = money. Plus, the case of Issuu, whose viewer I like better than Scribd, we are using it at our e-commerce site so people who make it there can see samples from our books.

Another issue, though, relating to these sites is piracy. For example, if you use the search term “grisham” at Issuu you will almost immediately—this morning, at least—come across a pirated version of John Grisham’s The Broker, uploaded by eddypedro over a year ago on February 8, 2008. A similar search at Scribd shows that many pirated Grisham books have been removed but, at the same time, it’s still simple enough to find the full version of The Street Lawyer uploaded on October 9, 2008, by api_user_11797_kushdude58. For me, it comes down to a kind of philosophical dilemma . . . do you really want to use a service from—or be associated with—a company that allows piracy? Yes, I know both these companies will say they do everything they can to prevent it. They will say when publishers request it offending files will be taken offline. But, I mean, really, one of these Grisham books has been up over a year, the other one more than six months, and you’re telling me that there’s no program/filter/protocol for finding these copyright violating materials any sooner or more easily? After all, I can go to a doctor who has treated me perfectly well but if she/he lets prescription pads periodically “walk off” is that a doctor I want to use? Do I want to frequent a bar that consistently lets underage kids drink there under the guise of “well, they looked old enough” or looking the other way when some crappy fake ID is presented? There is certainly a place for document sharing sites on the Web, but as a publisher I’m pretty leery of how these services are being misused, especially in terms of the actual return they do (or don’t) provide.

[UPDATE #1: Since this post was completed this morning, the pirated version of The Broker at Issuu has been taken down although the account of the user who uploaded it is still active. See, that's one of the things I just don't get. It's not just some tragic accident/misunderstanding that Grisham's book wound up online---it's illegal!---so why does that user seemingly get a pass on this?]

[UPDATE #2: In the hour or so since my first update to this post, The Street Lawyer at Scribd is now down as well.]

Mark

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One of the things that we’ve been looking for lately is a good online book previewer to integrate into the individual product pages at our e-commerce site (as well as using elsewhere as applicable). The first good application I remember coming across like this was Amazon.com’s system. Another one is used by National Academies Press. Both these systems, though, are proprietary and what we needed was a system that was robust enough for our purposes and, because we don’t have tons of money for a new stand-alone application or one off the shelf, at the right price.

Thankfully, I think we’ve finally found what we’re looking for with Issuu.

As described on its Web site, Issuu allows you to publish documents online via their platform for free. (While there is an Issuu Pro option, the basic level is working well for us.) Some representative examples of what gets uploaded there include:

• Magazines (Blush)
• Catalogs (Architecture 2008)
• Newspapers (HCC Times)

From what I’ve seen through an informal, not scientific, assessment book publishers are using Issuu primarily for book catalogs. But there’s no reason not to use it for more. So far, in addition to uploading our catalog, we’ve also used Issuu’s sharing capabilities regarding printing/downloading to utilize the following options:

• Full text, downloadable & printable—(TSTC 40th Anniversary Cookbook, Shelbert Goes to Summer Camp)
• Full text, no download or printing—(biotechnology, nanotechnology, home technology integration, fuel cell, and gaming technology forecasts)
• Table of contents & sample chapter, downloadable and printable—(Biomed TechCareers, Contemporary Math Using Maple and TI-89, Installing & Administering MS Windows Server Operating Systems and others)

(Plus, we’re beginning to link to these previews from individual product pages at our e-commerce site. For example, there’s a link at the Taking Charge page under the jpeg of the cover that goes directly to here.)

Anyway, overall it seems to be working pretty well as we’ve uploaded previews and/or full text of many of our titles with the rest coming in the near future at our Issue page. I will say that we looked pretty long and hard at Google Books but it was going to be to harder to integrate with the software at our e-commerce site. (And besides, do Google and Amazon.com have to be source of everything that is innovative and new!?!) Plus, Issuu just seemed to be the easiest to get started with. That being said, of course, once we get this first set of previews done Google Books is next, especially given that the book info there has links that go directly to booksellers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, Books-A-Million, Borders, and Indiebound.

This is all thanks to Sarah-Jane Sanders over at marketing & communications here on campus at TSTC Waco. A while back I was kvetching once again about my inability to find a good book previewer application—after all, as Marge Simpson says “It’s easy to be critical” while Homer follows up with “And it’s fun too”—but it’s thanks to her pointing out that TSTC Harlingen has been using Issuu for a while—for example, putting their college catalog online—that we’ve actually got a solution.

Mark

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I’ll be the first to admit that personally I’m a pretty slow adopter of new technologies. I finally broke down and bought a cell phone barely two years ago (if it was even that far back). Until last year ago I still had my $9.95 a month dial-up Internet service. I’ve yet to hold a Kindle, much less read a book on one. A big part of it is that it’s hard to tell exactly what the Next Big Thing is vs. just the Next Big Hype and what’s worth your time vs. just being a waste of time. Plus, when talking about tech gadgets or Web-based applications, you have the tech geeks who love anything as long as it’s the absolutely newest thing around however impractical, convoluted, and/or nonsensical it may be. (In fact, they’ll love it all the more for being exactly those things.) Then you have your average (that is, normal) person who likes new applications/gadgets that are both simple and powerful.

Falling into this latter category, I will happily admit, is Twitter, which we got one of our authors, Terry Cooper (better known as The Texas RV Professor), set up on this week.

What is Twitter? It’s a micro-blogging service—you can write posts, or “tweets” as they are called, up to (but not over) 140 characters—where your updates go to people who choose to “follow” you. Plus, you get the tweets of those you follow. And . . . that’s really just about it. I guess I first heard about Twitter around a year and a half ago and I didn’t really get it. I mean, 140 characters? What was I (or anyone else) going to write? “Got up, read paper, slapped on the happy face and went to work”? (For those counting, that would be 62 characters inside the quotation marks.) I remember being at the Publishing Business Conference a year ago listening to social networking evangelist Joe Pulizzi from Junta42 saying Twitter was going to be the next big thing. Even he admitted that he wasn’t sure why (or what it was really good for) . . . but he could tell—savvy New Media Guy that he is—that it was really starting to take off for whatever the reason. Finally, thanks to Sarah-Jane Sanders who kept extolling its virtues (or @sj_sanders as she is known in Twitterland) we got set up on it last summer. Anyway, for more of our take on Twitter, take a look at this post at The Publishing Trends Blog.

So, back to the Texas RV Professor. Terry and I (along with Jazzy Films’ Bruce Carbonara) had lunch on Monday and I told him that I had set up a Twitter account for him he should start using. At first—much like I had been—he didn’t really see the usefulness it as we went over how it worked back at the office that afternoon. But, hey, that was 4 days ago. Since then Terry (as @TX_RV_Professor) has made 14 tweets, is following 356 people, and is being followed by 250 people (or “tweeps” as they are known in Twitter parlance). In comparison, @tstcpublishing, twittering since August 2008, has made 394 posts, is following 125, and is being followed by 175.

The numbers themselves, though, are not particularly that revealing per se; instead, it’s a matter of figuring out what your goal is on Twitter and the most effective ways to integrate yourself into the community. Right off the bat there is a big difference between us and Terry: we typically use Twitter to follow publishing industry people in a variety of areas whereas he wants to network with RV industry professionals as well as all those RVers out on the road. But the general rules—as I see it—for being a responsible member in your own Twitter network are still the same for both us and him and fall into four basic categories:

1. Retweeting: This is when you repost an update from another Twitter user so that it goes out to all of your own followers. Twitter is social networking. It’s not all about what you have to say; it’s also about paying attention to what your followers have to say and passing on the good information that you come across.
2. Responding: This is when you make a comment to another Tweeter’s update. Once again, it’s not all about expecting people to listen to you. Hey! It’s a dialogue, not a monologue! You have to show that you’re engaged in the conversation that’s going on so that people will be willing to be engaged with what you’re saying.
3. Posting Your Own Info: Certainly, though, Twitter is not just about rehashing/reposting everybody else’s information. You do need to provide those links, facts, and news that will appeal to the network you’re building and a part of. You have to be able to contribute something new and useful on a regular basis.
4. Showing Who You Are: I think the informal, impromptu, and casual vibe that Twitter has really requires that you post information that demonstrates who you are at a personal level. Sure, we read the updates of people we follow but equally interesting (and engaging) are the facts that make them individuals, not just informational ticker tapes. It’s like what I used to tell my composition students about writing essays: facts are convincing but facts alone can be boring while anecdotes are interesting but not persuasive so if you can get a good balance of the two you can be convincing and interesting.

Another major ingredient to all this is using a third-party Twitter application to make your updates (and those of your followers) easier to keep organized. Personally, I like TweetDeck. (Note: in the time it’s taken me to write the last couple of paragraphs, Terry has picked up 2 new followers, bringing his total to 252.) TweetDeck allows you to break out all of your followers into different groups to break out all the updates you get. Plus, you can set up a group that shows all the tweets everywhere (not just those from your tweeps) with a specific search term in them: cats, TSTC, RV, or whatever.

And it’s this last thing—searching for Twitterers who are posting on the same topics you’re interested in no matter what they may be (for us it’s publishing, for Terry it’s RVers)—that’s really key. That is, you get a lot of people on Twitter who will follow anyone hoping to get them to follow in return just to get their total number of followers as high as possible. (These people are also know as folks who need to GET A LIFE.) I mean, what’s the point? If this is who you  are, you’re not paying any attentions to your followers, they’re not paying any attention to you, and it’s all a pointless exercise. But, if you choose to align yourself with those you actually have a primary interest in common with, see who their followers are that might also might make for a good connection, you can build a network that has real value, egages in meaningful communication, and builds knowledge among its members instead of just being a bunch of people standing jostling around in a room shouting at each other while never listening.

(One final note: Terry has picked up two more followers so that he’s now at 254. Then again, we’ve picked up another one since I started this post so we’re doing our best to keep pace at 176.)

Mark

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Week before last it was time for the annual Texas Community College Teachers Association (TCCTA) Conference that was held this year in Austin, Texas. This was the third year in a row we’ve exhibited there and it was familiar yet still interesting. (Odds and ends of photos can be found here.) In the exhibit hall we visited with folks from the various TSTC colleges as well as with other people we’ve come to know from Cengage, Norton, American Technical Publishers, and Hampden.

A personal highlight was tagging along to a dinner that Thursday night with Dr. Eric Foner, historian extraordinaire, while, in a more practical sense, the most helpful (and surprising) thing that happened was my wife showing up unannounced in the exhibit hall Saturday morning with a couple of IKEA tall chairs for me and Lindsey to use. That is, if you sit in a regular chair at your booth it tends to make you look slouchy; however, standing on your feet all day is just murder. Murder! Last year we noticed that the president of ATP in the booth next to us used a tall chair—that way you’re at eye level while sitting down when people come up to the booth instead of looking like you’re working a garage sale waiting to make change in nickels for crazy people buying your junk—and we had talked about getting a couple of them; however, it took my blushing bride to actually pull the trigger on that.

Anyway, old home week, dinners, and tall chairs aside, the most interesting new thing I saw in the exhibit hall was the Flat World Knowledge booth.

It’s no secret that that the textbook publishing business is reaching a real point of crisis: prices keep going up, the people who make textbook choices (teachers) are divorced from the reality of prices in relationship to those who buy them (students), and textbook publishers are doing anything they can to kill the used book market for their titles. It’s gotten to where state legislatures—in Texas at least—keep discussing possibilities such as 1) regulating prices and/or 2) dictating how often new adoptions may be made by faculty. Without a doubt the current model for textbook publishing is in trouble. The big question is : What’s to be done about it?

One thing you can do is just lower textbook prices. After all, that’s what we’re doing. Most of our books are in the $30-$50 range with none above $65. Of course, with lower prices there are limitations to the features we can provide: soft-cover textbooks, black and white interiors, and limited student/instructor ancillaries.

Then again, you can try what Flat World Knowledge (a video overview can be seen here) is going for with a wide range of business & marketing titles: textbooks freely available online combined with the options to buy hard copies directly from them (b&w versions for $30 and color versions for $50) along with other student ancillaries (digital flashcards, podcasts, review tests) available individually or in bundled packages. Also, they’re using print-on-demand so that’s reducing inventory and storage costs, especially those costs for books that might never actually get sold as can easily happen when printing large offset runs.

At first this complete reversal of the textbook publishing model—after all, textbook adoptions traditionally drive sales with free ancillaries helping to convince faculty to select a particular title—seems pretty counter intuitive. In particular, I was immediately wondering how authors make money if their books are given away for free? Plus, given my first question, where is it that these books are coming from?

Authors, it turn out, make a 20% royalty on the hard copies and ancillaries sold. (That’s a big leap of faith if there ever was one!) And, although they don’t explicitly say it, it seems from looking at their forthcoming titles that some are new editions that had originally been published in some earlier form by other publishers. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that; however, if a publisher drops a title it’s typically because they have stronger titles in that same area and are culling the weaker titles—sales-wise—from their list.) There are, however, some 100% new titles coming out over the next year. There are some other nice features too: instructors can modify the text of the books they’re using online and if students order a hard copy of the book it will reflect the changes the instructor made. Plus, instructors can re-order chapters in books—as well as, I think, drop chapters out—and in the future should be able mix and match chapters from different books.

One thing Flat World has going for them is that the two main guys behind the company are long-time textbook publishing insiders. With their years of experience they have a pretty thoughtful idea of what they’re doing and why and how they’re doing it. Plus, their site alludes to research done which, in theory, shows that each student in a class using one of their books generates an average of $26 in revenue. Another factor working in their favor is that students wanting a hard copy of a book buy it directly from them as opposed to through their college bookstore. This eliminates bookstore/distributor discounts (typically 25%-55% of retail price) so they’re gaining some financial ground there. Finally, by making textbooks free, they have an easy way to disseminate their product across the Web instead of doing the more laborious (as we’ve learned) task of utilizing outside/inside sales with the endless sending out of desk copies.

So, will it work? I just don’t know. I’m kind of a pessimist at heart—most days I call this being a realist—and I see two big potential stumbling blocks: 1) convincing authors to rely on single-copy (as opposed to bulk adoptions) sales plus additional revenue from ancillaries (especially when it comes to writing a new book from scratch as opposed to revising an out-of-print book they’ve already done the majority of work on) and 2) that students over the long haul really will generate significant amounts of income from single copy and ancillary sales when the text itself is available online. And, as well, I think technology constantly outstrips the desires/abilities of the public at large who are supposed to embrace it. That is, teachers like to use books that are as easy as possible to adopt; I’m not sure most have the time or inclination to be editing a book online for their particular class a la the FWK model. But, I do think it’s certainly an interesting experiment. The free distribution model means plenty of faculty can immediately give their books a shot. And the founders certainly get my kudos for trying something COMPLETELY different as opposed to just applying some cosmetic changes to the current publishing model. For some other people’s take on the FWK model, take a look at the comments at the bottom of this blog post at Wired.

The bigger question is, of course, could this business model work for us? I’d like to say yes but it’s hard to know. On the one hand, given that the majority of our revenue comes from sales within the colleges in the TSTC System, anything that could quickly and widely increase the scale of use of our titles would be great. On the other hand, there are two big issues here: 1) we don’t have, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the kinds of ancillaries Flat World is betting their success on (although, as we’ve realized, we’re got to produce those and are in the process of doing so) and 2) many of our technical titles are still so niche oriented (FWK is certainly targeting a very large market by starting out solely with business and marketing titles) would the investment in said ancillaries make sense financially? (Then again, if any book can’t justify the cost of ancillaries, why publish it at all?)

In one of my few favorite business books Surfing the Edge of Chaos the authors talk at one point about how companies reach certain “fitness peaks” based on a particular business model and to grow from there requires actually becoming less efficient/profitable for a while as they descend from their current fitness peak to climb another (presumably) higher one. So perhaps this is a case where me being a pessimist is at heart really me just being a coward as opposed to it (pessimism) being a synonym (as I suggested above) for realism. Realism, in this case, could wind up being something more in line with the STEOC idea in relationship to with what FWK is doing.

Anyway, to make a long post endless, Flat World Knowledge was by far the most interesting booth I saw at TCCTA this year. I certainly wish them the best of luck. I’ll be watching closely over the next couple of years to see how it all comes out in the wash. As Tom Woll told us last year when he was down, publishing is eventually just a big crap shoot where you place your bets and then sweat it out until you see what happens.

Mark

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Whoosh. What a day: five sessions in a row at The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age at the Annenberg Presidential Conference Center next to the George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M. Overall, though, it was a good day.

First thing this morning I tried to get a wireless connection at the conference center but when that didn’t work I struck up a conversation with a guy sitting in the lobby next to me. Typically, I can contentedly stand in a corner all day at the periphery of a crowd with some kind of dour look on my face that is inherently uninviting so in the interest of “networking”—that is, as I call it, “schmoozing” and/or, as my wife refers to it, “being sociable”—I did my best to break out of that mode.

Thanks to breaking out of my (dis)comfort zone I met Dr. Gerald (Jerry) Vinson, retired TAMU engineering professor, who now travels around in the country with his wife in his RV stopping in at different colleges to sell his self-published engineering text/workbooks. Before that he had published several books through Kendall/Hunt and knew David Pike, the K/H sales rep that we worked with way back when in the TSTC Waco English department when we were putting Techne together, the project that led to the formation of TSTC Publishing. The publishing world . . . big, yet small, all at the same time.

Anyway, all that aside, here’s a brief recap of what got covered today:

“Scholarly Authority in the Age of Abundance: Retaining Algorithmic Relevance in the New Landscape”
Michael J. Jensen

Mike Jensen is the Director of Publishing Technologies at National Academies Press. For anyone who hasn’t seen their Web & e-commerce site, I would highly recommend that you take a look at it. I first came across it when Tom Woll was here last year doing his analysis of our publishing operation and pointed it out as an example of good design as well as pricing in terms of their books, e-books, sections of books, and so on.

Jensen talked about how popularity (that is, high high you are on the Google search results) needs to match actual real-world authority. (A corollary to this is that the more virtual an online world is the more divorced it is from actual empirical reality.) And, as well, academics need to focus on promoting the quality of their work to increase their popularity. (After all, Darth Vader has 36,000 followers on Twitter.) He also emphasized that when it comes to having academics break out of their comfort zone in terms of reaching a lay audience for their work that the technology itself to do this is secondary to “environment of encouragement” at their schools. Finally, as he stated on his final PowerPoint slide, “Shift happens while you’re making other plans.”

I happened to get a chance to talk to Mike after his presentation as he was having a smoke outside to talk about the NAP Web site. In particular, they have a really nice page preview function at it—you can flip through their books on a viewer embedded on the page—and I curious to know if it was their proprietary software or an off-the-shelf product. Sure enough, it’s their software . . . he said they’d thought about making it open source but that it hadn’t happened as yet. There’s a whole cottage industry built around book previewers—some charge you a per book fee for conversion; some are so code intensive I’d never be able to figure it out—but he suggested taking a look at Google Book Search. (D’uh! Everything comes back to Google in the final analysis.) It’s free and it should do what we’ll need so I’ll be taking a look at it in the near future.

“The Harvard Open Access Project”
Stuart M. Shieber

Stuart Shieber is the Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University.

Shieber talked about the Digital Access to Harvard Scholarship (DASH) project where faculty members are being encouraged to submit all their peer-reviewed articles accepted for publication to an Open Access database. Part of his talk dealt with different procedural issues that had cropped up but the most interesting aspect (for me) was when he talked about how a “moral hazard” had been created by faculty requesting journal subscriptions at libraries but having the libraries pay for them. That is, the users (faculty) are divorced from the cost (paid for by the library) so as the price for periodicals spirals upward faculty don’t realize the problem until suddenly the libraries can’t afford journals any more. Of course, the first thing I thought of in relationship to this was textbook pricing: prices keep going up as faculty make adoption choices without regard for the students having to actually pay for them.

“Intellectual Property Rights and the Open Access Movement”
Georgia K. Harper

Georgia Harper is the Scholarly Communications Advisor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Harper is basically a copyright lawyer who deals with intellectual property issues for UT. Given that she’s a lawyer, it was surprising to hear her come out vociferously against the concept of copyright, positing it as an unnecessary monopoly that does nothing to encourage/protect creativity as it was originally designed to do in the 1780s. To be honest, this was the session that I had the most problems with in terms of the message. This was probably because I was already getting worn out by people saying “if somebody would just cover first-round production costs” that Open Access would be great. Well, sure, if. But if you want quality texts–not some self-edited not ready for prime time Lulu.com production–there’s a lot more than just paper, printing, and binding (PPB) to consider. That is, what about the overhead for the folks it takes to do this? It seems like a lot of people outside of publishing seem to think that there’s not much to the mechanics of publishing other than running spellchecker on a Word document and merrily sending it off to the printer. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that’s how Ms. Harper feels about publishing. On the other hand, like I said, I was starting to get worn out about how these myhical “production costs” are the only thing keeping all writing ever done by anyone being available via Open Access policies.

“The Future of University Presses and Other Institutional Publishers”
Michael E. Keller

Michael Keller is the publisher of both Stanford University Press and Highwire Press.

Keller talked a lot about how tenure policies and practices need to change so that e-journal publications can count as heavily as traditional print publishing. Also, in a concrete suggestion for who should pay for “production costs,” he said that tenure committees should underwrite scholarly publishing/journals because there are fewer and fewer outlets for junior profs to get their research out to begin with. He also talked about how e-book/HTML versions of books need to actually create a “new narrative” that incorporates hyperlinks, multimedia, and other digital resources as opposed to just uploading an electronic version of a hard copy (that is, a PDF). He also thinks that more input needs to solicited from actual authors and readers as opposed to presidents, directors, and other administrators who tend to want to impose a top-down to publishing “transformation.”

“Impacts on the Academy of Improved Access to Scholarly Research”
David E. Shulenburger

David Shulenburger is the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASUGC) which is soon to be the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).

Finally, in the last presentation I went to Shulenburger talked about the impact that improving access to scholarly research can have. Sure, faculty can get credibility and tenure. And schools and departments improve their “brand” by increased scholarship and citations of that scholarship by others. But, as he emphasized, people don’t realize what a wall academia has built around itself until you’re off the university campus and are then trying to get access to research. In addition, especially in medical areas, there is a real interest among people being able to do their own research to supplement what their doctors may be telling them. He said the Harvard DASH initiative was a good start but that public universities such as TAMU have an even greater responsibility to make all their research openly (and easily) available.

All in all, an interesting day . As I said earlier this week, we’re not really a university press per se—no original “scholarly” works—but we are part of a school with all the procedural/organizational “challenges” that implies so much of the discussion was relevant. Plus, I think TAMU did a great job of organizing this “Open Access” event. They really put their money where their mouth is; that is, they didn’t talk about free dissemination of information to folks they were charging $400 apiece to attend. Instead, they had a good cross-section of speakers, excellent facilities, and good meals . . . all for no cost to attendees. I’ll be curious to see if they have this again next year and if it’s still free. I certainly hope so.

[UPDATE 3/6/09: Streaming video of all the sessions is now available online here.]

Mark

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Blogging has been light lately—then again, blogging is almost always light—but the last month has been particularly busy with the PR blitz about to kick off for the new RV DVDs and forthcoming RV books. (Certainly, however, it does seem like a million years ago, not just a month, since I had the time/inclination to spend a big chunk of publishing-related energy doing things like editing videos of trips to Abilene.) This next week, though, will be a change of pace as I’ll be attending The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication in the Digital Age conference at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.

As much as trade publishing has been hammered over the last couple of quarters—hardly a day goes by without at least one announcement of layoffs, restructurings, and specific figures about plummeting earnings—university press publishing, both books and journals, is suffering through its own set of crises. There are the financial woes: smaller subsidies from universities and other parties, shrinking acquisition budgets of academic libraries, and declining sales shared by the whole industry. At the time, there is ongoing debate about how to best to implement open access policies for scholarly work while also developing a business model that allows university presses to survive and thrive. Finally, with tenure-track positions requiring numerous publications in refereed journals, there’s the issue of how publications will be rated when there may only be an online/digital edition of a professor’s work.

So, this first annual conference co-sponsored by Texas A&M University Press should be interesting as it has identified the following major topics to be addressed:

1. open access
2. intellectual property rights
3. peer-reviewed electronic journal and book publishing
4. improving access to publicly funded research and the scholarly work of faculty
5. the effects of new scholarly publishing models on the promotion and tenure process
6. how university presses can best contribute and sustain themselves in this changing landscape
7. the best uses of university resources to cover these mission-centered responsibilities and costs
8. the role of the university libraries as institutional repositories and facilitators for faculty scholarship

Our publishing operation is a kind of an unique hybrid—textbook and trade publishing combined—so we don’t fulfill—currently at least—the kind of scholarly mission as university presses. We are, however, in higher ed publishing and part of a larger college system so many of our organizational—read “financial”—concerns do parallel university presses. At the very least after going to the Publishing Business Conference & Expo in March last year this should prove an interesting counterpoint.

Finally, hats off for the conference organizers for having no registration fees to attend. Given the state of everyone’s travel budgets these days, this is a great incentive for people to attend. A detailed program schedule can be found here and speaker info here.

(I’ll try to Twitter updates while I’m there but I refuse to be one of those people who’s tapping away at a Blackberry or some other PDA in a session/meeting oblivious to everything going on around them. I don’t care they’re indicative of millennials taking over the world or not . . . it’s just rude! )

Mark

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So, I finally had one of those moments of clarity that Jules Winnfield talked about in Pulp Fiction and have decided, you know, that there may be something to web video conferencing after all. I think it all occurred last Friday as I left the house at 6:30 in the morning to drive the three hours out to Abilene, be in meetings until about 2:30 and then head back to Waco. Or maybe it was on Saturday as I was making a YouTube video out of Flip camera footage I shot during the drive.

It also used to be more interesting to drive places when I hadn’t followed the route quite so many times. (Two of the TSTC colleges are over three hours from Waco and the third is about seven hours away.) This sort of parallels the way I’ve gotten to feel about staying in hotels/motels. Way back when it always seemed cool and decadent to stay in a hotel . . . kind of like you’re in The Who on tour. But the older I get the more I feel like Howard Hughes and every motel room is just a bigger and bigger Petri dish with some out of control bacterial culture growing in it. I used to drive a lot more often—up to 600 miles a week—when I was adjunct instructor and for a while I  made my peace with it by thinking, gosh, I’m seeing the highways and byways of America like a Led Zeppelin roady on a tour bus. But then one day you realize you’re actually driving on autopilot—cruising down farm-to-market roads faster and faster as you’ve been on them a million times before—and all you really wind up doing is kind of waking up at your destination all dazed with an aching back.

Then again, I always told my comp students that no matter how bored they initially felt about an assignment, the key thing was to make it interesting to themselves . . . and if they could get over that hurdle that things would probably go much more smoothly. So, since I’ve made the drive out to Abilene a ton of times—up Highway 6 to I-20—I thought I’d shoot some video on Friday’s trip. . . especially because the school truck I was in only had a cassette player and there’s a vast dead zone radio-wise for much of the trip. After all, I knew where the giant spur was in Hico, the dilapidated buildings in Clairette, the peanut warehouses in Gorman, Sharon’s Barbeque in Abilene, and so on.

Saturday, as I said, I spent most of the afternoon editing my footage and putting together the initial cut of 20 minutes that I showed to my wife that night. (This just goes to show your spouse does love you . . . she’s the only one who would sit all the way through something like this.) Then I decided to upload it to YouTube only to discover there was a time limit of 10 minutes. All of a sudden I felt like Francis Ford Coppola dealing with the studio about Apocalypse Now: you cannot make me butcher my masterpiece! But, it made me cut out the fat—such as it was—as I pieced together my Dogme 95 homage.

This is not to say that I got my wife to sit through this shorter version. As she said, very nicely, to me, “Hon, you know nobody is actually going watch this whole thing. It is  . . . so . . . borrriiinnnggg.” Yes, I said, yes! That’s how it was! That’s verisimilitude!  “Truth alone,” she replied sadly, “does not make art.”

But, anyway, getting with people face to face is the best way to do business. There’s a certain amorphous nature to emails—easy not to respond to, even easier just to ignore entirely—that makes them not particularly useful when things actually need to get done. (Plus, there’s always an electronic trail and the reality that you just never know who a message might get forwarded to.) And phone calls . . . ugh. I hate talking on the phone. Usually I find myself spending most of my time looking up at the ceiling and/or gesticulating wildly based on what I’m hearing. You just can’t beat looking at people when they’re talking to you. For me, probably has something to do with that old saying about how it’s better to be the kind of guy who will stand on the ground and tell the truth instead of climbing up in a tree to tell a lie.

So, today at work I downloaded Skype, borrowed a webcam from another department, and next week we’re going to start figuring out web video conferencing  . . . especially to try to reduce the need for quite so many day trips in particular. Until then I’ll be the guy standing in the corner at the party, wearing the beret, and talking to anyone who has the misfortune to wander within earshot about the Dostoyevskian nature of West Texas geography.

Mark

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