MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 36) Education & Innovation, iTunes U, Pearson + More

Kevin Carey of Washington Monthly takes a look at investments in the education technology space. (WM):

Last August, Marc Andreessen, the man whose Netscape Web browser ignited the original dot-com boom and who is now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential venture capitalists, wrote a much-discussed op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. His argument was that “software is eating the world.” At a time of low start-up costs and broadly distributed Internet access that allows for massive economies of scale, software has reached a tipping point that will allow it to disrupt industry after industry, in a dynamic epitomized by the recent collapse of Borders under the giant foot of Amazon. And the next industries up for wholesale transformation by software, Andreessen wrote, are health care and education. That, at least, is where he’s aiming his venture money. And where Andreessen goes, others follow. According to the National Venture Capital Association, investment in education technology companies increased from less than $100 million in 2007 to nearly $400 million last year. For the huge generator of innovation, technology, and wealth that is Silicon Valley, higher education is a particularly fat target right now.

This hype has happened before, of course. Back in the 1990s, when Andreessen made his first millions, many people confidently predicted that the Internet would render brick-and-mortar universities obsolete. It hasn’t happened yet, in part because colleges are a lot more complicated than retail bookstores. Higher education is a publicly subsidized, heavily regulated, culturally entrenched sector that has stubbornly resisted digital rationalization. But the defenders of the ivy-covered walls have never been more nervous about the Internet threat. In June, a panicked board of directors at the University of Virginia fired (and, after widespread outcry, rehired) their president, in part because they worried she was too slow to move Thomas Jefferson’s university into the digital world.

The ongoing carnage in the newspaper industry provides an object lesson of what can happen when a long-established, information-focused industry’s business model is challenged by low-price competitors online. The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether. It may also be an existential threat to institutions that have long played a crucial role in American life.

And a look at LORE a new company that The Economist finds interesting (Econ):

Lore is part of a trend that builds on the familiarity with social networking that has come with the success of Facebook. It customises the rules of a network to meet the specific needs of students. Anyone teaching a class would reasonably worry that students using Facebook were gossiping rather than learning useful information from their network of friends. Lore allows teachers to control exactly who is in the network (by issuing a class-membership code) and to see how they are using it. They can also distribute course materials, contact students, manage tests and grades, and decide what to make public and what to keep private. Students can also interact with each other.

In the academic year after launching its first version last November, Lore was used in at least one class in 600 universities and colleges. Its goal for its second year, about to begin, is to spread rapidly within those 600 institutions, not least to see what the effects of scale are from having lots of classes signed up within the same institution.

Inside Higher Education takes a look at Apple's iTunes U Course Manager (IHE):

There remain a number of challenges to this LMS + Apple Courses model.

First, each student needs to have an iOS device - and preferably an iPad. Android or other mobile OS users need not apply. Stay within the Apple world and the curricular content consumption experience is great - stray and you are left without options. Apple is smart to make the Course Manager and iTunes U software free, as the ability to easily create a great tablet / mobile experience will push colleges to consider 1-to-1 iPad programs.

The second challenge is that the LMS + Apple Course model separates the consumption of curricular content (on the iOS device) and the production of active learning (via blogs and discussion boards in the LMS). Even if the mobile experience for the major LMS platforms improves dramatically (which I hope), students will still need to go outside of the Apple Course environment. Discussions and formative assessments are separated from curricular content.

Parade's End will soon be on TV here (US) and The Telegraph takes a look at other potentially 'lost' masterpieces (Telegraph):

So when we speak of “forgotten novels”, we actually mean those that are not really forgotten at all – there are plenty that no living reader has ever heard of in the stacks of copyright libraries. We mean a novel that is kept alive only by the fervent enthusiasm of a small group of fellow practitioners – the so-called “writers’ writers”. We might also mean the sort of writer who was once read in huge quantities, whose works were predicted to be the great classics of the future, who now go completely unread. The writers’ writer, like Ford, might be returned to circulation in time; the abandoned bestseller might be undergoing a temporary dip in reputation. But for the most part, these novels end as almost all novels do, in obscurity.

The writers’ writer has, on the whole, never commanded a large readership. Henry James and Joseph Conrad mastered the approbation, mostly, of their fellow novelists – oddly enough, the one book with which Conrad commanded a large readership, the sumptuous Chance, is now one of his most overlooked. The writers who are kept alive by small bursts of enthusiastic praise are regularly brought back into print, and drift off again before another publisher is persuaded that it might be worth having a go.

Pearson has been granted a contract to supply California State Universty schools with a platform to deliver on-line courses (Press Release):

The California State University, the nation’s largest four-year university system, has selected Pearson to launch Cal State Online, a fully online program designed to increase access to higher education. Cal State Online will launch in January 2013 with a selection of undergraduate degree completion and professional master’s programs, leveraging the multitude of programs currently available across the CSU.

“As a university system that is devoted to access, affordability and quality, the CSU needed an educational partner with the highest levels of expertise, experience and demonstrated success launching high-growth online learning programs,” said John Welty, President of Fresno State and Chair of the Cal State Online Board. “We partnered with Pearson because they offer a robust suite of services, support and a collection of success stories through their work with other universities, making them a perfect fit for Cal State Online.”

The Economist looks at how printers are doing given the migration to on-line delivery of content (Econ):

If journalists are gloomy about the outlook for their industry, printers are despondent. Media companies can still make some money as readers switch to digital editions; a printer cannot. The outlook for newspaper printers is particularly grim, says Robert Picard, a media economist: advertisers are now keener to run their adverts in magazines on high-quality glossy paper than in newspapers, whose circulation is dwindling. But newspapers and magazines require different printing equipment, so switching over is costly.

Some printers are offering marketers and retailers the option of printing more personalised catalogues to target different groups of consumers more accurately. But this is not as lucrative as “long runs”, printer-speak for running off hundreds of thousands of identical copies. Several printers (including Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which prints its own newspapers) have opened their presses to competitors to earn extra money; last year the newspaper group won a contract to print the Evening Standard, a London daily. A few reckon that they can turn a profit from the digital switch, and help clients to design electronic versions of their printed material.

From Twitter:

Milestones: LibraryThing Turns Seven! InfoDoc

The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald – review Guardian

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 34): Copyright, Digital Public Library, Colleges & Big Data + More

University of California at Berkeley professor Dr. Pamela Samuelson in The Chronicle from a few weeks ago on Copyright reform and the creation of a comprehensive digital library (Chron):

The failure of the Google Book settlement, however, has not killed the dream of a comprehensive digital library accessible to the public. Indeed, it has inspired an alternative that would avoid the risks of monopoly control. A coalition of nonprofit libraries, archives, and universities has formed to create a Digital Public Library of America, which is scheduled to launch its services in April 2013. The San Francisco Public Library recently sponsored a second major planning session for the DPLA, which drew 400 participants. Major foundations, as well as private donors, are providing financial support. The DPLA aims to be a portal through which the public can access vast stores of knowledge online. Free, forever.

Initially the DPLA will focus only on making digitized copies of millions of public-domain works available online. These include works published in the United States before 1923, those published between 1923 and 1963 whose copyrights were not renewed, as well as those published before 1989 without proper copyright notices, and virtually all U.S.-government works. If a way can be found to overcome copyright obstacles, many millions of additional works could be made available.

It's no secret that copyright law needs a significant overhaul to adapt to today's complex information ecosystem. Unfortunately the near-term prospects for comprehensive reform are dim. However, participants at a conference last spring at Berkeley Law School on "Orphan Works and Mass Digitization: Obstacles and Opportunities" believe that modest but still meaningful reforms are possible.

Her comment about the institutional license for the Google database reminded me of the analysis I completed in 2010.

The Atlantic takes a more detailed look at the Digital Public Library (of America):

The DPLA is the most ambitious entrant on the digital library scene precisely because it claims to recognize this need for scale, and to be marshaling its resources and preparing its infrastructure accordingly. With hundreds of librarians, technologists, and academics attending its meetings (and over a thousand people on its email listserv), the DPLA has performed the singular feat of convening into one room the best minds in digital and library sciences. It has endorsement: The Smithsonian Institution, National Archives, Library of Congress, and Council on Library and Information Resources are just some of the big names on board. It has funding: The Sloan Foundation put up hundreds of thousands of dollars in support. It has pedigree: The decorated historian Darnton has the pages of major publications at his disposal; Palfrey is widely known for his scholarship on intellectual property and the Internet; the staging of the first meeting on Harvard's hallowed campus is not insignificant. Ideally, the consolidation of resources—specialized expertise, raw manpower, institutional backing and funding—means that the DPLA can expand its clout within the community, attract better financial support, and direct large-scale digitization projects to move toward a national resource of unparalleled scope and functionality. "We believe that no one entity—not the Library of Congress, not Harvard, not the local public library—could create this system on its own," Palfrey says. "We believe strongly that by working together, we will build something greater."

The Economist takes a look at an exhibition at the British Library on the life of Shakespeare (Econ):

Shakespeare is such a global brand that the man himself almost disappears. The aim of “Shakespeare: Staging the World”, at the BM until November 25th, is to make the playwright specific and particular, to root him in his time, 400 years ago. The exhibition summons his physical world with an array of culturally evocative objects, many of which were used in “Shakespeare’s Restless World”, a splendid BBC radio series presented by the BM’s director, Neil MacGregor, earlier this year.

The show unfolds in a dark circular space, with curving rooms that wind from one to the next, each subtly lit and discreetly atmospheric of its contents: arrow slits in the room about the history plays, a hint of trees to suggest Warwickshire and the Forest of Arden, a touch of charring on black walls for the gunpowder and witchcraft of James I’s reign (when Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth”), and finally a pale dawn for the Americas, the “brave new world” of “The Tempest”. All this sits within the embrace of the old Reading Room, its shelves and dome dimly glimpsed through gaps here and there. This globe within a globe, as it were—one full of artefacts, the other of books—glances at the play between word and object that underlies the exhibition.

Fascinating (potentially spooky) article at the NYT on how colleges are beginning to use "big data" to manage student performance and even play match maker (NYT):

Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That’s a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. “The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class,” she says. “They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what’s going on with their students.”

As more of this technology comes online, it raises new tensions. What role does a professor play when an algorithm recommends the next lesson? If colleges can predict failure, should they steer students away from challenges? When paths are so tailored, do campuses cease to be places of exploration?

“We don’t want to turn into just eHarmony,” says Michael Zimmer, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he studies ethical dimensions of new technology. “I’m worried that we’re taking both the richness and the serendipitous aspect of courses and professors and majors — and all the things that are supposed to be university life — and instead translating it into 18 variables that spit out, ‘This is your best fit. So go over here.’ ”

From the Twitter this week:

ALA Releases Report on Library E-book Business Models Publishers Weekly

Media Decoder: Google to Buy Frommer's From Wiley Publishing New York Times

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 33 ) The Cost of Higher Education in the US - Chronicle, Economist, Bain + More

The problem with the cost of education in the US (Economist):

A crisis in higher education has been brewing for years. Universities have been spending like students in a bar who think a Rockefeller will pick up the tab. In the past two years the University of Chicago has built a spiffy new library (where the books are cleverly retrieved by robots), a new arts centre and a ten-storey hospital building. It has also opened a new campus in Beijing.

And it is not alone. Universities hope that vast investments will help them attract the best staff and students, draw in research grants and donations, and ultimately boost their ranking in league tables, drawing in yet more talent and money. They have also increased the proportion of outlays gobbled up by administrators (see chart 2).

To pay for all this, universities have been enrolling more students and jacking up their fees. The average cost of college per student has risen by three times the rate of inflation since 1983. The cost of tuition alone has soared from 23% of median annual earnings in 2001 to 38% in 2010. Such increases plainly cannot continue.

And The Chronicle also takes a look at the sober truth exacerbated by the slow economy (Chron):

This anecdotal evidence seems to be supported by reports in the past several weeks on the financial state of higher education. An analysis by Bain & Company and the private-equity firm Sterling Partners found that one-third of all colleges and universities in the United States face financial statements that are significantly weaker than before the recession and find themselves on an unsustainable fiscal path. Another quarter of colleges are at serious risk of joining them.

Meanwhile, two major credit-rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service, released warnings that put a negative outlook on all but the name-brand market leaders in higher education. “We’re seeing prolonged, serious stress,” Karen Kedem, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody’s, told me.⁠ What is significant about the move by Moody’s is that it typically rates only colleges with strong balance sheets to begin with.

Here is that link to the Bain report:

Despite this success, talk of a higher education “bubble” has reached a fever pitch in the last year. The numbers are very familiar by now: Annual tuition increases several times the rate of inflation have become commonplace. The volume of student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion and is now greater than credit card debt. Most college and university presidents, as well as their boards, executive teams and faculty members, are well aware that a host of factors have made innovation and change necessary.

Last month Blackboard held their annual get together and Inside Higher have a podcast of the highlights

In this month's edition of The Pulse podcast, Rod Murray discusses highlights from the annual Blackboard World 2012 gathering, including information on its new products, services and applications.

From FT writer Simon Schama a contrasting views of the US and UK popular reaction to the games (FT):

At a time when the gap between rich and poor is growing wider, the educational prospects for minorities are loaded with prohibitive debt, when democracy has become the catspaw of plutocrats; what the American people want from the strength, grace and resolution of their athletics is one place where the founding promise of upward social mobility, that Dream thing, is not a sick joke. In the republic of exertion the dream comes true. You have your gift, you work it to the max; you bring it to the day; you breast the tape, touch the lip of the pool, you let yourself weep as the Star Spangled Banner plays and you fold it about your shoulders – and it feels still that there is a place for young Americans, against whom the odds have never been more brutally stacked, to be winners.

If anything, there’s even more at stake for the British. The economy is flatlining; the coalition seems to have lost the plot. Yet from Danny Boyle’s Fabian extravaganza to the sudden cascade of golds that began with Heather and Helen sitting in their boat looking as ecstatically amazed as all the rest of us, a startled, almost embarrassed, suspicion, that the British could actually be world beaters by being themselves, began to dawn.

Coelho has a go at James Joyce and The Economist's Prospero takes exception:

The above two quotes neatly show the dividing line in this latest literary skirmish. Mr Coelho and Salman Rushdie are the same age, are widely read and employ magical realism in their work. Both authors have received prestigious international prizes, and find inspiration in the Bible and "One Thousand and One Nights". But only one of them credits his sources, writes literature, and worships James Joyce.

Another line worth quoting is Mr Coelho’s dictum that a writer has “a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation.” Let’s see here…hmmm...Joyce was the very picture of a starving artist, a virtual exile from his own country, accused of pornography and reviled in his lifetime (and occasionally since) as a writer of unreadable books. Mr Rushdie is similarly big in Tehran. The impossibly avuncular Mr Coelho, on the other hand, may be the Most Understood Author on the planet. Every Coelho bookcover trumpets his success, wooing potential buyers with the promise that he has sold hundreds of millions of copies in over a 160 nations, translated into over 72 languages—the most by a living writer, Guinness confirmed. One wonders if his business card touts: “Over 150 Million Served.

From my twitter feed this week:

Amazon Stops Processing Payments For Crowdfunding Platform For Creative Commons Books http://dlvr.it/1zQPpr

Adam Gopnik remembers Robert Hughes: "One of the indispensable mavericks of modern humanism." New Yorker

Amazing: 'History Man' - the front page of tomorrow's Sunday Telegraph Telegraph

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 32): Team GB, Big Data on Campus, Libraries and eBooks, Amazon Daily Delivery + More

First the important stuff:  TEAM GB!

From Andy Murray's gold to the men's lightweight four landing a dramatic silver, here are Britain's medal winners of the Games.

And this: Britain's medal winners are a portrait of the United Kingdom as a whole rather than of London and the south-east Economist

Big data on Campus (NYTimes):

This is college life, quantified.

Data mining hinges on one reality about life on the Web: what you do there leaves behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Companies scoop those up to tailor services, like the matchmaking of eHarmony or the book recommendations of Amazon. Now colleges, eager to get students out the door more efficiently, are awakening to the opportunities of so-called Big Data.

The new breed of software can predict how well students will do before they even set foot in the classroom. It recommends courses, Netflix-style, based on students’ academic records.

Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That’s a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. “The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class,” she says. “They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what’s going on with their students.”

As more of this technology comes online, it raises new tensions. What role does a professor play when an algorithm recommends the next lesson? If colleges can predict failure, should they steer students away from challenges? When paths are so tailored, do campuses cease to be places of exploration?

An interesting discussion about the choices libraries must make when building an eBook collection from Andromeda Yelton writing in Library Journal:

The one thing I know for certain about the future of ebooks in libraries is that it’s about tradeoffs among deeply held values. Right now, we have lots of options which protect ebook access via established distribution chains and publisher agreements — but they also limit it through DRM, restricted format support, and outright refusal by some publishers to sell ebooks to libraries. Negotiating preservation can be complicated or impossible; privacy questions lurk; and checkout limits put sharing at risk.
The eleven emerging models profiled in the In the Library with the Lead Pipe article, referenced above, provide different tradeoffs.  (Disclosure: one is my employer, Unglue.it.)  They vary in who hosts the files, whether libraries are free to make copies, whether DRM is applied, and what legal terms govern the use of the ebooks. This gives each of them a unique set of values tradeoffs. In general, they offer libraries more options in terms  of sharing, preservation, and privacy.  However, right now, all emerging models are limited in terms of access.  Some are theoretical or in a prototype stage, so they don’t offer any content yet. Others require libraries to negotiate themselves for content access, rather than outsourcing this to a distributor. While this puts libraries in a better position to advocate for their values, it also means more work.
I believe it’s important for libraries to do this kind of work. We need to have passionate, engaged conversations, with our eyes open, about which values we most want to defend in the ebook fray — and which we’re willing to compromise on. We need to consider which of many imperfect models offer the best tradeoffs for enacting library values. And we need to do this, not just in service to the patrons of 2012, but to the patrons of 2020 as well. How do the choices we make today affect their options for private, shared, lasting, accessible ebooks?

Getting that bucket, fan, shaving cream or book today with little or no effort is about to get a whole lot easire as Amazon shoots for same day delivery (Slate):

Can Amazon pull it off? It’s sure spending a lot of money to try, and it has already come up with a few creative ways to speed up deliveries. In each of the deals it has signed with states, the company has promised to build at least one—and sometimes many—new local warehouses. Some of these facilities are very close to huge swaths of the population. Amazon is investing $130 million in new facilities in New Jersey that will bring it into the backyard of New York City; another $135 million to build two centers in Virginia that will allow it to service much of the mid-Atlantic; $200 million in Texas; and more than $150 million in Tennessee and $150 million in Indiana to serve the middle of the country. Its plans for California are the grandest of all. This year, Amazon will open two huge distribution centers near Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, and over the next three years it might open as many as 10 more in the state. In total, Amazon will spend $500 million and hire 10,000 people at its new California warehouses.

But Amazon isn’t simply opening up a lot of new shipping centers. It’s also investing in making those centers much more efficient. Earlier this year, it purchased Kiva Systems, a company that makes cute, amazingly productive “picking robots” that improve shipping times while reducing errors. Another effort will allow the company to get stuff to you even faster. In Seattle, New York, and the United Kingdom, the firm has set up automated “lockers” in drug stores and convenience stores. If you order something from Amazon and you work near one of these lockers, the company will offer to drop off your item there. On your way home from work, you can just stop by Rite Aid, punch in a security code, and get your stuff.

Will the flipped classroom lead to lower costs - A Provosts perspective. (Inside Higher Ed)

But the cost savings may be more imaginary than real depending on what you are looking for the education to accomplish.  The more you expect education to accomplish and the more personal the educational experience, the lower the actual savings (if any) will be. For example, if the faculty member involved in preparing the class material and the faculty member meeting with the class for questions, projects, analysis and discussion is one and the same and if the class size remains unchanged, there will be no savings in moving from in-person to blended. There are still variables that can result in savings: an adjunct faculty member in place of a full-time faculty member, or a larger class in place of a smaller class.  At the other cost extreme, you can have students take the free online courses now offered by a number of Ivy League schools  and couple that experience which would count as the lesson with a classroom experience that covers questions, analysis, greater depth, etc., taught by graduate students or adjuncts at a significantly reduced cost.  Smaller class size and greater use of full-time faculty will increase the cost of this experience.

Establishing standards in community college education - Not as easy as hitting a baseball (Inside Higher Ed):

Why baseball batting? Williams includes a chart showing that a baseball can pass through the strike zone in 77 different places. I have no trouble seeing a Ted Williams chart worth of pitches headed at me when I step up before these students each day.
I am not going to trivialize students by naming them  “Curve,” “Slider,” “Changeup,” “Forkball,” or “Sinker.”  Consider the variety of pitches?  Some students are high school graduates and some have GEDs.  A Somalian explained at the start of one semester that the challenges impairing her high school experience included dodging snipers on the way to school and frequent raids on the school, machine guns firing, by rebels kidnapping future child soldiers.
The first languages that any class might pitch to me include Arabic (Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese dialects), Armenian, Russian, Portuguese – via Brazil and Angola -- Spanish from every South and Central American country.  Somali.  French.  Creole.  Swahili.
Hunger is a more frequent pitch.  These students may not have eaten that day.  Last spring, two students had bosses who thought nothing of scheduling 8 a.m.- 4 p.m., 4 p.m.- midnight, and midnight to 8 a.m. shifts all during one week.  One semester, I had a veteran who vanished (later found) after two more buddies from his unit committed suicide.  Once, a student was shot and murdered.  Last spring was the first semester in a while where no one in the class reported anyone shot in their family.

Shakespeare at the British Museum - The Economist:

Out of this miscellany emerges a larger story about the evolution of a British national identity, independent of the papacy, with its own history and imperial ambitions. It was a process in which history, geography, religion and myth were promiscuously pressed into service. Ancient Rome was as likely to turn up in a painting of Queen Elizabeth as an American Indian cherub (with ostrich) in an engraving of London. During Shakespeare’s life, it became possible for the first time to visualise Britain and its place in the world through maps. “He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies,” says Maria of Malvolio in “Twelfth Night”. Behind her words lies a world of travel and history—from the medal commemorating Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe to little playing cards printed with the counties of England.

From Twitter this week:

New Video in BBC #Archives Series Looks at “New Kinds of Metadata” NYT

Germans blow off steam with swearing hotline Reuters  Reminded me of classic Python: YouTube

Our dad, Joe Strummer, remembered Guardian

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 29): UK Frees Journal Articles, Amazon in Japan, Revising HigherEd, Blackboard Myths, Translations + More

UK is about to open up academic publishing.  (Guardian):

Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article.

Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has been called the "academic spring".

Why Amazon will have a hard time in Japan.  I guess we'll see if they're right.  (JapanTimes):

The problem they’re having in Japan is trying to negotiate that same kind of deal with domestic publishers. Like any long-established industry in Japan (or almost anything for that matter, from the nation’s government to even its foster care system), they are resistant to change. They don’t want to rock the boat, or experiment with new things. They don’t like the idea of cutting back on their wholesale prices, and thus reducing their profits. Especially to a big, foreign company from the U.S. Not after they’ve been doing things their own way for so long.

While Amazon is struggling to get publishers signed on for e-book distribution, Rakuten already has deals with a majority of them. A big part of that could be that Rakuten is a domestic Japanese company. They know what the publishing companies of their own country want and how far they’ll be willing to bend. Another factor could be that they’re not after drastically reduced wholesale pricing like Amazon is. Rakuten knows Japanese customers are used to paying high prices for media like books, music, and movies, and they’re not trying to change that. Besides, they’re already the equivalent of Japan’s own Amazon.com. They don’t need to revolutionize the book selling market to make their name, they’re just trying to break into the e-book market.

Interesting piece from Fast Company about revising the HEd curriculum (FastCo):

The opposition of “liberal arts” and “vocational education” carries with it a lot of residual 19th-century class snobbery as well as 20th-century quantitative bias. In the real world of the 21st century, there aren’t “two cultures.” We need both. As a cartoon circulating on Facebook would have it, “Science can tell you how to clone a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Humanities can tell you why this might be a bad idea.”

To get us thinking about the possibilities of real educational reform, I propose a Start-Up Core Curriculum for Entrepreneurship, Service, and Society (hokey, yes: SUCCESS). Neither a Great Books common core (which, however profound, rarely connects to a student’s specialized major) nor the duck, duck, goose model of distribution requirements (where students are left to make coherence from a welter of rhetoric, statistics, art appreciation, natural science, foreign language or other course offerings), the Start-Up Core Curriculum isn’t just about content mastery, but about putting deep knowledge along with basic skills into practice to address intractable real-world global problems.

Stop complaining: Five Myths about Blackboard (Inside HigherEd):

Myth #4 - Blackboard's Challenges Are Around Technology: It is easy to look at Blackboard's core Learn product, compare the platform against modern LMS's designed solely for cloud delivery (such as Instructure's Canvas), and conclude the Blackboard has a technology problem. The reality is that Blackboard has a large number of skilled developers and the capabilities to quickly design next generation cloud based learning services. Learning platforms that would benefit from all the Blackboard has learned about scalability, usability, and reliability. Blackboard's challenge is an installed user base of educational institutions that are reluctant to make big changes (for good reasons).   Everyone at Blackboard knows that mobile learning, interconnected platforms, and software as a service e-learning is the future. The key is figuring out how to help higher ed clients build that bridge between a legacy and modern e-learning infrastructure.  This is where the Services division will be so important, as change management is the most important and difficult component of increasing productivity (supported by technology) in higher ed.

From the Economist a look at book translations in Stories from Elsewhere (Econ):

The Illinois-based Dalkey Archive Press, which has been publishing international literature in English for 25 years, says the lack of literature in translation is a cultural crisis that is growing worse. Faced with such a homogeneous reading culture in her adopted Britain, Meike Ziervogel, a German native, started Peirene Press in 2008 in her north London home. She joins a handful of publishing pioneers such as New York’s Europa Editions and Rochester University’s Open Letter, which are working to chip away at the navel-gazing literary culture of Anglo-American letters. She publishes three novellas (each shorter than 200 pages) a year in English by celebrated European authors who are barely known outside their home countries.

From my twitter feed this week (slow week);

Hands-on: nearly instant photofinishing direct from your smartphone ArsTechnica

Library Groups, EFF Hit Back in HathiTrust Case http://www.PublishersWeekly

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 26): AAUP Meeting, Summer Reading Lists, Magazines, The Guardian's Future +More

Last week the Association of American University Presses held their annual conference in Chicago, (where I attended and made two presentations but more on that later) and there were several write-ups.  First, the organizers added a session on the last afternoon about the Georgia eReserves case and here is a blow-by-blow of the session (Inside Higher Ed):

University presses are still unhappy with the outcome of the landmark copyright case, which centered on Georgia State University's practice of duplicating book material and making it available to certain students free through the universities' electronic reserve database. That much was clear at Wednesday’s session, during which Steinman repeatedly slammed Judge Orinda Evans’s legal reasoning in the decision to a chorus of exasperated groans from a packed room of university press workers and executives.

“This is a terrible decision, it’s poorly reasoned, the result is a poor one, it’s a terrible precedent to have on the books,” said Steinman, doubling down on the AAUP’s much milder statement last month, which merely asserted that Evans’s 347-page ruling “appears to make a number of assertions of fact that are not supported by the trial record.”

But collective disdain for the judge’s reasoning in her decision eventually gave way to a general agreement among the attendees that, in order to make the outcome workable, university presses need to mend fences with another key player on their campuses -- librarians.

And from Jennifer Howard at The Chronicle an overview of the entire meeting:

Be part of the conversation, mind your metadata, and use technology as a bridge to the world: That advice animated sessions at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses, held here this week.

This year marks the group's 75th anniversary, and attendance hit a record high, with 787 people registered. The numbers created some logistical hassles but gave the meeting energy, too, tempering nervousness about how to feed the growing e-book market and how to convince budget-obsessed administrators that presses are assets, not liabilities.

People talked somberly about the news that the University of Missouri plans to shut down its press. But so far Missouri has been the exception, not the rule. Most presses have survived the recession and budget cuts. Some, like Princeton University Press, had excellent years, according to Peter Dougherty, the Princeton press's director and the new president of the association.

What should the kids read over summer (NYTimes)

Reading literature should be intentional. The problem with much summer reading is that the intention is unclear. Increasingly, students are asked to choose their own summer reading from Web sites like ReadKiddoRead, where the same advanced Real World Fiction category includes “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Flipped,” by Wendelin Van Draanen, which centers on divorce and kissing. Both books can be enjoyed by middle schoolers, but how will the seventh grader determine which one to pick?

The issue is further compounded when summer assignments require students to write about what they read. The problem is that the tasks assigned are at once too open and too circumscribed to be of use. What summer reading needs to be is purposeful. But how do we ensure purposeful independent reading given the low accountability of summer assignments?

Some students will happily read off a recommended-reading list (which should include a companion list of resources to support understanding). They will head to the park with Dickens or Austen under their arms, so long as they can leave the Post-it notes at home. They should be permitted this luxury, to have their teachers treat them as independent learners capable of a first dip into a classic, with no destined-to-be-unread written responses required. Doing this allows the student who chooses tougher books to say, “I didn’t understand half of it.” What better time to allow students to struggle than summer, when no one is calling on them to interpret or explain?

How's the magazine business doing you ask? (Economist)

But among magazines there is a new sense of optimism. In North America, where the recession bit deepest (see chart), more new magazines were launched than closed in 2011 for the second year in a row. The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) reports that magazine audiences are growing faster than those for TV or newspapers, especially among the young.

Unlike newspapers, most magazines didn’t have large classified-ad sections to lose to the internet, and their material has a longer shelf-life. Above all, says David Carey, the boss of Hearst Magazines, a big American publisher, they represent aspirations: “they do a very good job of inspiring your dreams.” People identify closely with the magazines they read, and advertisers therefore love them: magazines, says Paul-Bernhard Kallen, the chairman of Hubert Burda Media, a large German publisher, remain essential for brand-building.

Also from More Intelligent Life (Economist Family) a look at The Guardian newspaper and how it might survive (I thought it was).

In terms of reach and impact, the Guardian is doing better than ever before. But its success may contain the seeds of its demise. Its print circulation is tumbling. In October 2005, boosted by a change to the medium-sized Berliner format, the average daily circulation was 403,297. By March 2012 it was down to 217,190. Those figures are not quite like-for-like, as the Guardian has sworn off the Viagra of giveaway copies and overseas sales (which tend to be counted less rigorously); but they are still bleak. Saturday sales remain sturdy, at 377,000, but, on a typical weekday, only 178,000 people buy the Guardian, while millions graze on it for nothing on their screens. In the financial year 2009-10, the national newspapers division of Guardian Media Group—which also includes the Observer, Britain’s oldest Sunday paper—lost £37m. The following year, it managed to cut costs by £26m, and still ended up losing £38m. In May, Rusbridger told me he was expecting a similar loss for 2011-12. So, for three years running, the Guardian has been losing £100,000 a day. This is not boom or bust, but both at once: the best of times, and the worst of times. 

At the Open Weekend, one event looked at whether journalism was a second-rate form of writing. In the audience of 50 or so was the white-haired figure of Nick Davies, taking a breather from his investigative duties. When the conversation turned to long-form journalism, he spoke up, sounding exasperated. “In 20 years’ time,” he said, “there won’t be any newspapers left to do this. All these millions of hits won’t pay our salaries. The internet is killing journalism.”

And from my twitter feed this week:

Rare aerial photographs of Britain go online Guardian

15 books that apparently make you "undateable" – happy to report I've read most Flavorwire

Libraries, patrons, and e-books Pew Report  

Top US universities create online platform BBC EdX worldwide initiative to deliver online course by Harvard & MIT

The French Still Flock to Bookstores NYTimes

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 18): Cloud Education, Navigating LBF, NYPL Rennovations, Pottermore + More

Is the cloud the future to revolutionizing education?  Gordon Freedman in the Chronicle proposes some interesting ideas (Chron):

The problem with many academic systems is that they are "dumb" to who their users are, what they are doing, and what other systems they are using. This is largely because colleges have different buyers for different functions—learning management, student-information systems, digital-content management, campus analytics, and e-mail systems.
While there are single sign-on systems to get to all of these systems with one log-on, that does not make them "smart." A smart system integrates all of these functions to do two things: serve the end user (students, faculty, administrators) and interpret the data to improve performance.
At the moment there is no clear path to smart systems in higher education. The big data and identity engines of Silicon Valley are not idling, however. They are starting to accelerate, with the higher-education market squarely in their sights. While private equity is rearranging many of the traditional education-technology and content players, mostly on the East Coast, a new breed of venture-backed education start-ups are taking what their founders learned at Google, Facebook, Zynga, and Twitter and focusing on education.

How goes the London Book Fair?  Mark Medley from Canada's National Post follows Canadian publisher House of Anansi Press around the fair (NatPo):

There isn’t much trembling at the fair, at least on the surface. The London Book Fair makes you forget about the paper-thin profit margins, closing bookstores, and falling advances. Walking through Earls Court’s cavernous main hall, one is transported to an alternate-universe where the popularity of books is at an all-time high. It is a circus atmosphere: a man on stilts distributes leaflets; pirates welcome visitors to the L. Ron Hubbard display; a half-naked man hands out copies of 50 Shades of Grey. While there are plenty of smaller displays, the larger publishing houses have all built lavish shrines to the printed page. Wiley’s booth is equipped with 23 individual meeting desks and looks more like a stock market trading floor than a book fair display; Hachette’s multi-tiered mansion rises two storeys in the air, like a middle finger, and Little, Brown, part of the Hachette empire, flaunts an oversized photo of J.K. Rowling, as if to remind other publishers that they, and not you, are publishing her upcoming novel.
“We keep it in the basement, I guess, and wheel it out for every London Book Fair,” says Stuart Williams, an editor at The Bodley Head, an imprint of Random House UK, when I ask where the booths come from.
Over in Earls Court Two, which opened in 1991, adding 17,000 square metres of floor space, the Chinese contingent dominates the centre of the mammoth hall. Nearby is the sleek and minimalist Digital Zone, where attendees wait for the day they take over the main space. Dozens of individual countries are present, from Romania to Saudi Arabia to Turkey, next year’s market focus. The Sultanate of Oman is housed in a castle. There are also booksellers, textbook and university publishers, business books, children’s publishers, travel guides, accessories for e-readers. There are even booths advertising other book fairs, such as the Sharjah International Book Fair, which takes place in the U.A.E.

The debate over the New York public library's house cleaning continues (IHE):

Efforts to spin the news are to be expected. Much more of a problem with the proposed changes is the lack of transparency. The actual Central Library Plan itself had not been made public last year, when The Nation published Scott Sherman’s long report on the proposed changes. Four months later, it still isn’t. Nor are officials responsive to serious questions. When the New York writer Caleb Crain was invited to join an advisory panel concerning the Central Library Plan, he assumed it meant the administration would be forthcoming about details. At least he cleared up that misunderstanding pretty quickly. “I don't think anyone should expect this advisory panel to have much investigative authority or capacity,” Crain wrote on his blog two weeks ago. “I've pressed as hard as is consonant with civility, and I'm afraid I don't have much to show for it publicly. I've been given private answers to some of my questions, but I worry that unless the answers are offered to the public, there's no way to recruit outsiders to help fact-check them, and no way to hold the library accountable later for promises implicit in its reassurances.”

 The Economist on Pottermore and the power of Rowling.  I continue to believe Pottermore is a storefront and platform for a lot more than the Potter franchise. (Econ):

“With great power comes great responsibility,” is a lesson learned by Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Peter Parker. High expectations are the price of Pottermore’s guaranteed success. Ms Rowling knows full well that she, like The Boy Who Lived, does not abide by ordinary rules. Already she has changed the e-book retailing model. By retaining her own e-book rights, and then forcing Amazon and others to sell them via Pottermore, as well as offering vastly extended access to libraries and schools, she is evening the playing field. Fans responded by buying $1.5m in e-books in the first three days, particularly the seven-book set. The sales are fundamental, Mr Redmayne says, to financing the free Pottermore platform, which can be accessed in a variety of languages.
Whether Ms Rowling and her team can bring this same disruptive innovation to the Pottermore world itself, and sustain the momentum of the original series remains to be seen. How fast, and how creatively, the site builds out will determine the answer. An entire world of linking interactivity between the digital books and the online universe of Pottermore is possible. The medium is in its infancy. One thing is certain: if there’s anyone who can turn an e-reader into a device that “apparates” from the everyday into the truly magical, it will be Harry Potter.

Thinking about NetFlix and their changed business model that generated so much aggro (S&B):

In October 2011, one of the great backflips in the annals of business strategy took place. Netflix Inc., the most prominent video rental service company in the world, had begun to charge separately for its DVD-by-mail service and its streaming service in July, which in effect had increased prices by 60 percent for customers who used both services. Then, in September, Netflix had gone further, announcing it would split those services into two separate businesses, renaming the DVD-by-mail operation Qwikster. Consumer protests, conducted largely over the Internet, forced the retraction in October; Netflix announced it would revert to providing a combined service under one brand. By November, the company’s market cap had dropped by 70 percent and more than 800,000 subscribers had fled. The online mea culpa that CEO Reed Hastings wrote to customers only added fuel to the flames. In January 2012, a group of investors sued the company for loss of profits. Clearly, a bit of the company’s luster as a Silicon Valley darling has been lost, and Reed Hastings’s reputation as a strategically adept CEO has been damaged.

From the twitter this week (PND):

Flipboard is ‘head-on competitor’ on Economist’s road to all-digital Paidcontent

Apple's iBooks Author: the iTunes of self-publishing apps? Arstechnica

The digital world has invigorated publishing, not doomed it Guardian 

If Harvard Can’t Afford Academic Journal Subscriptions, Maybe It’s Time for an Open Access Model Time

Pearson says first-half profits will dip - FT

Fight heats up between John Wiley and patent lawyers over journals Paidcontent

U of M opens up to open source textbooks MINN Public Radio

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 17): Academic Publishing, Canadian Copyright, Linked Data + More

I was in London all week where I had a terrific London Book Fair and met many new publishers and partners which accounts for the lack of posts this week - even missed my weekly photo image.

Academic and Scientific publishing is still hitting the main stream news with little or no real counter pr campaign mounted by the publishers in question.  Elsevier is taking the brunt of the attention as in this article from the Observer on Sunday:

The most astonishing thing about this is not so much that it goes on, but that people have put up with it for so long. Talk to university librarians about extortionist journal subscriptions and mostly all you will get is a pained shrug. The librarians know it's a racket, but they feel powerless to act because if they refused to pay the monopoly rents then their academics – who, after all, are under the cosh of publish-or-perish mandates – would react furiously (and vituperatively). 

And as you might imagine there are many comments.

In an opinion piece the Economist also weighs in:

There are some hopeful signs. The British government plans to mandate open access to state-funded research. The Wellcome Trust, a medical charity that pumps more than £600m ($950m) a year into research, already requires open access within six months of publication, but the compliance rate is only 55%. The charity says it will “get tough” on scientists who publish in journals that restrict access, for example by withholding future grants, and is also launching its own open-access journal. In America, a recent attempt (backed by journal publishers) to strike down the existing requirement that research funded by the National Institutes of Health should be made available to all online has failed. That is good news, but the same requirement should now be extended to all federally funded research.

A little hysteria in the run up to London Book Fair from the Guardian:

It's not only new names commanding attention at this year's London Book Fair, a three-day event attended by over 24,000 publishing professionals from around the world, where rights in the hottest new books are bought and sold. Literary novelist William Boyd's take on the James Bond legend, announced last week, has already been sold to publishers in Germany and France, while agent Deborah Rogers has been signing deals left, right and centre for McEwan's latest. Set in 1972, Sweet Tooth is the story of Serena Frome, the daughter of an Anglican bishop, as she enters the intelligence service and falls for a promising young writer while on a mission. Out in the UK this summer, Rogers has already sold it to 14 other countries and promises this is "just the beginning". "It's only just come in and it's moving very quickly," she said. "A new Ian is always a very exciting moment."

There's been a copyright wrangle in Canada for the past 12 months or so which keeps percolating nicely (Canada.com):

The deal between the Association of Universities and Colleges Canada and Access Copyright, which collects money for copyright holders from such institutions as schools, libraries and businesses for the right to photocopy and distribute copyrighted works.
Under terms of a deal announced earlier this week, students could pay more than $25 per semester to access copyrighted materials. That's up from less than $4 a semester in 2010.
Under the former agreement, students were charged 10 cents per page for printed readings and similar works.

Nature have launched a linked data platform to aid searching over their 450,000 journal articles (Folio):

Essentially, this linked data platform connects publication dates and other features within manuscripts like institutions, journal titles, volumes, issues and authors. That creates what Wilde refers to as triples.
“A triple is an object, an assertion and a destination,” he says. “A subject, a predicate and an object are the official way of describing it. Many believe linked data itself is the next generation of the Internet and semantic Web—being able to understand and create links between information that may not necessarily be directly linked. For example you can say an article is written by me and via linked data you can find out what else I’ve done—you’re starting to create connections of information by how they relate to each other.”

In the Economist I found this interesting in how behavioral economics are being used in public policy

All this experimentation is yielding insights into which nudges give the biggest shove. One question is whether nudges can be designed to harness existing social norms. In Copenhagen Pelle Guldborg Hansen, founder of the Danish Nudging Network, a non-profit organisation, tested two potential “social nudges” in partnership with the local government, both using symbols to try to influence choices. In one trial, green arrows pointing to stairs were put next to railway-station escalators, in the hope of encouraging people to take the healthier option. This had almost no effect. The other experiment had a series of green footprints leading to rubbish bins. These signs reduced littering by 46% during a controlled experiment in which wrapped sweets were handed out. “There are no social norms about taking the stairs but there are about littering,” says Mr Hansen.

John Wiley is working with Blackboard to make the Wiley content available to Blackboard users as an integrated option (Press Release):

The field trial involves students, faculty and campus administrators across 42 courses at two and four-year higher education institutions in the U.S. and Canada. More than 50 instructors and 2,900 students have been providing ongoing feedback on their experience with the integration that significantly enhances the use of Wiley’s content within the Blackboard Learn™ platform.  Instructors have expressed great satisfaction with the integration, which lets them easily add digital content to their courses in Blackboard Learn and synchronize grades and other data from Wiley’s research-based, online teaching-and-learning-environment, WileyPLUS.  “I can set up my Blackboard class and integrate WileyPLUS assignment links with Blackboard tools, like discussion boards,” said Julie Porterfield, an Anatomy and Physiology instructor at Tulsa Community College. “Students can easily tell in what order they need to complete certain tasks and assignments. I have been using WileyPLUS for four years and so far, this semester is even more successful in terms of student use and tracking data.”

From Twitter:

Supreme Court to rule on “grey market” goods in books case PaidContent

Not a good weekend in sports (and I was there to make it worse) MEM.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 48): Orwell on Police Actions, Dickens and Economist Book Festival + More

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”.

Join me on Twitter: PND

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 37): Scholarly Publishing, Project Gutenberg, Literary Festivals, Lawsuits, + More

The New York Times takes up the issue of "pricy" scholarly journals and leads with their view point (NYT):

After decades of healthy profits, the scholarly publishing industry now finds itself in the throes of a revolt led by the most unlikely campus revolutionaries: the librarians.

Whoever pays the bills, publishing is not free. Under the traditional business model most of the costs were met by subscribers, though some journals do also charge contributors, making scholarly publishing one of the most consistently profitable, if least noticed, corners of the business. Elsevier, for example, reported profits of £724 million on revenues of £2 billion last year alone. According the Mr. Suber converting to open access “will involve some cost shifting, But also considerable cost savings” for libraries and university budgets.

The traditional model does have its defenders. After George Monbiot, a British academic and journalist, published an article in The Guardian newspaper last month calling academic publishers “ruthless capitalists,” Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing at the London-based Publishers’ Association, told the journal Times Higher Education that all publishers “aspire to universal access” but that it would take time to find a “sustainable, scalable, funded” way to achieve it.

Writers at the Scholarly Kitchen blog, who are mostly involved in the less commercial end of publishing, said that although subscriptions for popular titles might be expensive, the cost for each individual reader remained very low.

They also noted that many titles with high fees for American or European readers were available free or at lower costs to researchers in the developing world through the Hinari program, a partnership of the World Health Organization and several major publishers including Elsevier, John Wiley and Blackwell.

Sir John Daniel, president of the Commonwealth of Learning, an organization that helps developing countries improve access to education, said such efforts did not go nearly far enough. “One of the major obstacles to education in the developing world is the lack of high quality teaching materials,” he said. “The countries we work with can’t afford journals; they’re already paying an arm and a leg for textbooks.”

“I’ve seen it from both sides,” said Sir John, who was once briefly on the board of Blackwell. “I saw the vast industry built up from publicly funded research, and it was never clear to me what value was being added. But if you needed the material, they had you over a barrel.”

On the whole this article meanders and doesn't offer any insight. The author notes the Elsevier profit numbers as de facto proof that academic publishers are blood-suckers.

Appreciation for Michael Hart the founder of Project Gutenberg from the Observer:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault. He never made much money, repaired his own car, had scant faith in medicine and built most of his own electronic gear from stuff he picked up in garage sales. On Saturday mornings over breakfast in the local diner, he would work out the optimum route to cover the maximum number of garage sales that day; it was his version of the travelling salesman problem in mathematics.In his obituary of Hart, his colleague Gregory Newby described him as an "unreasonable" man, in George Bernard Shaw's celebrated use of the term. "Reasonable people," wrote Shaw, "adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

From the Economist: It's good to have gatekeepers (Economist):

The more general question, however, is whether publishers like Amazon (and particularly Amazon) represent a threat to the older magazine model, in which a variety of articles are bundled together and sold for a price that, even on the newsstand, is lower than what a reader would expect to pay if buying everything piecemeal. Part of the reason readers buy magazines is because they are comfortable outsourcing some of the decision-making about content delivery, and welcome the fact that magazines curate the news. The last issue of the New Yorker, for example, included articles about Mr Perry, the gold standard, tarot cards, Wikipedia, Syria, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia, and Rin Tin Tin.

According to the Economist there are a raft of regional literary festivals going on in Asia. I need an invite. (Economist):

In contrast to bleak conditions in Western book markets, the Indian divisions of international publishers are busy signing up new authors. London’s literary agencies have opened offices in India. Namita Gokhale, a novelist and one of the Jaipur festival’s organisers, says that South Asia is having a “literary moment”. It is “exploring its place in a new world” in English, while also maintaining traditions in the region’s native languages. She believes making sense of South Asia’s many upheavals has something to do with the outbreak of writing and reading.

Fellow traveler Peter Brantley is now writing for Publishers Weekly. Here on defining "library" (PW):

We are now engaged in acts of social reconstruction. Just as digital networks have forced us to deeply question the role of publishers, they also force us to reconsider the role and purpose of libraries, which developed in the modern era around the presumption of the Industrial Age book right along with publishing. A library fills many needs in its community; it is an after-school day care and gaming center, an employment hall and meeting space, offering shelter and privacy. It has also been a place with shelf upon shelf of CDs, newspapers, magazines, and books. Indeed, our understanding of libraries is so bound up in the physical world that their presumptive value has most often been measured through a single proxy: how many books they hold.

Statement from Paul Courant of the University of Michigan in response to the Authors Guild suit against scanning (UM):

“The University of Michigan library has been digitizing books for more than 20 years Sections 108 and 107 of the federal Copyright Act provide the guidance and the authority for this work, which supports our ability to preserve and to lawfully use the collections that we have purchased and maintained. Moreover, our digitization efforts enable us to make works accessible to people who have print disabilities because the overwhelming majority of works have never been available in an accessible format.

And from the twitter this week.

From InfoBoy: New Report from EU: Electronic Clearance of Orphan Works Significantly Accelerates Mass Digitization: Link

IBM starts its own NYC high school: http://bit.ly/qvl4Ad

Pearson buys virtual school co for $400 million | Reuters uk.reuters.com/article/2011/0…

....

And in sports, Lancashire County Cricket Club which hasn't won a championship for 77 years won one this week on a squeaker end to the season. For Mr PND Senior who is Chairman of the Club, I think this is almost a crowning achievement. And, they get to go to the Palace. (MEveningNews)

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 36): Amazon Digital Library, Piracy, Newspaper Disruption, Private Blackboard + More

Jeff Trachtenberg of the WSJ reports that Amazon may be looking to launch a digital lending library for books.

It's unclear how much traction the proposal has, the people said. Several publishing executives said they aren't enthusiastic about the idea because they believe it could lower the value of books and because it could strain their relationships with other retailers that sell their books, they said. Amazon didn't immediately respond to requests for comment Sunday. The proposal is another sign that retailers are looking for more ways to deliver content digitally, as customers increasingly read books and watch TV on computers, tablets and other electronic devices. Seattle-based Amazon makes the popular Kindle electronic reader and is expected to release a tablet to rival Apple Inc.'s iPad in coming weeks, people familiar with the gadget have said

Spotting The Pirates from The Economist and like most things piracy isn't simple:

Media piracy is more common in the developing world than in the rich world (see chart). The most piratical countries are places like China, Nigeria and Russia, where virtually all media that is not downloaded illegally is sold in the form of knock-off CDs and DVDs. But there is also great variation among rich countries. Piracy is far more widespread in the Mediterranean than it is in northern Europe, including Britain. America may be the least piratical country of all—oddly, since Napster was born there.
...
The result is that big labels have pruned their Spanish operations. Universal Music has shed a third of its Spanish staff. Max Hole, who runs Universal’s businesses outside America, says the firm is “holding out” in Spain, but largely in the hope that it will discover an artist who appeals to Hispanics in the United States. Mr Kassler says EMI is spending five or six times as much in Germany, a low-piracy market where music sales are declining more gently—by 11% between 2006 and 2010.

Again from The Economist their last essay in their recent special section on the Newspaper industry (Econ):

In the past decade the internet has disrupted this model and enabled the social aspect of media to reassert itself. In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past. “Social media is nothing new, it’s just more widespread now,” says Craig Newmark. He likens John Locke, Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin to modern bloggers. “By 2020 the media and political landscapes will be very different, because people who are accustomed to power will be complemented by social networks in different forms.” Julian Assange has said that WikiLeaks operates in the tradition of the radical pamphleteers of the English civil war who tried to “cast all the Mysteries and Secrets of Government” before the public.
News is also becoming more diverse as publishing tools become widely available, barriers to entry fall and new models become possible, as demonstrated by the astonishing rise of the Huffington Post, WikiLeaks and other newcomers in the past few years, not to mention millions of blogs. At the same time news is becoming more opinionated, polarised and partisan, as it used to be in the knockabout days of pamphleteering.
Not surprisingly, the conventional news organisations that grew up in the past 170 years are having a lot of trouble adjusting. The mass-media era now looks like a relatively brief and anomalous period that is coming to an end. But it was long enough for several generations of journalists to grow up within it, so the laws of the mass media came to be seen as the laws of media in general, says Jay Rosen. “And when you’ve built your whole career on that, it isn’t easy to say, ‘well, actually, that was just a phase’. That’s why a lot of us think that it’s only going to be generational change that’s going to solve this problem.” A new generation that has grown up with digital tools is already devising extraordinary new things to do with them, rather than simply using them to preserve the old models. Some existing media organisations will survive the transition; many will not.

From New York magazine and Boris Kachka on Why Debut Novels are Big Business Again:

But a funny thing happened on the way to austerity: growth. Book-publishing revenue is up almost 6 percent since 2008, and the monster advances are back, too—seven for first novels in the past year. “They’re coming back in a big way,” says Eric Simonoff, an agent at William Morris who sold a debut for more than $1 million in February. It may be that overspending isn’t such a luxury after all but a publicity pre­requisite, the only marketing gesture anyone believes anymore. HarperCollins’s Jonathan Burnham, who bid in the Harbach auction, often makes news by dropping seven figures on debuts, like Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, which posted disappointing sales, and S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which was more of a success. Burnham acknowledges the power of “measured overpaying”—“if it’s the right fit for the list, and it makes the right statement,” he says. “It creates a sort of sense of destiny, and in most cases, that’s a huge advantage. It becomes a source of gossip and excitement in the trade. Everyone’s twittering away about it—in the old-fashioned sense of twitter

Kachka refers to a Slate article entitled MFA vs NYC written by Chad Harbach (Slate)
The IHE hosted Digital Tweed blog has poses interesting set of speculations regarding the consequences of the privatization of Blackboard. This clip is from the intro of a long post: (DigitalTweed);

It’s been 20 days since the announcement that Providence Equity Partners would acquire Blackboard. The acquirer became the acquired in this transaction: Blackboard, which has spent more than a half a billion dollars over the past five years to buy a range of technology firms that focus on the education market (Angel Learning, Elluminate, iStrategy, NTI, Presidium, WebCT, and Wimba, among others) agreed to be purchased for approximately $1.64 billion.

Not surprisingly, the message from Blackboard, as reflected in a public letter from Blackboard CEO Michael Chasen, a blog post from Blackboard Learn president Ray Henderson, and an accompanying set of FAQs – is, in essence, that the sale to Providence will have little impact on the company’s relationship with clients. Chasen’s letter announced that he and the current management team “will remain in place and we do not anticipate any changes [in Blackboard’s] day-to-day operations.” Henderson’s blog provided some additional rationale for the financial deal, suggesting that private ownership frees management from the quarterly pressures to report continuously rising revenue and profits: “private equity now provides an alternative ownership model that’s more agile…firms like Providence include very long-term investors…willing to take longer-term perspectives.” Henderson also proclaimed that that the new owners “share our vision of improving the education experience for our clients, and of the mission critical role [Blackboard’s] platforms play in teaching and learning today.”

Repost from The Chronicle of Higher Ed: An Era of Ideas.

To mark the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, The Chronicle Review asked a group of influential thinkers to reflect on some of the themes that were raised by those events and to meditate on their meaning, then and now. The result is a portrait of the culture and ideas of a decade born in trauma, but also the beginning of a new century, with all its possibilities and problems.

From the twitter this week:

Google to Buy Zagat: http://nyti.ms/rgpjIb

Elsevier's Scopus Data Drives Visualization of International Collaborative Research Networks for Max Planck MarketWatch http://bit.ly/pp9Bsv

HathiTrust full-text index to be integrated into OCLC services [OCLC]: http://bit.ly/oG4FxL

Amazon’s Future Is So Much Bigger Than a Tablet | Epicenter | Wired.com http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/09/amazon-bigger-than-tablet/