Media Report (Vol 14, No 2): Pell Grants, Black Literature, Cancelling Shakespeare, American Dirt

Raising Pell: How Industry Support and Federal Grants Improve Prison Education (PND)

The Obama Administration recognized that a coordinated and organized approach from the Department of Education and Bureau of Prisons would improve prison education programs. In the years since, quality education programs – where they exist – remain concentrated and reach less than 10% of incarcerated individuals. Allowing Pell Grants to be used by this population is an important step; however, if educational programs are a hodge-podge of well-intentioned but uncoordinated initiatives, they will only ever be partially successful (if success means delivering an efficacious education program to all who seek it).

Black Kids and White dominated Literature: A Do It Yourself Model (The Conversation)

Although much of American children’s literature published near the turn of the last century – and even today – filters childhood through the eyes of white children, The Brownies’ Book gave African American children a platform to explore their lives, interests and aspirations. And it reinforced what 20th-century American literature scholar Katharine Capshaw has described as Du Bois’ “faith in the ability of young people to lead the race into the future.”

Most likely inspired by The Brownies’ Book, several Black weekly newspapers went on to create their own children’s sections. While the children’s publishing industry may have shut out Black voices and perspectives, the editors of these periodicals sought to fill the void by celebrating them, giving kids a platform to express themselves, connect with one another and indulge their curiosities.

Why are schools cancelling Shakespeare? (WAPO)

Why should students be forced to read Shakespeare, as some teachers on Twitter are wondering? Why, indeed? God forbid they should try to muddle through a sentence by Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy or, my high school favorite, William Faulkner. I loved Faulkner not because he was easy to read but because I had an unforgettable teacher whose passion shined light on the beauty and the sound and the fury of words.

Not that I’m a literary snob, mind you. I also read all of Harold Robbins’s trashy novels in junior high, much to the furrowed brow of my mother. One night, while I was reading “The Carpetbaggers” by flashlight under my covers, I overheard her say to my father: “Should we be letting her read those books?”

The Management Lessons in David Simon's Homicide (Strategy + Business)

What can we learn from this acute environment? For one, culture matters. The foundation of the work that gets done in the book is a powerful culture built on tradition and values, which the detectives transmit and reinforce in one another. It is a ferociously masculine culture, insular and to a great extent Catholic, expressed in gallows humor, and exalting duty and strength. Being a cop in Baltimore is so dangerous that a tradition has evolved for when someone returns to work after being shot in the line of duty: The officer gets to pick any assignment he’s qualified for.

As Simon demonstrates, this culture sustains the detectives in the face of nearly overwhelming challenges. But it can also be a problem. “Police-involved shootings” are investigated with an eye toward making potential problems go away. The culture also means that the advent of women as detectives is unwelcome to the men, even as they occasionally accept one.

The Implosion of America Dirt (NYMag).  It didn't stop it being one of the years biggest books,

On the publisher’s side, Miller and Don Weisberg, then the president of Macmillan, did most of the talking. The book’s editor, Amy Einhorn, was mostly silent. The executives expressed interest in the activists’ suggestions, but they also wanted to discuss the tone of the online discourse. Miller comes from a generation that prizes “civility,” one employee noted. “He could be accused of tone policing,” added another. Gurba, who had received a barrage of menacing emails since publishing her essay, was disturbed that Miller seemed to be “equating the criticism Jeanine was receiving with the death threats I was receiving,” she said. As Miller and Gurba began to argue over this, one Macmillan staff member blurted out that Cummins had never received any actual death threats. “Everybody just went dead silent,” Gurba recalled.

 Magazines are turning in to Books (CNN)

While many magazines have shrunk or folded in recent years, some publishers see opportunity in bookazines. They are less dependent on advertising — a once reliable source of revenue that continues to be eaten up by tech platforms like Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG). The issues are big, sometimes exceeding 100 pages, but publishers can fill pages with stories and photos from their archives, making them less costly to produce. And they can seize on current trends like keto diets or cultural moments such as the passing of beloved celebrities and other public figures.

"To me, [bookazines] represent a really nice pandemic treat," said Aileen Gallagher, associate professor of magazine, news and digital journalism at Syracuse University. "We're all still stuck in our houses and the only place we're really going is the grocery store. It's like, 'Oh, here's this thing that will entertain me for a little while that I will invest $10 in.'"

 Digital subscriptions for content businesses are growing across the board (TheNewStatesman)

In a survey conducted for the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2020, 64 per cent of readers in the UK cited “distinctive journalism” as their primary reason for subscribing to any publication, and 35 per cent of those readers said that they subscribe for particular writers they like. This agrees with what our readers tell us about why they subscribe: for Stephen Bush, Anoosh Chakelian, Jeremy Cliffe, Emily Tamkin, Sarah Manavis and Ailbhe Rea, among many others.   

Our investments in technology and data journalism are paying off, as is our expansion into international coverage, led by Jeremy Cliffe. Our coverage of the US election in particular was widely praised for its insight and accuracy.

 More from my Flipboard magazine

MediaWeek Report (Vol 13, No 2): ViaNOT - Simon & Schuster Nolonger a Fit at ViacomCBS

Almost apologetically, ViacomCBS Chief Executive Bob Bakish announced that Simon and Schuster (S&S) wasn’t a real fit for his media company, this despite the fact that S&S has been part of the family for 25 years give or take. That said, he did confirm what many in the industry have seen for a while, that ViacomCBS has been interested in off-loading S&S for a while. It’s pretty unfair on S&S too: The company has a strong backlist and stable of reputable authors, has avoided some of the bigger controversies such as library lending and Amazon conflicts and has managed to produce decent operating margins in a trade publishing business that historically struggled to achieve 10% profit margins.

Left unsaid in Bakish’s admission is that a strategic buyer may not be on the cards. For HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Hachette that deal has been but a phone call away for the past 3-4 years, but no deal is in the offering. Bakish has been forced to announce publicly the chance to purchase one of publishing’s most iconic publishers to gin up some interest. Perhaps if this effort doesn’t produce a buyer then VIacomCBS may moderate their price expectations to make a deal with another publisher more likely. While efficiencies are likely in a combination with another publisher cost savings may not be as significant at first glance. Publishing has been running lean since the financial crisis (not the current one).

S&S had revenues of $814 in 2019 according to industry sources which was slightly lower than those in 2018. Profit is likely to be around 10-15% which may broadly imply a valuation in the $500mm range. With market power of both Amazon Publishing and Penguin Random House potential buyers would be wise to be cautious in overpaying for an expanding and growing market opportunity which simply isn’t there.

The Giant List of Publishing Predictions for 2016

Here is a listing of some interesting predictions for 2016 across the publishing and media sector:

Trade and Self-Publishing

Mark Coker from Smashwords provides a comprehensive exploration of trends for 2016 with particular focus on the Amazon subscription model and its impact on traditional publishers.  His post also includes extensive follow-up and comments: 2016 Book Publishing Industry Predictions: Myriad Opportunities amid a Slow Growth Environment

Jonathon Sturgeon as flavorwire suggests "Books by Committee, Self-Published Books by Computers" may be something we need to watch out for during 2016: From Adult Relaxation to Prole Erotica: Book Publishing Predictions for 2016

Blogsite Bookworks presents: 2016 Predictions for the Self-Publishing Industry

Digital Book World asked Tom Chalmers for his 10 Industry Predictions for 2016

Jane Friedman has 5 Industry Issues for Authors to Watch in 2016

Publisher'sWeekly: What Does 2016 Hold for Digital Publishing?

LA Times: 6 book trends for 2016: Look into the future

Academic and Scholarly Publishing

From Publishing Perspectives five predictions for open access academic publishing

From Scholarly Kitchen: Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?

General and Digital Media:

Deloitte Media: Telecommunications and Technology predictions for 2016 report

MediaPost: The Mobile Revolution Accelerates

From Talking New Media Five digital publishing predictions from Arazoo Nadir

From Publishing Executive magazine:  2016: The Year Ahead for Publishing in 12 Words

From MediaShift:  VR Heats Up, Publishers Wise Up to Fraud and 10 Predictions for Media Metrics

Techcrunch: Predictions on the future of Digital Media

What's new in publishing: Digital Publishing Predictions for 2016 

From Mequoda: 3 Subscription Website Publishing Predictions for 2016

A Gartner report Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond:  The Future Is A Digital Thing. (but requires registration)

Millward Brown: Digital and Media Predictions 2016

equimedia: Digital media predictions for 2016

Fred Wilson: 2016 Predictions

Top Indian publishers predict digital publishing trends for 2016

Newspaper/Journalism:

Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, released a new report: Media, Journalism and Technology Predictions 2016. 

From Neiman Labs: Predictions for Journalism in 2016

At Forbes and short set of suggestions: Who Will Win The Publishing Battle In 2016? Early Predictions For What's Next

There's more than enough here to keep anyone busy well into 2016.  For my predictions from years past click on this link to list all of them.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 42): Writing for Free, Comic Sutra, Autobiographies + More

Why writing for free is wrong (The Atlantic):

But the fact that so many people write for free, all the time, sits uncomfortably with the fact that writing is also, occasionally, a profession. And we have, in this country, a fairly clear sense that work deserves compensation. This is, for example, why I consider unpaid internships morally repugnant, since we're essentially asking that entry-level jobs, for which there is a minimum wage, be performed for free because somebody replaced the word "job" with "internship."

So here is the rub. Unpaid writing is all over the place. But writing is also a job. And jobs should be paid. So is it immoral for a publication to ask for somebody to write for free?

Unfortunately, the "slavery" article in Sunday's Times by Tim Kreider buries the simplest argument—that it's good to pay writers, nobody should appreciate this more than *other writers*—under an avalanche of righteousness, like "nobody would ever ask my sister to perform dangerous surgeries for free." Well, no they wouldn't, and thank heavens, because freelance lobectomies sound like a horrible idea. On the other hand, asking smart people to write for free on their spare time creates an impressive intellectual surplus. I am immeasurably smarter about stuff (I think) because of other writers' willingness to "enslave" themselves to blog networks.

Comic Sutra: Big in Bombay (New Republic)

Savi, with her long hair and voluptuous body, invokes the sensual female protagonists of the ACK series—but with a sly, modern spin. “Arousing sexual excitement and moral anxiety with equal ease, Savita Bhabi straddles both continuity and change,” said Shohini Ghosh, professor of media at Jamia Millia University in New Delhi. India is a major consumer of porn. The international porn star, India-born Sunny Leone, has said that 60 percent of her revenue comes from India. And Savi is now firmly embedded as an icon in the landscape of sexual contradictions that define India today. Characters like Savi have helped to open up the conversation about freedom of sexual expression. When the government shut down Savi’s website in 2009 in the name of the IT Act, which outlaws “lascivious” electronic material, feminists, journalists, and other anti-censorship voices rallied around her in the press.

Autobiography as public relations (Guardian):

Morrissey has inspired a lot of hostility from the literary establishment for insisting on publication as a Penguin Classic. He wants that inevitable rendezvous with posterity and he wants it now. Closer to the ground, or at least the players' dressing-room – a society he's said to have betrayed –Ferguson has provoked bitter accusations and angry rebuttals across the world of sport, from the likes of Roy Keane and Wayne Rooney. If the style is the man, as the French would have it, neither Fergie nor Morrissey have done themselves many favours, though they must be better off at the bank. Possibly the most subtle commentary on the continuing boom in memoir and autobiography, and the trouble it can cause, comes from Jennifer Saunders, Ab Fab's "Eddie", whose own autobiography is Bonkers.

From twitter this week:
Broadchurch the book to be published in 2014 Telegraph
SUNY faculty and libraries innovate to solve problems of high-cost textbooks by producing high-quality open textbooks LISNews
Netflix Flirts with a New Idea: “Big” Movies at Your House, the Same Day They're in Theatres : AllthingsD

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 42): Open Access Myths, eBooks and Tablets, China's Fake Research Industry, Brit Trade Invasion, + More

Open Access expert Peter Suber writes in the Guardian:  Open access: six myths to put to rest

Open access to academic research has never been a hotter topic. But it's still held back by myths and misunderstandings repeated by people who should know better. The good news is that open access has been successful enough to attract comment from beyond its circle of pioneers and experts. The bad news is that a disappointing number of policy-makers, journalists and academics opine in public without doing their homework.

Pew releases an update to its' tablet and ebook ownership report and there continues to be overlap between eBook and tablet buyers.  (Pew)

• 

There was a controversy this month regarding 'fake' articles being submitted to open access journals.  Seems that that issue may pale in comparison to what's going on in China (Economist)

As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier.  Chinese scientists are still rewarded for doing good research, and the number of high-quality researchers is increasing. Scientists all round the world also commit fraud. But the Chinese evaluation system is particularly susceptible to it.

Again, from The Economist: Why most published research is probably false.

Is there a Brit Invasion underway in publishing or is it just a PR excuse? (io9)

Why are so many British publishers coming to America right now? And why are there so many smaller imprints coming out of the U.K.?

I think it’s pure economics. The book industry in Britain is not great at the moment. We’re struggling through the recession with very poor sales. So obviously we’re looking to see where they can make money, and America is five times the size [of] the market in the UK. So it does seem to me that if you’re a small nimble company that you can do this much easier perhaps than the bigger boys. If you’re a big company setting up in America, it automatically becomes a much bigger thing.

 Professor wants to know what's going on with is book (Chronicle):

You can't push on a rope" is a bit of folk wisdom from my rural upbringing. The phrase is about feeling powerless over a process in which you think of yourself as an equal, indispensable partner. Your end of the rope is firmly in your grasp; the other end has gone slack.  It's an apt description of what it's like to have a manuscript accepted for publication, the contract offered and signed, a proper final edit completed, the final product delivered for typesetting, and then ... nothing.  For more than a year, I've been holding the rope and waiting for someone to tug back on the other end.

From Twitter:
News: Noel Gallagher Says Reading Fiction 'a Waste Of Fucking Time' http://dlvr.it/49DgRz
Charlie Hunnam quit Fifty Shades 'after being refused extensive creative input' http://gu.com/p/3jj8p/tw  Really?? What did he have in mind?

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 40): Open Access Publishing Scam?, US Panorama, Political Biographies, Expensive Journalism, 50 Shades +More

Lots of discussion has been generated by the publication in Science magazine about journalist John Bohannon expose about open access journal publishing.  Here commentary from The Chronicle:

“The data from this sting operation reveal the contours of an emerging Wild West in academic publishing,” Mr. Bohannon wrote in Friday’s issue of Science.
For now, however, allegations of flaws—at least in the way the magazine promoted the piece, if not how the study was constructed from the start—are commanding the bulk of the attention.
Mr. Bohannon offered his fake science submission only to open-access journals, a growing model in which published articles are made freely available rather than restricted to readers with a paid subscription.  More than a dozen critiques have been posted to various news sites and blogs, some of them suggesting a bias by Science, which charges for subscriptions, against the open-access model.
The pique is less about Mr. Bohannon’s 4,200-word article, which suggests he confirmed a problem throughout academic publishing, than his magazine’s 200-word press release (read it here; scroll down to see it), which repeatedly emphasized his findings as an indictment of the open-access model. The sting operation, Science said in its promotion, “exposes the dark side of open-access publishing.”

What the magazine got wrong: Guardian

Favorite fonts from the Observer a pictorial:

Three weeks ago, Domenic Lippa, a partner at Pentagram Design Consultancy, selected his favourite 10 fonts. His list inspired hundreds of readers to pick their preferred typeface. He says: 'Nowadays we all use fonts: the digital revolution has meant that we can choose from thousands every day. Only 20 years ago, most people wrote correspondence by hand, or used a typewriter, using a font called "typewriter". Typography, once the domain of an elite minority, has now become democratic, and with that comes a voice. The hundreds of examples posted here all have something to inspire. If you want to know which type you are, check out this little game my company created a couple of years ago – it might change your view of fonts…'

Why do politicians like writing political biographies so much? New Statesman:

It made for a fine silly-season story to read that Boris Johnson was writing a book about Winston Churchill. Here we see a man, instantly recognisable and quite irrepressible, a master of wit and wordplay, from a privileged background yet with the common touch, always ready to parade his own vices to mock political correctness, and above all a bad party man with ill-concealed ambitions to get to the top. But which man?

The question is hardly new. When a living politician is drawn to be the biographer of a great statesman – that is, a dead politician – we are bound to wonder about the motivation. In the past, the usual reason was piety. An eminent former colleague or political disciple, preferably one with some literary bent, had to be recruited as the keeper of the bones of the saint. John Morley’s life of his hero Gladstone is a classic example. What was expected was a work in at least two volumes, as the conventional “tombstone” biography. De mortuis nil nisi bunkum.

Saturday Night Live - Screen tests for Fifty Shades of Grey: pairings from Seth Rogen (Bobby Moynihan) and Emma Stone (Noël Wells) to Tracy Morgan (Jay Pharoah) and Tilda Swinton (Kate McKinnon) try out for the coveted roles of Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele. (The sketch's casting of Nasim Pedrad as Aziz Ansari serves as a reminder of the ensemble's overall homogeneity). 

Why investigative journalism is still necessary but also very expensive.  A case study in The Atlantic (Peter Osnos) of Propublica.

Clearly, $750,000 is a very expensive story. On the other hand, what price do you suppose a parent with a young, feverish child might put on these disclosures? As a society we have to find the means to underwrite reporting of this magnitude. Of all the funding ideas that are mainly predictable—foundations, sponsored conferences (a particular specialty of the Texas Tribune), annual appeals, donor buttons on the sites--one notion that deserves far more attention than it has received so far came from Steven Waldman, the author of the Federal Communication Commission's massive 2011 study of the country's news media in the broadband era, including "shortfalls in robust accountability journalism." According to a report by Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, Waldman told the conference that he believes that the tech companies that have grown in scale and revenues to a considerable degree from their distribution of news—Apple, Google, Verizon, AT&T—owe these nonprofit content providers a portion of their massive proceeds. "The winners of the new economy. . . . If they would put just a tiny bit of their wealth into this," Waldman said, serious journalism could thrive.

From twitter;
In Maui’s Upcountry, Where the Paniolo Roam NYTimes My old neighborhood.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 32): Detective Fiction, Barnes & Noble + More

Why detective fiction works from New Statesman:
This may or may not be a good thing. These days, you can comfortably inhabit the world of eccentric amateur detectives and embittered private eyes all year round, in the company of learned fellow travellers, on television, at the cinema, in books and online. There are murder mystery weekends and endless box sets; in classrooms, at conferences and on college campuses, it is now de rigueur for undergrads to study crime fiction and its relationship to feminism, post-colonialism and critical theory, just as I once had to sweat my way through Troilus and Criseyde and the meaning of courtly love. At City University in London, you can now study for an MA in crime thriller novels. Doubtless at a certain point, even Michael Gove will capitulate and make Elmore Leonard his grammar tsar. The underground has become the mainstream.
Just to recap, for those few who haven’t been paying attention or who haven’t had the chance to study, say, module EAS3217 (“Crime and Punishment: Detective Fiction from the Rue Morgue to the Millennium”) at the University of Exeter or EN658 (“American Crime Fiction”) at the University of Kent: Edgar Allan Poe invented detective fiction in 1841 with his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, then Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone (1868), then along came Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie; America went hard-boiled; and now there’s everything else, including a lot from Scandinavia.

Boris Kachka with some needed perspective on the news about Barnes & Noble (New York):
The industry that looked on Barnes & Noble as a virus now treats Amazon like a pandemic. Just last week, in advance of Obama’s visit to an Amazon warehouse, a letter from the ABA (now down to roughly 1,500 members) called Obama’s praise of the company “woefully misguided.” Publishers, meanwhile, are a lot more open in their disdain for Bezos than they ever were for ­Riggio—especially after Amazon came out on top in a recent antitrust suit over e-book prices. Now they’re on the side of Barnes & Noble, the last bastion of bricks and mortar. When Microsoft invested in the Nook last year, publishing CEOs wrote in to congratulate Lynch.
But that cooing sound you hear from publishers isn’t love for Barnes & Noble; it’s fear of its disappearance. Last year, one executive compared a B&N-free landscape to The Road: “The postapocalyptic world of publishing, with publishers pushing shopping carts down Broadway.” For all the anti-chain agitation, publishers long ago adapted to a world in which one business controls 25 percent of the market. And while it may have hastened publishing’s own rapid consolidation—culminating in this year’s Penguin–Random House merger—Barnes & Noble never seriously jeopardized the publisher’s role as the supplier. Amazon, though, is now a growing publisher in its own right, threatening to make not just bookstores but traditional publishers obsolete.

In sports this week from Twitter feed:

James Anderson of England poses with Bob Willis ,Ian Botham and Michael Cairns, the Lancashire Chairman after after becoming the highest Test wicket taker whilst playing for Lancashire during Day one of the 3rd Investec Ashes Test match between England and Australia at Old Trafford http://fb.me/2eSG3vKbi

The Baked Beans Are Off - Ideas on What Scale Means (And reference to Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House)

One of the themes at BookExpo 2013 is about scale in publishing and how this concept has and is changing within our industry.  I was reminded of this post from July 2010 on that topic:


When I joined Macmillan, Inc in 1989 the company was rounding out the decade nicely having gone from losing over $1mm per week and a share price less than $2 in 1980 to one sold to Robert Maxwell for 19x earnings and $92 per share. Application of economies of scale helped build Macmillan to a $2billion publishing conglomerate where each newly acquired publishing company was just ‘more beans for the baked bean company’ which was how senior executives referred to their “factory acquisition” process. In fact, some of the executives, notably CEO Bill Reilly, had come from industrial manufacturing and had a deep understanding of how to effectively apply scale economies to operations.

All the largest publishing companies were following a similar ‘baked bean’ approach as the industry consolidated: Publishing lists were separated from their original companies and progressively (sometimes immediately) overhead expenses were eliminated as the acquired company was absorbed. At one point, I was tasked with following up on the ROI for a slew of companies acquired over a two year period. This proved difficult because their operations had been so effectively integrated into the parent company that constructing a post-acquisition income statement proved virtually impossible.

Fast forward 20 years and the scale economic model is falling apart for trade publishing. So effective at applying scale to accounting, manufacturing, management, production and other overhead, it is ironic that in the internet world everyone now has access to similar scale benefits. Publishing companies now realize they have achieved scale advantages in the wrong functions. Scale advantage in editorial, marketing, promotion, and content management is almost non-existent to the degree that will ensure competitive advantage, yet these are the functions important to future success. (As an isolated example, I would argue that authonomy.com by Harpercollins represents an attempt to build scale into the editorial process).

We all know seismic change – prevalent everywhere - has to come to the cost structures of publishing companies. Squeezed by downward pricing and potential revenue share models that provide more to authors and contributors, publishers will wonder where the money is going to come from. The scale model that built companies like Macmillan, Inc. is irreparably dead to anyone thinking about the future of publishing. The only way out – and it’s not an easy suggestion – is to recognize that those functions that used to provide scale benefits are no longer doing so and need to be carved out. Some of this has happened in manufacturing where companies like Donnelly and Williams Lea have taken over the manufacturing and production function for companies: Those departments no longer exist at the publisher. Decisions to outsource non-value added functions such as accounting, distribution and fulfillment and information technology must be made as the publisher contemplates their future. Once unencumbered, the real test will be whether publishers can re-work their structures so that they build scale economies in those functions that do provide value: Content acquisition, editorial, marketing & promotion and content licensing and brand building.

There is little evidence that this is happening or that the realization has set in. Instead of seeing a publishing company improve their performance over ten years as Macmillan did in the 1980s, we are likely to see many examples of the exact opposite over the next ten. Will companies rise to the challenge or are they so wedded to the old ‘baked bean’ model that they expect it to go on forever? Clearly, it won’t.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 21) Online College?, Society Publishing, Georgia Tech Online, Copyright Revision + More

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: Is College moving Online?

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they’re hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.

But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.

In Scholarly Kitchen Joe Esposito identifies the Inexorable Path of the Professional Society Publisher:

What makes this path inexorable has to do with the structure of the marketplace today. For almost all journals publishers, libraries constitute their single largest source of revenue. Therefore, a publisher must get access to the library budget to thrive or even survive. But increasingly the largest commercial publishers have set up as gatekeepers to those library budgets, a situation that has intensified as more and more purchasing power has moved to the library consortia. When a society publisher decides to move up to stage 6 — that is, by making an arrangement with a large commercial publisher — it can be seen as selling out, but a strategic assessment of the marketplace may see that as buying in.

Georgia Tech announce massive Online/distance learning project (Inside HigherEd)

The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.

Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.

Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master's program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.

The university will rely instead on Udacity staffers, known as “mentors,” to field most questions from students who enroll in the new program. But company and university officials said the new degrees would be entirely comparable to the existing master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Tech, which costs about $40,000 a year for non-Georgia residents.

Some bullet points and not particularly cohesive from the Goldman Sachs business book of the year award (FT):

Victoria Barnsley, chief executive of HarperCollins UK, probably speaks for many publishing executives when she highlights “single platform domination” as “the risk”. “I don’t think it was good for the record industry nor will it be good for publishing,” she says. The conundrum for publishers is what to do about it.

The House Judiciary Committee began hearings on changing copyright law. Don't hold your breath (CJR):

This contentiousness stems from the fact that copyright law, itself, is something other, or more than, dull. As it stands now, it’s intricate, confusing, and — most of the experts who testified yesterday more or less agreed — due for an update. But not quite everyone. “I think the notion in many circles that copyright law has become totally dysfunctional and counter productive is not the way the situation is,” said Jon Baumgarten, who once served as the general counsel to the copyright office.

This is what passed for consensus in this debate. The CPP’s final report, for instance, noted that “various members of the group maintain reservations and even objections to some proposals described as recommendations in this Report.” And so, they wrote, “we do not intend affirmative statements or the use of phrases, such as ‘we recommend’ or ‘we believe,’ to suggest that the group as a whole was uniformly in support of each particular view stated.”

From twitter this week:

Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax Guardian

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 20) Dan Brown's Inferno, a Parody, Coursera, + More

The Telegraph reviews the new Dan Brown book (in a way):

The Inspector reluctantly passed a laptop to Langdon who could now sit up in bed. Dr d’Angelou smiled.

“I will leave you two gentlemen,” she said, because that was the sort of thing people said in novels.

Langdon pressed a few keys and on the laptop screen was a grey filtrated image of himself walking along a street he did not recognise. Across the road was a little old woman dressed as Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that deeply divisive saint of the Catholic Church and presumably head of the deeply sinister Salvation Army.

With a chill that aspirated his spine, Langdon watched as the diminutive saint beckoned to him across the road.

“What is she saying, laddie?” the Inspector asked.

Langdon shook his head.

“I don’t know,” he lied.

“You don’t know?” the Inspector asked. “Robert Langdon PFC etc etc doesn’t know something? No wonder you’ve gone as white as your sateen sheets.”

But it was the next frame in the CCTV footage that genuinely shocked him. Out of nowhere and without warning a yellow school bus appeared. It was going at least 30mph in a 20mph zone and its windows were crowded with faces cheering and waving, but that is not what caught Langdon’s attention. Down its side was written in large letters the word PEN.

Langdon froze the picture.

“What does PEN mean, do you think?”

Langdon wrote the word pen along one of the fine lines that demarked the sheet of foolscap in his firm yet carefree handwriting.

They over do it by trying the above again in a different section of the paper although this one may be better:(Telegraph)

“Thanks, John,” he thanked. Then he put down the telephone and perambulated on foot to the desk behind which he habitually sat on a chair to write his famous books on an Apple iMac MD093B/A computer. New book Inferno, the latest in his celebrated series about fictional Harvard professor Robert Langdon, was inspired by top Italian poet Dante. It wouldn’t be the last in the lucrative sequence, either. He had all the sequels mapped out. The Mozart Acrostic. The Michelangelo Wordsearch. The Newton Sudoku.

The 190lb adult male human being nodded his head to indicate satisfaction and returned to his bedroom by walking there. Still asleep in the luxurious four-poster bed of the expensive $10 million house was beautiful wife Mrs Brown. Renowned author Dan Brown gazed admiringly at the pulchritudinous brunette’s blonde tresses, flowing from her head like a stream but made from hair instead of water and without any fish in. She was as majestic as the finest sculpture by Caravaggio or the most coveted portrait by Rodin. I like the attractive woman, thought the successful man.

As the book hits number one all around the world, literary smugness at its finest.

Is good grammar still important? (Observer):

The inaugural Bad Grammar award has gone to a group of academics for an open letter in which they criticised education secretary Michael Gove. Are we too hung up on the correct use of language?

Coursera adds Textbook content from Sage, Wiley, Oxford University Press and Macmillan Higher Education in partnership with Chegg (Blog):

Now, all classes need some additional learning materials – guides, lecture notes, and of course books. That’s where Chegg steps in. We’re serving as the platform on which Coursera students access their reading materials, all through our eTextbook reader.

“Student needs are evolving so it’s important that they continue to learn in and out of the classroom,” said Dan Rosensweig, President and CEO of Chegg. “It’s vital that we put students first. Digital courses allow the most sought-after classes, taught by the most knowledgeable educators to be accessible, even worldwide, helping students finish college quicker and with less debt. At Chegg, we are thrilled to partner with Coursera to expand and adapt our digital offerings – from textbooks to supplemental content – to enhance the way students are learning today.”

From Twitter this week:
Items from Hemingway's Cuba home go to JFK Library BusinessWeek
Ann Curry reportedly being courted for lucrative tell-all book deal Examiner - Didn't she get $10mm severance? Not enough?

And in Sport, Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson announced his retirement this week and will be leaving the job on a high note: Guardian Supplement

Croudsourcing Investments in Books: It will happen.

Eric Hellman over at the eponymously named Go To Hellman has an interesting idea that chips away at one of the last foundations of big publishing; the 'investment banking' attribute that big publishing brings to the industry.  Here's a snip from his blog post this week:

There's nothing intrinsic about crowd-funding that restricts this sort of fund-raising to unknown authors looking for a first advance. The JOBS act restricts the amount raised from "unqualified investors" to $1,000,000, so the really big name authors would have to tap the "qualified investor" funding market. (An individual with more than a million dollars in assets excluding home and vehicles is considered "qualified")

Once equity crowd-funding becomes established for books (and it WILL happen!), incumbent publishing houses will have lost, at a stroke, their oligopoly on books as investment vehicles. Already, publishers are outsourcing their design, editorial, production, distribution and sales functions; providing capital is their last bastion of essential function. They will have to participate in the new markets or they will dissipate into irrelevancy.

Read the whole thing.