Personanondata: Volume 4

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

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

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

Also Wired.

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

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

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

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

Christopher Hitchens in quotes from The Telegraph: My favorite:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Twitter:

Georgia O'Keeffe's visit to Hawaii SFGATE

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

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

Sunday, December 11, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Twitter:

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

Sunday, December 04, 2011

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

The GED test is being revamped (EdWeek):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two articles about beautiful books from the NYTimes:

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

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

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

And from the Guardian:

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

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

Some other articles of interest:

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

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

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

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

From the twitter:

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

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

Sunday, November 27, 2011

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

Sunday, November 20, 2011

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 47): Lobbying for On Line Learning, Loan Bubble + More

A long article on how government lobbying activities have brought about significant changes in the prospects for online learning companies (Nation):

Despite the clear conflict of interest between her lobbying clients and her philanthropic goals, Levesque and her team have led a quiet but astonishing national transformation. Lobbyists like Levesque have made 2011 the year of virtual education reform, at last achieving sweeping legislative success by combining the financial firepower of their corporate clients with the seeming legitimacy of privatization-minded school-reform think tanks and foundations. Thanks to this synergistic pairing, policies designed to boost the bottom lines of education-technology companies are cast as mere attempts to improve education through technological enhancements, prompting little public debate or opposition. In addition to Florida, twelve states have expanded virtual school programs or online course requirements this year. This legislative juggernaut has coincided with a gold rush of investors clamoring to get a piece of the K-12 education market. It’s big business, and getting bigger: One study estimated that revenues from the K-12 online learning industry will grow by 43 percent between 2010 and 2015, with revenues reaching $24.4 billion.

In Florida, only fourteen months after Crist handed a major victory to teachers unions, a new governor, Rick Scott, signed a radical bill that could have the effect of replacing hundreds of teachers with computer avatars. Scott, a favorite of the Tea Party, appointed Levesque as one of his education advisers. His education law expanded the Florida Virtual School to grades K-5, authorized the spending of public funds on new for-profit virtual schools and created a requirement that all high school students take at least one online course before graduation.

“I’ve never seen it like this in ten years,” remarked Ron Packard, CEO of virtual education powerhouse K12 Inc., on a conference call in February. “It’s almost like someone flipped a switch overnight and so many states now are considering either allowing us to open private virtual schools” or lifting the cap on the number of students who can use vouchers to attend K12 Inc.’s schools. Listening to a K12 Inc. investor call, one could mistake it for a presidential campaign strategy session, as excited analysts read down a list of states and predict future victories.

And somewhat related: Is there a bubble in student education costs? ( New Yorker):

The bubble analogy does work in one respect: education costs, and student debt, are rising at what seem like unsustainable rates. But this isn’t the result of collective delusion. Instead, it stems from the peculiar economics of education, which have a lot in common with the economics of health care, another industry with a huge cost problem. (Indeed, in recent decades the cost of both college education and health care has risen sharply in most developed countries, not just the U.S.) Both industries suffer from an ailment called Baumol’s cost disease, which was diagnosed by the economist William Baumol, back in the sixties. Baumol recognized that some sectors of the economy, like manufacturing, have rising productivity—they regularly produce more with less, which leads to higher wages and rising living standards. But other sectors, like education, have a harder time increasing productivity. Ford, after all, can make more cars with fewer workers and in less time than it did in 1980. But the average student-teacher ratio in college is sixteen to one, just about what it was thirty years ago. In other words, teachers today aren’t any more productive than they were in 1980. The problem is that colleges can’t pay 1980 salaries, and the only way they can pay 2011 salaries is by raising prices. And the Baumol problem is exacerbated by the arms-race problem: colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio.

From the twitter:

Anthony Burgess archive reveals vast body of previously unseen work Guardian

Hilary Mantel novel Wolf Hall will be part of a trilogy Telegraph

Nora Roberts: The woman who rewrote the rules of romantic fiction Guardian

Reed Elsevier fails to impress analysts despite revenue growth Reuters

Sunday, November 13, 2011

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 46): WW I Archive Goes Online, Mrs Beeton's 150, Silicon Valley's Daily, Cookbook Aps +More

An archive trove of documents relating to the first world war is to go online (Guardian):

Living witnesses to the war may no longer be with us, but British archives still hold a wealth of original documentation from those years and, although much of it is in danger of crumbling away, the range of testimony held by the British Library helps to broaden understanding of the war.
In an unprecedented effort to make this material available to the widest possible public, the library is to join forces with 12 European partners – including national libraries in Rome, Berlin, Paris and Copenhagen – to put key documents and images on the internet. The new three-year project, Remembering the First World War, will be finished in time for the ceremonies to mark the centenary of the outbreak of war in 2014.

More than 400,000 first world war source materials, many of them rare and highly fragile due to the deterioration of the paper on which they are printed, will be freely available online for the first time. Those interested in finding out more about the conflict will no longer have to apply to see documents in person in the reading rooms of Europe.

"It is particularly important that this project includes organisations that were involved in different sides of the conflict," said Jamie Andrews from the British Library, who is leading the British project.

Mrs Beeton's cookbook is 150 years old. How do the recipes stand up? (Intelligent Life):

Beeton was a hard-pressed journalist rather than a practised cook: her biographer, Kathryn Hughes, says there is no evidence “that Isabella was interested in cooking”. Compiled under pressure of deadline, the recipes were shamelessly purloined from other cookbooks. Beeton’s claim in advertisements for the book that every recipe was tested seems doubtful, judging by her odder instructions. She maintains that large carrots should be boiled for 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 hours and macaroni for 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 hours. Oddly, her recipe for haricot mutton contains no haricot beans, and she suggests that Brussels sprouts “may be arranged on the dish in the form of a pineapple”.

On the plus side, “Household Management” is punctuated with background information about food. We learn that black turkey “approaches nearest to the original stock and is esteemed the best”. Beeton’s advice on fresh-cooked lobster could scarcely be bettered for precision. It should have “a stiffness in the tail which, if gently raised, will return with a spring”. Current culinary opinion has come back to her view on butter, “nutritious and…far more easily digested than any other of the oleaginous substances sometimes used in its place”. And the book as a whole provides a magnificent panorama of food in the middle of the 19th century. Along with items that have remained mainstays of British cuisine—rib of beef, pork pie, Welsh rarebit and bread-and-butter pudding (“better for being made about two hours before it is baked”)—there are numerous other recipes that have been forgotten.

The Columbia Journalism Review notes some sloppy citations on the Poynter Romenesko blog and all hell brakes loose (Poynter):

One danger of this practice is that the words may appear to belong to Jim when they in fact belong to another.

This style represents Jim’s deliberate choice to be transparent about the information’s origins while using the source’s own words to represent his or her work. If only for quotation marks, it would be exactly right. Without those quotation marks, it is incomplete and inconsistent with our publishing practices and standards on Poynter.org.

A long discussion of the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s own daily, which as CJR notes was poised to ride the digital whirlwind. What happened? (CJR):

Dave Butler has been a newspaperman since 1972, a self-described journeyman who became the editor of the Mercury News in 2008. The paper had been sold two years earlier by its longtime parent company, Knight Ridder, to the McClatchy Company. McClatchy in turn quickly sold it to MediaNews Group, whose chairman, Dean Singleton, put Butler in charge. Three months into the job, Butler wrote a memo to the staff, outlining a vision that could essentially be boiled down to a simple premise: the past could no longer animate the Mercury News. The days of four hundred people in the newsroom, revenues of $300 million and profit margins north of 30 percent, a bureau in Hanoi, aPulitzer for foreign news, Spanish and Vietnamese language editions, and a Sunday magazine, were gone. The staff of the Merc, now about half the size it was at its peak in the late 1990s, had no choice but to press on with vigor and a sense of mission: “Let’s carve some new trails in the jungle of journalism!”

Butler has the advantage of having missed his paper’s past, and so is unencumbered by the memory of what the place had been, not so long ago. Randall Keith knew. He had arrived earlier, in 1998, just in time to watch the great tech bubble inflate, carrying the Merc along with it. He had left a job as city editor of the Quincy, Massachusetts, Patriot Ledger to join a paper with a national reputation both for its journalism and its profitability. Time magazine had several years earlier dubbed the Merc the nation’s most tech-savvy newspaper. Its revenues from classified advertising—especially recruitment ads for all those many high-tech companies whose every product roll out and inevitable IPO were covered by the paper’s burgeoning business staff—had fueled ever more revenue, $288 million the year Keith arrived.

From the Observer: Ahmed Mourad was Hosni Mubarak's personal photographer and a thriller writer. (Observer):

"I was ready to explode because I had been living a dual life for five years, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde," says the dapper, quietly spoken Mourad. "During the day, I spent hours working with Hosni Mubarak – a man who had been burying the dreams of Egyptians for three decades – and at night I was with my friends, who were cursing him and wishing he would disappear. What was really making me angry was that I knew the Egyptian people were destined to live better and he was the reason why that wasn't happening."

So was Mourad in fear for his job – or, indeed, his life – when Vertigo appeared? He does not answer the question directly. "I didn't think it would be published, but I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn't written down what I was thinking, if I hadn't joined the revolution," he says. "I would have regretted my silence."

I'll have an App for Christmas dinner (Observer):

Yet those domestic chefs who have long treasured their dog-eared copies of classics by Elizabeth David, Madhur Jaffrey or Delia Smith may find it difficult to accept a technological upgrade. Whether a favourite cookbook is marked with telling splashes and scribbled comments, or is merely read in bed, performing the function of a familiar comfort blanket, it still delivers something that the food writer and television presenter Jay Rayner suspects cannot be replaced.

"A cooking app is a brilliant thing, until you have to turn the page with hands caked in dough. A stained cookery-book page is a mark of commitment; a stained smartphone is a trip back to the shop," he suggests.

To develop the look of the new apps, publishers have brought in designers to draw up cartoon-like cooking aids that avoid the high production costs of filming a live chef working in a kitchen. Early internet services, such as the innovative British website Videojug, are still proving popular, but new, stylish, illustrated apps are coming up fast. From next summer even the prestigious Culinary Institute of America in New York will require its students to come equipped with a tablet computer pre-loaded with the school's new app.

From Twitter:

The future of books? Publishing by numbers: IrishTimes

Self publishing textbooks online saves Minnesota school district $175,000 (Link)

Australia gives up battle protecting its publishers, will reduce timeframe for retention of territorial copyright (PW)

Alec Baldwin hands over $250 Large to East Hampton public library. (EHampton)

Sunday, November 06, 2011

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 45): The New A&R, Problem Biographies, Scan your Books, Education, Libraroes + More

Changing the way music stars are made (Economist):

David Joseph, who runs the British arm of Universal Music, says A&R men used to be alchemists, discovering base talent and turning it into gold. “They made dreams come true,” he says.

These days they are venture capitalists. Particularly at big labels such as Universal, A&R executives increasingly expect acts to have built a self-sustaining, if modest, business before they offer them a recording contract.

Large numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers help show that a band has traction. But record labels have become wary of social-media indicators. They know that desperate bands may chatter about themselves or hire marketing firms to inflate their online metrics. The labels also want to know whether a band is drawing a steadily growing number of people to its gigs. The bar rises constantly. Mumford & Sons (pictured), a successful folk-rock outfit from bucolic west London, had amassed a large live following and had released several EPs before signing with Island Records in 2009.

Louis Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Press reflects on the Julian Assange biography imbroglio (TheAge):

When publishers and authors resort to lawyers, injunctions, and secret book drops to bookshops, things have gone haywire. Demanding an advance is returned is rare, retrieving the cold, hard cash even less likely. Contracts, deadlines and copyrights may have legal force but the relationship always depends on good faith. One cannot bully a writer into delivering a manuscript good enough to publish or on time. That is why it is in the interests of both publisher and author to keep it ''nice'' and renegotiate when deadlines loom or the editorial direction differs from the original brief, or when the author wants to put ''your'' book on hold while they write another book for another publisher.

Scan all your books - yes, there's a service for that (Economist):

1DollarScan is the American outpost of the Japanese firm Bookscan, founded to solve the problem of scant space in Japan's poky urban dwellings and to prevent damage caused by bookshelf-toppling earthquakes. (Bookscan has no relation to Nielsen BookScan, an American retail-sales-tracking service). Ship your volumes to 1DollarScan, and the company will slice off the spine, and charge $1 for every 100 pages scanned. (The firm also scans routine documents and photos.) It uses high-speed Canon scanners, with optical-character recognition (OCR) software developed jointly by Bookscan and Canon. The process does not yet produce text in standard e-book formats; instead, customers receive PDF files that show the scanned image, but also have whatever text was successfully extracted in a separate, searchable layer. The resulting files are chunky: tens of megabytes per book, or 100 times bigger than Amazon's Kindle titles. But it is a start.

Hiroshi Nakano, the boss of 1DollarScan, says a few thousand books have been received in the first month or so of operation. And that is before the firm has begun its marketing drive, or adapted its Japanese-language smartphone software (for reading and managing user accounts) for English speakers. One early surprise has been the linguistic diversity of books sent over: besides English, there have been Portuguese, Hebrew and Arabic titles, among others. Boxes of books are being shipped in from Europe, too, in English and other languages. (The firm uses slightly different OCR software depending on the language in question.) Another difference is the volume of individual orders. Where Japanese customers send batches of 150 books, the California-based service is seeing an average closer to 30.

Commentary on the Dot Earth blog at the NYTimes about developing a different approach to education:

As I’ve written here before, finding and disseminating education methods that foster creative, collaborative and resilient learning and problem solving is a prime path toward fitting human aspirations on a finite planet. Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, “Occupy the Classroom,” explores relevant terrain. This approach is also particularly useful in the face of prolonged economic uncertainty.

Notably, the potential learning-by-doing role of American students and scholars in advancing human prospects in struggling regions came up today at a meeting organized by the United States Agency for International Development (which just celebrated its 50th anniversary) and hosted by theWoodrow Wilson Center. Alex Dehgan, the science and technology adviser to the agency’s administrator, said you’ll know we’re there “when we have students not asking what is your major, but what is your problem.”

Current classroom norms, which Goyal described as the “culture of fill in the bubble tests and drill-and-kill teaching methods,” aren’t a good fit in a complicated, connected, competitive world.

Nic Kristof in the NY Times takes a look at Room to Read which is one man's approach to solving illiteracy around the world (NYTimes):

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.

From the Twitter:

Talks under way to save UK's biggest music and drama lending library http://gu.com/p/335ka/tw

A jewel of an of obit, by Margalit Fox: Jimmy Savile, TV Personality, Dies at 84: http://nyti.ms/w0jozP

In sports: Sir Alex Ferguson describes his 25yrs as a fairy tale. http://bbc.in/vTSWAV

Sunday, October 30, 2011

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 44): Books in Browsers, Photography, Drivel + More

I pride myself somewhat on how I organize these posts, only to find that those of you receiving this in the email version will think I am careless and disorganized. In truth, it is the blogger editor which while never very good has gone from bad to worse. I spend at least 50% more time putting these things together now versus how long it took prior to the 'upgrade'. So my apologies to those of you who care about these things but it's just not my fault.

At the Books in Browsers conference hosted by the Internet Archive attendees debate "what is a book" NYTimes

The challenge will be to sort all of that material into ephemeral and semipermanent baskets, some of which might be called, for lack of a better term, books. But at the moment, as Mr. Hellman said, online books are largely stuck in the “pretend it’s print” model. That works for traditional publishers because it offers a model that looks a lot like the past but ultimately depends on a notion of false scarcity.

Mr. Hellman’s own idea, which he is developing as Unglue.it, is to crowd-source the money to digitize individual titles and basically set them free. It sounds like a dreamy but impractical idea, but he added this to ground it in reality: “Have you ever given a book to someone? Have you ever given the same book to multiple people? Would you like to give this book to the entire world?”

From the Observer a look at how British museums are embracing photography all of a sudden (Observer)

The culture around photography – festivals, book publishing and selling, workshops, websites and prizes – has grown exponentially, making London a centre of contemporary photographic practice. Finally…

Inevitably, if belatedly, the major art institutions have responded in kind. Last week the Victoria & Albert unveiled its new Photographs Gallery, a permanent space to show highlights from its extraordinary collection, chronicling the history of photography from 1839 to the 1960s. Ironically, the exhibition harks back to a time when London embraced what was then a revolutionary new medium that threatened to make painting a thing of the past. The V&A was the first museum to collect photography and, in 1858, to exhibit photographic prints. The oldest photograph on display in the new gallery is a daguerreotype of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square by an anonymous photographer, and many of the pioneering giants of photography, from Margaret Cameron to Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray to Irving Penn, are represented. What's more, the exhibition will be re-curated every 18 months to show off the scale of the museum's archive of original prints.

"We play to our strengths," says curator Martin Barnes, "which, in photography, is the fine print. We are not showing the history of photography, nor charting a chronological story with examples along a linear trajectory, but nevertheless the collection is deep enough that the historical reach will always be evident in the exhibition."

And again from the Observer a review of a book that looks at the history of some of London's ritzy hotels during the war (Observer)

At the Savoy, journalists filed articles from makeshift offices carved from the carcasses of once-expensive suites. Con artists and swindlers, invigorated by the opportunities brought by war, hunted for victims among the potted palms. Illegal abortionists, profiting from the wartime increase in unwanted pregnancies, conducted their business behind locked hotel-room doors. Spies and spymasters made the grand hotels into thriving centres of espionage, using quiet suites for debriefings and interrogations and picking at the plasterwork for hidden microphones. MI5 booked a suspected Nazi double agent called Stella Lonsdale into a room at the Waldorf, and waited for her to crack. Guy Burgess installed a pair of spies at the Dorchester, one a painfully handsome 19-year-old with 10 targets on his watch list – mainly homosexual Magyars (Hungarians) who were charmed by his unfingermarked good looks. "The whole place," shuddered the head of Special Branch, "is crawling with foreigners."

The photographer Cecil Beaton made a gleefully snobbish inventory of the Dorchester's inhabitants: "Cabinet ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron-grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty; actresses (also); déclassé society people; cheap musicians and motor-car agents." At the front of the hotel, General Eisenhower plotted the progress of the war behind a concrete barrier installed for his protection. Beneath the hotel, the foreign secretary Edward Halifax slept beside his wife and his mistress in the Turkish bath – not realising that the chamber projected out from the main body of the hotel and was therefore one of the most vulnerable spots in the building.

Will games replace reading? The Author answers his own question (Observer):

As an author who also plays games, and the father of three boys who read books and play games, I often get asked whether I think games will kill off the novel, and the answer is no, of course they won't. Books have survived the coming of films and TV, rock'n'roll and sudoku, and they will survive the coming of computer games. But they will be influenced by them, just as all those other media had their own impact and influence on books and, let's not forget, were hugely influenced by them.

The best games have taken stuff from books (where would computer games be without Tolkien, for instance?) and any novelist worth their salt should be taking stuff from games. What you don't want are books that slavishly replicate the experience of playing a game because, well, why not just go and play a game instead? In the same way, you don't want a game that gets bogged down with interminable cut-scenes and has only one, very rigid, way of being played. There are cleverer and more elegant ways of designing them, as demonstrated by the brilliant GTA series.

More mindless drivel (Telegraph)

It is reported Miss Middleton has had two meetings with publishing executives at HarperCollins and has met with several other publishing houses. There are predictions that she could make more than £1m from royalties and the sale of international rights and spin-off projects.

A well-placed publishing source told the Sunday Times (£): “Pippa is very serious about the project and has been going to meet publishers personally. Pippa hasn’t signed a contract yet but I don’t think it will be far off. She is a good writer but I expect she would be offered the services of an experienced ghost writer.”

Movie and theatrical performance rights may follow if all goes well (This bit is a lie).

From The New Republic, why authors should embrace Amazon's push into publishing (TNR):

THE TIMES WONDERS if Amazon can “secretly create its own bestsellers.” Actually, it already has, although they aren’t the books in its publishing program. Of the current top ten e-book bestsellers on Amazon, four of them are self-published. These aren’t flukes: They’ve been in the top ten more than 50 days on average. They’re books by authors you probably haven’t heard of—Darcy Chan, Chris Culver, Michael Prescott, Douglas E. Richards—right up there with James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks. At 79 to 99 cents a copy, they’re priced to sell. But considering that sales estimates for some of the top indie e-book sellers start at 2500 copies a month, that’s money most authors would be quite pleased with. Self-published e-books occupy several slots of the top ten on all the genre lists, too—sci-fi, romance, mysteries.

This is staggering, and it’s a part of the story that hasn’t yet been fully explored. When nontraditional e-books are taking such a large cut of the market, why on earth is Amazon building an editorial apparatus? It would seem to be exactly the wrong move—unless there’s some other piece of the puzzle we don’t know about.

Amazon can be faulted for a lot of things, but making bad business decisions isn’t one of them. If the company has calculated that the gain of bringing edited books to market is worth the investment in an in-house editorial staff, that’s not an assault on the publishing industry. To the contrary: It’s a signal that the services the industry has traditionally offered are still of value. What’s under assault, rather, is the bloated, arrogant, and conservative culture of the publishing conglomerates that for so long have enjoyed far too much control over what we read.

Notes on a voice from More Intelligent Life takes on Conan Doyle:

“Dr Watson doesn’t write to you, he talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy, across a glowing fire.” So said John le Carré, one of many writers in thrall to Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). His most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, provides the excitement. But his second most famous, John Watson, provides the voice.

The stories (1887-1927) are infinitely re-readable. Fans focus on Holmes himself, that perfect assemblage of cold calculation and eccentric tastes—the violin, the cocaine, the tobacco in the Persian slipper. “Every writer owes something to Holmes,” wrote T.S. Eliot in 1929. But Holmes would be precious without Watson’s direct, manly presence. A late story narrated by Holmes was hopeless. The prose lost most of its energy and all of its suspense, and became smug.

Watson, the medic ever ready with a pistol and a flask of brandy, was a conduit for Doyle himself, who had been a GP. The doctor is decent, and, contrary to popular belief, not stupid. He shares the reader’s breathless bemusement at Holmes’s lightning deductions. “What can it all mean?” Watson gasps in “The Speckled Band”, the most terrifying story of all. “‘It means that it’s all over,’ Holmes answered.”

From Twitter:

Lonely Planet looks to digital publishing http://bit.ly/rVpFRq

Philip Pullman: Using the internet is like looking at a landscape through a keyhole - Telegraph

Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me' – interview http://gu.com/p/32mnp/tw

Editing Wikipedia at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: http://nyti.ms/qCaJdn

Sunday, October 23, 2011

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 43): Tom Waits, Children's Books, The Booker, "Close the Libraries", Textbooks & Education + More

Interview with Tom Waits in the Observer:

"Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting," he says. "The idea that it will just be a sort of vapour that you listen to out of speakers the size of a dime alarms me. It's like injecting yourself. Or eating alone."

He is, he says, equally wary of the ease of search and shuffle. "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."

Does he ever stray online?

"No," he says. "But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music."

In Observer, there is a section devoted to reading with kids and here an essay on asking why young adults are so interested in dystopian fiction (Observer):

A new wave of dystopian fiction at this particular time shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's the zeitgeist. Adults write books for teenagers. So anxious adults – worried about the planet, the degradation of civil society and the bitter inheritance we're leaving for the young – write dystopian books.

We create harsh, violent worlds. These are dark, sometimes bleak stories, but that doesn't mean they are hopeless. Those of us who write for young people are reluctant to leave our readers without hope. It wouldn't be right. We always leave a candle burning in the darkness.

And we write good stories. That's why teenagers read them.

Gaby Wood reflecting on the Booker prize (Telegraph):

But when our shortlist became the fastest-selling since records began, all hell broke loose. Clearly, our choices must be too “commercial” and not “literary” enough. Significantly, none of this discussion was a response to the actual books on the list.

Of the people who have scoffed, asked me if I’m embarrassed, or who pronounced the prize to be on its last legs, not a single one has read The Sisters Brothers or Half-Blood Blues or Pigeon English, all shortlisted and all quite sophisticated exercises in voice-throwing or genre-bending. There is something magnificent about this: that books which in another year would be classed as too odd or offbeat or even experimental have been derided as too commercial. Readers, we have slipped you some truly wonderful, surprising stuff in the inadvertent guise of the mass market.

Of course, The Sense of an Ending in any case makes these arguments instantly out of date, since its author is not a controversial or “unliterary” choice, and the book is a masterpiece by any measure. Most of the judges loved it as soon as we read it, all of us have read it several times, and no one doubts that it improves with every reading.

We should close the libraries says John McTernan who has an MA in librarianship and has 280 comments - so far. (Telegraph):

The final defence of the public library is that it is a place for the pupil who has nowhere else to study and revise. Once again, this is the 21st century. Virtually every kid has a desk at home – even if it often has a games console on it. And libraries at secondary schools are, in my experience, uniformly good and open places for young people.

Few institutions are timeless. Most reflect the period when they were created, and have to change as society changes if they are to survive. The crisis in our libraries is not because of the “cuts” – it’s because they are needed less.

And there are currently 280 comments including this one from "billfanshel"

"Google a subject and you can become ridiculously well-informed ridiculously quickly."

No, Google a subject and you can become ridiculously misinformed ridiculously quickly, with the result being an increasing susceptibility to demagoguery. A

major job of a librarian is to help patrons distinguish good information from bad. Having apparently been out of the profession for 17 years, the author has become out of touch with the modern library and the evolving role of librarians. That is, of course, assuming that he ever was in touch with those things.

As a librarian in the U.S., my philosophy regarding online resources is "supplement not supplant." In other words, the Internet should add to what is available in print and not replace it. It is sad to see that public officials in Britain are as ill-informed and anti-intellectual as those in the United States. However, based on this comment thread, it is encouraging to see that the British populace is as supportive of its public libraries as the U.S. populace and will fight attempts to eliminate them.

A few years ago, as part of austerity measures, the mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wanted to close down 11 of the city's 54 public library branches. The people balked at that prospect, and the library branches remain open. Do the same in Great Britain!

Is this war? In wake of Pearson's unveiling of a free LMS, Blackboard announces moves to promote sharing of open course content. (InsideHigherEd):

The company plans to unveil both of these moves at its corporate session here today. Ray Henderson, the president of Blackboard’s LMS product line and chief technology officer at the company, discussed them with Inside Higher Ed here at Educause on Tuesday.

“We look at the market and we see there’s a real curiosity in trying to extend the mission that the institutions have and who they serve,” Henderson said. “And there are a lot that take inspiration from, say, the MIT OpenCourseWare project, where they would really like to have their catalog of courses, and the course materials that they’re creating -- they’d like to contribute those more openly.”

Under the partnership with Creative Commons, Blackboard instructors will be invited to tag their course content with different licenses that indicate exactly how others can use it. Instructors will then have the option of sharing the course on Twitter or Facebook.

The company is also working to make the licensed course content more visible to public search engines, so that it can be discovered more easily by instructors searching the Web for free course content.

Under proposed legislation government grant money will be denied to developers of open access educational content (Inside HigherEd)

The move is a boon to publishers, who have feared that government support for the freely available, modifiable course materials, known as “open educational resources,” or OERs, would eat into their profits and give the free programs an unfair advantage. If effective programs are already for sale, they argue, the federal government shouldn’t spend extra money to reinvent the wheel.

Advocates for community colleges and online education argued that the provision, if enacted, would stifle innovation and restrict colleges to the publishers’ more expensive programs.

“We hear any concerns that the subcommittee might have about duplications of efforts and resources,” said James Hermes, director of government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges. “If there really is truly an alternative already in existence, you don’t want to duplicate that and create something from scratch that’s already there.”

From the twitter:

Philip Pullman: Using the internet is like looking at a landscape through a keyhole - Telegraph

Editing Wikipedia at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: NYTimes

An Indiana School System Goes Digital: NYTimes

Cengage will partner with Moodlerooms: Journal

Michael Cairns

Michael Cairns is currently Head of Partner and Channel Development for the publishing unit of the American Psychological Association which is a $100million scholarly, academic and educational publisher. In this role, he is responsible for all sales and marketing activities supporting the revenue base and working with current and new partners to expand APA's publishing program and mission. Michael Cairns has served as President, CEO and CRO of several brand name publishing, technology and content-centric businesses. His career includes a wide range of publishing and information products, services and B2B categories and his operating and consulting experience has largely been with brand-name companies such as PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Macmillan, Inc., Berlitz International, AARP, R.R. Bowker and Wolters Kluwer. Mr. Cairns has also served on boards including the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and also served as Chairman of the International ISBN Executive Committee.