Before The Lion King

42nd Street - Before the Lion King, April 1993

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

Hard to believe it has been almost 20 years since I took this photo on a coolish April morning in 1993. For a few weeks that year, there was an art installation where artists placed messages and artwork on the front of the old theaters that lined 42nd street between 7th and 8th. Today this block looks completely different and the there's no remnant of the old sleaziness and edginess that pervaded Times Square in the years before The Lion King showed up at The Amsterdam Theater.

Here's the whole set from that morning.

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Cengage and their MindTap Personal Learning Environment

Personal Learning Environments gain credibility as Cengage launch MindTap.

Cengage has taken a first step in development of an entirely new approach to delivering educational content with the launch of MindTap which they say goes "well beyond an eBook, a homework solution or digital supplement, a resource center website, a course delivery platform or a Learning Management System."

On this platform, students and faculty can interact with textbook eContent, select materials they find useful, access and use applications developed by them, the publisher or third parties and engage others in the process of learning. Specifically, the platform:

• Engages students through highly interactive content including assignable and gradable learning activities
• Offers instructors choice in content, adaptable learning paths, additive learning tools, and multi-platform/device support
• Mashes up and orchestrates rich content, learning activities, and apps delivered in one cohesive context to drive higher levels of engagement and outcomes

All education publishers have or are developing electronic content and are delivering that content in multiple ways. Additionally, publishers are attempting to integrate their content to make the compilation of products as flexible as possible for both educators and students. What might be unique to the MindTap platform is the (radical) idea that external (to the publisher) developers could build applications that use the content in different ways. Publishers with more advanced experience in electronic publishing particularly in professional publishing have provided APIs to third party developers in numerous examples but this may be the first example in educational publishing where a large established company has taken this step. Readers here will recall that Elsevier recently launched SciVerse which allows for the same type of collaboration from their user community as the MindTap product presumably intends to do.

Interestingly, and whether intended or not, the company seems purposeful in drawing a distinction between their platform which they say is 'agnostic' and LMS platforms such as Blackboard. Whether this is a skirmish or prelude to war is hard to tell; however, in a recent profile of Blackboard and their development plans publishers may have some concern that Blackboard is looking to play on a much larger playing field.

MindApps create learning paths that integrate content and learning activity applications that map directly to an instructor's syllabus or curriculum. Unlike other products which are affiliated with a single Learning Management System (LMS), MindTap is LMS agnostic and designed to work with any supported LMS the instructor chooses to use. Students can navigate through a customized dashboard of readings, assignments, and other course information. This powerful combination of personalized content and on-the-go access encourages interactivity, increases student engagement and improves learning outcomes.

Quoted in the press release, William Rieders, executive vice president of New Media for Cengage Learning states:

"Many eBook and other technology platforms currently exist, but none of them have addressed the main needs of students and professors holistically. Digital platforms, until now, have simply recreated the experience of the print textbook in a digital format, leaving students dissatisfied and instructors limited in their ability to teach. MindTap takes classroom engagement to an entirely new level. It is an optimal blend of sound pedagogy, authoritative content and advanced technology."

What will be interesting is how the other publishers react - as I am confident they have their own platforms in development - and how the product will be accepted in the schools and by students. To date, students have been lukewarm about content delivered electronically.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 9): Information Concierge, Future of Education Publishing, Blackboard, The $16K/mth Sideline, Blurbs, Marilyn Monroe

We have a digital concierge at the publisher and now we have an information concierge at the library. The Chronicle looks into it:

At the start of each class session, the professor, Gardner Campbell, asked the 11 students to open their laptops, fire up Twitter, and say hello to their librarian, who was following the discussion from her office. During the hourlong class, the librarian, Ellen Hampton Filgo, would do what she refers to as “library jazz,” looking at the questions and comments posed by students, responding with suggestions of links or books, and anticipating what else might be helpful that students might not have known to ask.

“I could see the sort of germination of an idea, and what they wanted to talk about,” she said, noting that it let her in on the process of students’ research far sooner than usual. “That was cool for me,” she added.

“When I work with students at the reference desk, usually they’re already at a certain midpoint of their research.” When the class was discussing the work of the science-fiction author Clifford D. Simak, for instance, she tweeted a link to his archives at the University of Minnesota.

“One of the students said, ‘Hey, is there anything like that for Rilke?’,” Ms. Filgo said. “He was all excited. I don’t even think he knew of the idea that a library might collect an author’s papers.”

Again from The Chronicle: Podcast: The Future of the Textbook, as Seen by Publishers

“An e-book is not an engaging experience, merely replicating a textbook,” say William D. Rieders, executive vice president for new media at the publishing company Cengage Learning. At the 2011 Higher Ed Tech Summit, he said this major publisher sees little future in e-books, despite the proliferation of Kindles and other e-book readers, and tablets like the iPad. The biggest areas for Cengage, he says, are software programs like homework solutions and assessment tools. Print textbooks are still healthy, but they function now as a reference for professors and students, while these other materials are taking center stage in the learning experience.

Thinking about Blackboard's next business phase from Inside Higher Ed:

For those who have been watching closely, this development should not come as a surprise. Blackboard has been laying the groundwork for this second phase over the last few years, slowly absorbing e-learning companies that are not involved in learning management and rebranding them as Blackboard imprints. Blackboard Analytics, formed earlier this month after Blackboard acquired the analytics firm iStrategy, is the latest addition to Blackboard’s inventory of acquisitions. It joined Collaborate, which Blackboard created last year after buying live-communications companies Wimba and Elluminate; Mobile, which Blackboard disaggregated from the Learn platform in 2009; and Connect, which Blackboard inaugurated after buying the notification company Connect-ED in 2008.

As far as the U.S. higher education market goes, several business analysts who monitor Blackboard described this shift as a natural phase in the evolution of a company that has reached the edge of the earth and can only continue to grow by building on existing territory (the K-12 and international higher ed markets are still rife with unclaimed lands, officials point out). When you can no longer sell your core product to additional customers, the analysts said, you have to sell additional products to your core customers — that is, if you want to keep expanding. And Blackboard, a publicly traded company, does. (Desire2Learn, a private company that also sells license-based platforms, is taking a similar tack for the same reasons, according to Kenneth Chapman, its director of product strategy.)

Priced at .71p watching these download is thrilling - sorry. (Observer):

To maximise sales, he priced his books at Amazon's minimum for independent writers – about 70p (the equivalent of 99 cents). At this level, authors receive a cut of only 35% of the price; under Amazon's pricing structure, this rises to 70% if they price their books above the equivalent of $2.99. He then went on various forums to drum up awareness. Within a couple of weeks, all three titles were in the top 20 and "by November I'd knocked Stieg Larsson off the top spot".

"I knew the wave was going to break on Christmas Day. I got myself in position to take advantage, I got on and I've been riding it ever since.

"Yet while he is making significant sums just through ebook sales – "up to £11,000 a month" – he still only sees it as a sideline to his main writing career. "I never went into this to make money. I went into it as a way of widening my readership. My hope was that readers would read my book on Kindle, say, 'I really enjoyed that', then when my new thriller came out with Hodder, they'd remember it and buy that too."

Suggesting that's a sideline is a bit rich.

Getting that copy blurb can be troublesome and it's sometimes best to be forthright (Salon):

Like yourself (no doubt) I find blurbing to be absolutely repulsive. It is crass, pathetic and couldn't be less artistic. Just so you know, I am only doing this because the more I think about it, the more I would like to make a lot of money. Full disclosure: I named my conjoined Siamese cats Tommy and Pinchie. Tommy just died, which has made movement difficult for Pinchie. But she pushes on like a feline boat against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (F. Scott Fitzgerald). Like blurbs, an author's choice of title is very important for sales. Take "Gravity's Rainbow." That is a terrific title. Why? Because it tells you exactly what the book is about. I would like to think that my book's title does the same: Cream of America Soup.

Jefferson's lost books found in Missouri (JacketCopy):

It turns out they've been there since 1880, when Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, and her husband donated them to the university. They were part of a collection sold two years after Jefferson's death, and acquired by Ellen's husband through a friend; the family was particularly interested in books in which Jefferson had made notes. Although a pair of scholars turned up the 69 new books, more researchers than that have been on the case.

Like many historical and well-known readers, Jefferson's library has been reconstructed online by volunteers at LibraryThing. There you can find the details of Jefferson's own cataloging of his books, as well as more information about his collections, sales and distributions.

And it's always good to remember the British like a good bonfire.

Speaking of liking it hot here's a look at a new book that brings to light some of Marilyn Monroe's lost files (Telegraph):

What is certain is that sometime on the night of 4 August the cabinet in the guest cottage was broken into, and that crucial files were removed – perhaps pertaining to Monroe's relationship with the Kennedys and their links with the Mafia boss Sam Giancana, perhaps to her contractual arrangements with Twentieth Century-Fox.

How did these immensely valuable cabinets manage to vanish for so long only to resurface in a quiet corner of suburban California? The key to the mystery is Inez Melson, Monroe's business manager in the mid-1950s, guardian of Monroe's schizophrenic mother, and, following Monroe's death, administrator of her Los Angeles holdings.

In the days and weeks after Monroe died Melson, who received nothing in Monroe's will (the bulk of the estate and her personal effects were left to Lee and Paula Strasberg, her acting coaches), made sure the filing cabinets ended up in her possession.

From the twitter this week:

Publishing: Why Warren Buffett should be more like Liza Minnelli The Economist

BBCWW Seeking An Online Partner For Lonely Planet PaidContent

Who's Killing The Dewey Decimal System? Book2Book

And in sports - England played to a thrilling draw against India on Sunday: BBC

Yahoo (and Now Google) and The Semantic Web

News from Google about their use of Micro formats reminded me of something Yahoo announced over two years ago. First here is a snip from the Google announcement:

That’s a tough problem with the current web, according to Google’s Jack Menzel, the company’s product management director for search, despite the apparent ease that Watson had besting human Jeopardy opponents.

“We are still grasping for the Holy Grail of natural language search,” Menzel said. “We take the approach that the internet exists, and it is so big and Wild West-like that you have to take it for what it is. It is this giant immutable thing that will do its own thing, despite what you want it to do.”

The dream of a structured web has proven nearly impossible to create in practice as it requires coordination on building specs and then that web page builders take the time to mark their pages up in complicated XML. A more grassroots effort, known as Microformats, has had more success by focusing on just a few kinds of data and making innovative use of HTML, the lingua franca of the web, to simplify publishing meta-data. Google introduced its own suggestions of how websites could start publishing Google-friendly meta-data in 2009 (such as how many stars a rating is), with its so-called Rich Snippets.

And now for the first time, a mainstream search engine is built entirely around webpages that use microformats and other structured data.

So for instance, Google is able to show a searcher only Pho recipes that use tofu that take less than a half an hour to make, not by searching for pages that include the word “Pho” and “Tofu” and “Recipe”, but by actually knowing that a recipe for something called “Pho” has an ingredient “Tofu” and a listed cooking time of 1 hour (for example, the is done after publisher’s wrapping the word “1 Hour” in a defined HTML tag ()and then interpreting that in the search results ).

Here is the repost from March 14, 2008 (and some of what I comment on still applies):

In their continued strategic realignment and adoption of open standards, Yahoo has announced they are supporting a number of semantic web standards that will enable third parties (publishers) to augment and enhance native Yahoo search results. From Techcrunch:

A few details are being disclosed now, and Yahoo promises more in a few weeks. They are saying that they will support a number of microformats at the start: hCard, hCalendar, hReview, hAtom and XFN. They will support vocabulary components from Dublin Core, Creative Commons, FOAF, GeoRSS, MediaRSS, and others. They will support RDFa and eRDF markup to embed these into existing HTML pages. Finally, Yahoo will support the Amazon A9 OpenSearch specification with extensions for structured queries to deep web data.

There is a lot to get excited about in the Yahoo announcement(s) - and in reading the comments associated with the Techcrunch post others are interested as well - but perhaps the best thing to consider is that the weight of Yahoo will press faster adoption of some of these standards. In particular, microformats if adopted by publishers could/would change the rules of content syndication and lead to far wider distribution of publisher content. This in turn would lead to higher pass through traffic generating product or advertising sales for publishers.

I only became aware of microformats in the past six months or so but the concept derives from a practical problem. How often - like me - have you been frustrated by the need to copy down an address, or details of a book review, resume details, or even a cooking recipe. Well, microformats can standardize the manner in which these items are published to the web enabling users like me to access and use this content as uniform packages of information or data independent of the publisher. For example, if I wanted to create a list of recipes from ten different cookbooks, I could assemble these and they would all appear together in consistent form. That would be a huge practical improvement on copy and paste.

Image then how this could impact publishers which publish information that could be disaggregated. This could include every topic from travel to technology to cooking to sewing and knitting. A single dress pattern (Mrs PND believes no one sews anymore but no matter), which typically existed with many others in a book (or magazine) can now be extracted, indexed and monetized. Just think how many discrete elements could exist at a typical publishing house if they were disaggregated from their 'mother' products.

While the benefits of the Yahoo initiatives can be debated, at their core is a potential transformation in the manner in which information is produced and disseminated. The technology is not new, but the weight of Yahoo could propel the adoption and that would be a good thing. While publishers will be slow and cautious (some would say cumbersome), they should become the biggest beneficiaries of this initiative: They own massive quantities of content that has traditionally been packaged to discourage narrow use of content. Microformats and resulting syndication models will open up those content repositories and fundamentally change publishing.

Perhaps I could also add that these changes may enable publishers to reestablish stronger influence over the distribution of their content which has been lost in the physical world to Amazon and B&N. Maybe and perhaps...

Hong Kong: Piggee at the Market

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

From a street market in Hong Kong in 1997. Someone's dinner is being delivered. Interestingly, I have a similar image taken on a prior visit to Hong Kong in 1974.

Hong Kong: Piggee at the Market, 1997

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MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 8): Demise of Research Libraries, Online Education, Sir John Soane, Cuban Bookfair

From The Chronicle of Higher Education on the demise of higher ed as we know it (Chronicle):

There are more than 150 former normal schools like Winona, educating hundreds of thousands of students nationwide. Nearly all followed an identical progression: They became teachers colleges, then dropped the "teachers," then dropped the "college." Usually, they are medium-size, relatively obscure, and located away from central metropolitan areas. That's why directions on how to get there are often embedded in their name—Northern Iowa, Eastern Michigan, University of Maine at Presque Isle, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. Most of the rest, like Winona, are stamped with the reassuring label of "State." Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That's where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn't have them, a copy would do. ... The day of reckoning has been delayed in higher education because many of the most obvious disrupter candidates, for-profit colleges, have spent the past decade feeding on the federal student-loan system rather than delivering high-quality courses to students at a low price. But as the raging debate over for-profits shows, the era of easy money and lax regulation is ending. If federal officials do their job right, future for-profits will have to reorient toward high-quality classes and competitive prices. It will be very hard for traditional institutions to respond.

And in a similar vein from Inside Higher Ed:

As a result, every state has its own rules and requirements for the chartering, authorization and oversight of institutions of higher education. And that oversight has been notable for its inconsistency across jurisdictions: states such as New York have long exercised very close control over every aspect of institutional operations for both public and independent colleges and universities, while other states have had a history of minimal regulation. This regulatory patchwork has always been a matter of some concern, particularly as institutions expanded through the establishment of branch campuses located in different states. But it has been the advent of the Internet, and the explosive growth of online learning in the U.S., that has dramatically brought to the fore the importance -- and arguably the perverse impact -- of 50-plus different regulatory schemes for the supervision of higher education.

If you are in London with a spare afternoon go visit Sir John Soane's house. (I've mentioned this before). The Independent offers a hint at the museum's restoration:

And so, Soane's home and museum, built between 1792 and 1824, remains his most potent memorial. Yet, for the best part of two centuries, what lay behind the entrance door at number 13 (and numbers 12 and 14 to either side) remained something of a secret, except to architects and cultured individuals. Until about ten years ago, you could walk straight through into the eerily top-lit museum and find no more than a handful of visitors there. Today, you're more likely to have to queue to get in. The museum and other rooms are laden with hundreds of works of art and historical objects, including the sarcophagus of Seti I, Roman marbles, prints by Hogarth, and paintings by Canaletto and Turner. The museum is the most famous segment of the architecture, but the seductions continue, room after room: the Picture Gallery, with walls composed of folding panels; the domed and mirrored ceiling of the primrose-yellow Breakfast Room; the library, gothic in manner and a rich red; the Monument Court and Monk's Yard, replete with architectural fragments, including chunks of medieval stonework from the Palace of Westminster. The new scheme, Opening up the Soane, will lead to the full-access restoration of Soane's private rooms, crypt and catacomb, ante-room, Tivoli Recess – currently a lavatory – and a model room; for the first time since 1837, visitors will be able to pore over Soane's 80 historical architectural models, the largest collection of its kind in Britain.

ABC News covers Cuba's bookfair and for those who think BookExpo should be opened to the public here's a snip for you (ABC):

The high walls of El Morro and La Cabana, which offer a spectacular view of Havana's bay, house a giant celebration that mingles literary chitchat with an exuberant popular fair where some 6 million visitors socialize, browse for sandwiches of sizzling pork and scramble for novels, essays and scientific tomes. With an illiteracy rate near zero, Cuba boasts that its International Book Fair — which turns 20 this year — has little in common with what it calls more elitist events in the Americas and Europe. "This fair is oriented toward the reader ... as a chance to acquire books and have a dialogue with the authors, both Cubans and foreigners," organizer Edel Morales told The Associated Press. "It is a notable difference to others in the world where people rarely attend," he said. "Here it is the people who make the fair."

I'm having trouble believing that 6 million number myself.... From the twitter this week: Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins - NYTimes Exclusive: Kno Student Tablet Start-Up in Talks to Sell Off Tablet Part of Its Business Boomtown BBCWW To Buy Out Rest Of Lonely Planet PaidContent And in sport the London 2012 Olympics schedule is published: BBC Sport - London 2012 Olympic Games schedule released http://bbc.in/ghA19Y Something to look forward to.

Girl in the Klong: Thailand 1969

Girl in the Klong: Thailand 1969

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

In Bangkok, the river is the plumbing and the highway. This young woman has been sent out to do the laundry and will probably catch up on some personal hygiene. She's clearly less than impressed by the tourist boat and the ogling tourists but likely resigned to the frequent interruptions.

On the best of days the Chao Phraya, as it flows through Bangkok, is a brown mess of dirt, flotsam and boat traffic. Here, down one of the tributaries or Klong's the water is less brown than a deathly gray, and with houses built tight-knit and literally on top of the water there's no need of imagination to discern what's in all that grayness.

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Borders Trilogy: I'll tell you how it ends.

So Borders capitulates, and thus begins the inevitable transition we have all long anticipated to become smaller, leaner and possibly profitable. The company is now embarking on the third phase of its' existence which has seen it pass through the innovative, entrepreneurial, mercurial phase represented by the founders Tom and Louis Borders to the second kicked off by their IPO and subsequent purchase by K-Mart to this third phase from which they are unlikely to emerge.

The middle or second phase is what got this business in trouble and anyone working with Borders over the past 10-15yrs (as I have) must have seen this was a dead bookseller walking over that time. Make no mistake: This was inevitable. Serial management teams with no real experience intent on "disruption" and "reinvention" which were all "strategies" that hid their inability to understand and address their market effectively. So poor were these teams that even with 'retail' experience they continued a retail expansion plan that's proven so expensive it can't sustain the core business. If that wasn't enough they proved unable to manage inventory and to understand demand in any effective manner. They believed implementing new technology was the key but implemented a set of software tools that not only contributed to their problems it caused even bigger ones.

Long since abandoned, that experience pales in comparison to their biggest mistake (and in the context of Borders this is saying something) which was to 'invest' in the internet via a deal with Amazon. It would be like American investing in air travel by sending all their customers to Jet Blue. A legion of baffling decisions yet this one has a bizarre coda: At a time when the internet book selling market is essentially lost and their physical retail presence under significant threat the company decided to start a book selling web site and in the process wasted cash and management time and expertise in the process.

Will Borders exit bankruptcy? That's an open question. Certainly the economy is staggering into a recovery which could give investors some encouragement but the book market is migrating rapidly away from physical books and therefore the horizon is very short for any investment to return capital - like three years short in my view. So gone is the 'comfort' that an investor might have that in the worst of circumstances they could sit on the investment for five or so years. That's off the table. Alternatively, Borders could rebuild around digital content; however, we know that's closed off to them to because of (non)decisions made long ago. I expect liquidation is a distinct possibility and then the question becomes what happens to all that stock?

NetGalley Add Penguin

From their press release:

Penguin Group (USA) is teaming up with NetGalley to deliver galleys and promotional materials digitally. Starting this winter, Penguin will use NetGalley to share secure digital galleys--including in full-color--to reviewers, media contacts, booksellers, librarians, educators and other professional readers. Readers will be able to view select Penguin titles on computers and a variety of eReader devices. “I’m very excited about our partnership with NetGalley,” Matthew Boyd, Publishing Coordinator at Penguin Group (USA) said. “Providing books to readers in as many formats as possible has always been important to us, and NetGalley now allows us to accomplish this at the galley stage.

The partnership also furthers Penguin’s commitment to the environment, as we strive to find eco-friendly solutions at every phase of our publishing process.” Over 19,000 professional readers and 85 pu. blishers already use NetGalley.

Readers can register for free at www.netgalley.com. Readers can request titles from the catalog, or they can be invited to view titles directly by publishers

And I mentioned NetGalley before.

Beyond the Book Interview with Me: eBooks and ISBNs

Beyond the book interviewed me last week about the eBook ISBN study that I conducted for BISG:

Not so long ago, a book was an unmistakable object. Then someone came along and started digitizing content, and very soon, books were something else, something much more than ink on dead trees. That transformation, indeed the redefinition of books, matters enormously to readers and publishers, as well as retailers and librarians. Without a way to identify “books” as they are published, information and creativity could be orphaned.

To discuss this challenge, CCC’s Chris Kenneally recently spoke with publishing consultant Michael Cairns who had just completed a report for the Book Industry Study Group examining practices in the identification of e-books in all their vast variety. The research turned up several surprising findings, as well as revealed a tension between US publishers and their counterparts around the world.

“We’re in this transition between the sale of a physical book to one that’s a digital book, and in that transition, some aspects of the ISBN number are not being upheld as they were in the physical world,” notes Cairns, who is a highly-regarded blogger at PersonaNonData. “And when there’s a breakdown, that starts to increase the likelihood that the supply chain does not operate as efficiently as perhaps it should or could. And so that’s a real issue.”

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Makinson's Passage to India

Pearson's John Makinson gives an interview to Livemint (India) on the company's business strategy in that country where he also comments on Pearson's recent purchase of Indian education company TutorVista (LiveMint):

Pearson Plc, which recently bought a controlling stake of Indian education company TutorVista, wants to shed public perception of a publishing firm and establish itself more as an education service provider. Pearson India chairman John Makinson, who recently visited New Delhi, said in an interview that school education is now one of its key focus in the country, which can be replicated in other nations such as South Africa. He also said the Indian government’s decision to open up the education market is a welcome move for global education firms. Edited excerpts:

How much is acquiring TutorVista going to help Pearson?

Priority focus: Makinson says two key areas for the company in India are vocational education and schools.

Pradeep Gaur/Mint

For the last three years, we have been focusing in the Indian education space. The two key areas are vocational education and school education space. Two years back, we had two partnerships, one with TutorVista, which was largely an online tutoring firm, and the other with Educomp Solutions Ltd, on vocational education.

We had really not thought about the school education space. After talking to the TutorVista management, we realized they have a vision for school education. It sounded sensible to us and we thought of honing that in India. The challenge for a company like Pearson is it’s a large opportunity, which is scalable. It has to be delivered at a relatively low price. We have software, platform, we had other resources but we did not have the dedicated culture of growing schools. By combining the entrepreneurial skill of TutorVista with our global experience as a global education company, we thought we can achieve more success here.

More

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 7): Underused eBook features, UK Tuition, Mills&Boone, Coin Art

Professors are not rushing to adopt the newest eBooks features (Chronicle):

Publishers studying the effectiveness of their latest interactive e-textbooks are finding that the biggest challenge is getting professors to use the new features of the digital texts.

“On the instructor side, that’s where the inertia is,” says Jay Chakrapani, McGraw-Hill’s digital general manager for higher education. “That’s the biggest challenge that we’re all facing.”

Another publisher, John Wiley and Sons, commissioned a study in 2009 of the use of its WileyPLUS online learning tools by the University of Tennessee’s Institute for Assessment and Evaluation of nearly 500 students at 11 two-year and four-year colleges.

Instructors selected for participation all had at least two years of experience with the program, says Petra Steriti, Wiley’s manager for market research, but instructor use varied widely. “Not all instructors make students fully aware of what’s available,” she says.

Wiley plans to offer more tutorials to give professors a better understanding of the capabilities of the system, which can be used to quiz students on reading material and provide instant feedback.

Tuition rises in the UK have resulted in riots but will tuition waivers ease the pain (Inside HigherEd):

The British government ministers hope that the large tuition-fee waiver for poor students proposed by the University of Cambridge will pile pressure on the rest of the higher education sector as institutions approach D-Day for deciding charges for 2012-3. Under the plans -- revealed first by Times Higher Education -- the university would charge the maximum £9,000 fee (more than $14,400) but offer a £3,000-a-year “waiver” (more than $4,800) for students from households earning less than £25,000 a year (just over $40,000). But Cambridge has been accused of playing into the government’s hands with the proposals, which also recommend cutting aid packages by more than half – a move that would leave students with less money in their pockets and the Treasury with more. Other university vice-chancellors may carp that Cambridge has an ­unfair advantage, given that it has a relatively low intake of poor students compared with other institutions. David Willetts, the universities and science minister, is known to be watching developments at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford closely because of the ramifications that decisions at the ancient institutions with their democratic governance structures could have for fees set elsewhere.

A documentary explores writing for Mills & Boone (Telegraph):

Actually, this is why I’ve never been hooked on M&Bs myself – even at that age when teenage girls discover them and develop what is usually a temporary addiction. I’ve always found the characters unrealistic in their stereotypical attractiveness and conduct. However, lots of women – 1.3 million a month – never tire of the tanned hunks and usually sappy females (however “sassy-mouthed’’ they might be). And this is why Roger Sanderson, who has written almost 50 M&B novels under the pen-name Gill Sanderson, says he would never try to introduce a less than perfect Alpha male as the hero. “He’s got to have a good body, and there’s no way he can be fat or badly dressed,” he says in a new documentary, Guilty Pleasures, which explores the enduring phenomenon of M&B. “And I never have – and never will have – a red-headed hero.” This seems to me a bit rich coming from a balding man in his seventies. But Roger knows his audience’s predilections. This is made abundantly clear in Guilty Pleasures, which focuses on three women for whom M&Bs are an obsession; Hiroko Honmo, a demure housewife in Tokyo, Shirley Davies, a single mother from Warrington, and Shumita Didi Singh who lives in India. “Women want to read about their ideal man and for most of them, he doesn’t have red hair,” confirms Julie Moggan, the director of the documentary. In fact, their dream man is someone who looks exactly like Stephen Muzzonigro, a male model from New York, who features on countless Mills & Boon covers in passionate embraces and saucy clinches, depending on the imprint.

Simon Heffer in the Independent mourns the loss of coin art:

In the mid-1960s, it was still common to find Victorian pennies and ha’pennies in one’s change. Most were worn almost smooth, but some were not, suggesting that they had, at some point in their century-long existence, been hoarded for years or even decades before being put back into circulation. Silver coins of that age had disappeared for the simple reason that they were entirely silver: as were all threepences, sixpences, shillings, florins and half-crowns minted before 1920. The coinage mirrored the decline of the country. Impoverished after the Great War, we made our silver coins only half silver. After 1947, and the blow dealt to our prosperity by the Second World War, these coins were entirely cupro-nickel, and the silver threepenny piece was replaced by the dodecagonal brass threepenny bit. The half-silver coins lingered for decades: my father, in about 1967, had a huge sweet jar full of pre-1947 half-crowns on his desk at home. And it was one such coin that prompted my blinding revelation about the beauty of our coinage. Others may disagree, but I do not believe we ever minted a more ravishing coin than the half-crown of Edward VII, the design for which, with only the slightest modification, was used on the half-crowns of his son until 1927.

Heffernan thinks there's problems in the coffee shop (NYT):

Many indie New York City cafes now heavily restrict, or ban outright, the use of Kindles, Nooks and iPads. Evidently, too many coffee shops in town have had their ambience wrecked when itinerant word processors with laptops turn the tables into office space. Sure, that phenomenon can be depressing — whether you’re a scornful lady who lunches or the nomadic freelancer who fields glares. And full-dress computers are perhaps too much personal furniture for cafes to accommodate. But banning devices the size of books, like Kindles and iPads, is going too far, and it’s anathema to the character and history of cafes. Unwholesome things have always happened wherever people drink coffee together. They gossip and complain about powerful jerks; they read, write and scheme about their own comebacks. On the sidelines of those conversations — muttering, silently judging, chiming in — have always been loners who loiter with books and newspapers all day, ready to be recruited into conversation. This might come as hard news to would-be restaurateurs looking only to taste that sweet margin of coffee markup, but loiterers and readers must be part of the cafe equation. People who sit at bars are going to make out and brawl; people who sit in cafes are going to read and talk.

From the twitter this week:

Martin Amis claims only a 'serious brain injury' could make him write children's lit Telegraph Always one for a quote

Bertelsmann: Could Repay All Liabilities By 2014 - Document - WSJ Does this mean acquisitions are on the way?

And in sports: Rooney's goal