BISG: Making Information Pay for Higher Education

THIS IS THE BISG NEWSLETTER (NOT MINE) REMINDING EVERYONE ABOUT THIS WEEK'S MIP FOR HIGHER ED.

Enter my code MIP-INFO at registration for a 20% discount.

Web Version  |  Update preferences  |  Unsubscribe Like Tweet Forward LAST CHANCE TO REGISTER BISG's signature event for higher ed publishing is only three days away! MAKING INFORMATION PAY FOR HIGHER ED PUBLISHING February 7, 2013 | 9AM to 2PM Eastern The Yale Club of NYC BISG's Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing conference, held this Thursday in NYC, features an exciting array of data-rich presentations offering new insights into the unfolding digital transformation, student perspectives, illicit acquisition behaviors, international opportunities, and much more!... Meet the speakers! PRESENTATION: Education on the Open Web: The MOOC Experience Dave Cormier President, Edactive Technologies Web Projects Lead, University of Prince Edward Island Dave Cormier is a web projects lead at the University of Prince Edward Island, co-founder of Edtechtalk, and president of Edactive Technologies, a social software consulting firm. He teaches academic courses in writing, emerging tech, and culture. His major research interests include placing educational technology in a "postdigital" context, the examination of planned and unplanned communities, rhizomes as a model for knowledge creation, and open-source multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). Dave is a member of several research communities and has participated in several web based research projects including the Open Habitat project and the Living Archives project. He has produced, designed, or participated in over 300 online webcasts in the past four years and speaks regularly at conferences on topics including rhizomatics, effective use of new technologies, and educational project management and design. PRESENTATION: The Promise of Highly Interactive Online Learning Rebecca Griffiths Program Director for Interactive Learning, Ithaka S+R Rebecca Griffiths leads Ithaka S+R's growing program in online learning. In this capacity, she is managing an initiative to test whether and how Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could be adopted by faculty to improve learning and reduce costs within public universities and colleges. This effort is undertaken in partnership with the University System of Maryland and funded by a generous grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Previously, Rebecca launched and led ITHAKA's Strategic Services practice (now part of Ithaka S+R), which provides research and advisory services to clients. In that capacity she worked with online education initiatives to deepen their understanding of the audiences they serve and to develop sustainable business plans. In addition, Rebecca advised foundations on opportunities for funding new projects and co-authored reports on sustainability of digital projects, the role of publishing in universities, and uses of open source software in higher education. Before starting the Strategic Services practice, Rebecca was a founding member of Aluka, a nonprofit initiative to develop online primary resources from and about Africa for research and teaching. The Aluka collections are now available through JSTOR. Previously, Rebecca worked as a strategic consultant for Monitor Company in its Hong Kong and London offices. There she managed projects in media and telecommunications, helping her clients evaluate new growth opportunities, develop corporate strategies, and strengthen their organizations. She has also served as a product manager at AOL, responsible for launching new online services, and in business development at a subsidiary of News Corporation. Rebecca has a master of business administration from MIT and a bachelor of arts from Princeton University in East Asian studies. She speaks proficient Mandarin. PRESENTATION: The International Playing Field: Exploring Opportunities Overseas Joe Karaganis Vice President, The American Assembly at Columbia University Joe Karaganis joined The American Assembly at Columbia University as Vice President in 2010. His work focuses on the relationship between digital convergence and cultural production, and has recently included research on broadband adoption, data policy, and media piracy. Joe is the editor of The Politics of Open Source Adoption (2005), Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (2007), and Media Piracy in Emerging Economies (2011), among other work. Prior to joining the American Assembly, he was a program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. PRESENTATION: The State of Higher Ed Publishing: By the Numbers Carl Kulo US Director, Bowker Market Research Carl Kulo is US Director of Bowker Market Research, a recognized leader in plotting trends that impact organizations serving book consumers. At Bowker, Carl's role encompasses the management of the PubTrack Higher Education Sales Data Analysis tool where he provides client services to larger higher education publishers. Mr. Kulo was instrumental in the Bowker transition to PubTrack Higher Education -- the premier market intelligence source for the college textbook publishing industry. Carl's role includes management of the Bowker consumer research panel, reaching more than 100,000 US book consumers, where he collaborates with teams of researchers to monitor and analyze market movement and the digital transformation in the book market. Carl also manages the primary research projects for specific segments with the book industry, including genre-specific projects, and projects with individual publishers, author groups and outlets. Among the initiatives is a multi-year project with BISG to benchmark student attitudes toward content in higher education and consumer attitudes toward both e-devices and digital content. Prior to joining Bowker, Carl was Director of Market Research for Wiley Higher Ed, where he ran qualitative and quantitative research studies for the editorial, sales and marketing groups. PANEL MODERATOR: Structured Online Learning vs. MOOCs Maureen McMahon President and Publisher, Kaplan Publishing Maureen McMahon is President and Publisher of Kaplan Publishing, one of the nation's leading publishers of academic and professional resources in print and digital formats. In addition to overseeing content production, delivery, and management for Kaplan Test Prep course and retail products, she oversees Kaplan Labs, an initiative that focuses on the potential for emerging technologies to improve learning outcomes; Kaplan Mobile; and EPUB 3 product development. Prior to joining Kaplan in 2006, she was Vice President and Publisher of the Kaplan imprint at Simon & Schuster, and held several positions at Random House, including Publisher of The Princeton Review, Associate Publisher of Villard Books, and Director of National Accounts. PRESENTATION: Why Students 'Go Digital': Aspirations and Barriers to Success Len Vlahos Executive Director, Book Industry Study Group Len Vlahos, an 18-year veteran of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), signed on as BISG's Executive Director in September 2011. He has served as ABA's communications director, e-commerce director, education director and, just prior to joining BISG, was ABA's Chief Operating Officer Len has worked for Internet marketing pioneer Yoyodyne, and for Kratz & Co. public relations. Prior to joining ABA, he worked in independent, chain, and university bookstores. Special thanks to our sponsors! Additional sponsorship opportunities are available. Please contact BISG Deputy Executive Director Angela Bole at angela@bisg.org for more information. You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the listserv of the Book Industry Study Group. Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe Book Industry Study Group 145 W. 45th Street Suite 601 New York, NY 10036 Ph: 646-336-7141 Email: info@bisg.org

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MediaWeek (V6, N5): Education as we know it will end, Self-Help Publishing, The Four Beat Poet + More

It's the end of the world as we know it and educators should really care: Nathan Harden in American Interest (Long Read).

The open-source educational marketplace will give everyone access to the best universities in the world. This will inevitably spell disaster for colleges and universities that are perceived as second rate. Likewise, the most popular professors will enjoy massive influence as they teach vast global courses with registrants numbering in the hundreds of thousands (even though “most popular” may well equate to most entertaining rather than to most rigorous). Meanwhile, professors who are less popular, even if they are better but more demanding instructors, will be squeezed out. Fair or not, a reduction in the number of faculty needed to teach the world’s students will result. For this reason, pursuing a Ph.D. in the liberal arts is one of the riskiest career moves one could make today. Because much of the teaching work can be scaled, automated or even duplicated by recording and replaying the same lecture over and over again on video, demand for instructors will decline.

Who, then, will do all the research that we rely on universities to do if campuses shrink and the number of full-time faculty diminishes? And how will important research be funded? The news here is not necessarily bad, either: Large numbers of very intelligent and well-trained people may be freed up from teaching to do more of their own research and writing. A lot of top-notch research scientists and mathematicians are terrible teachers anyway. Grant-givers and universities with large endowments will bear a special responsibility to make sure important research continues, but the new environment in higher ed should actually help them to do that. Clearly some kinds of education, such as training heart surgeons, will always require a significant amount of in-person instruction

Boris Kachka writing in New York magazine: How Self-help Publishing Ate America

This new kind of self-help could never thrive in a vacuum. Or rather, it thrives in a particular vacuum—the one left behind by the disappearance of certain public values that once fulfilled our lives. Strains of self-help culture—entrepreneurship, pragmatism, fierce self-­reliance, gauzy spirituality—have been embedded in the national DNA since Poor Richard’s Almanack. But in the past there was always a countervailing force, an American stew of shame and pride and citizenship that kept these impulses walled off, sublimating private anxiety to the demands of an optimistic meritocracy. That force has gradually been weakened by the erosion of all sorts of structures, from the corporate career track to the extended family and the social safety net. Instead of regulation, we have that new buzzword, self-regulation; instead of an ambivalence over “selling out,” we have the millennial drive to “monetize”; and instead of seeking to build better institutions, we mine them in order to build better selves. Universities now devote faculty to fields (positive psychology, motivation science) that function as research arms of the self-help industry, while journalists schooled in a sense of public mission turn their skills to fulfilling our emotional needs. But since self-help trails with it that old shameful stigma, the smartest writers and publishers shun the obvious terminology. And the savviest readers enjoy the masquerade, knowing full well what’s behind the costume: self-help with none of the baggage.

Interesting article on the Beat Poets and identifies a fourth who committed murder. (Columbia Magazine)

But before the night of August 14, 1944, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg ’48CC, and William S. Burroughs weren’t the three principals of a literary movement — at least, not one that existed outside their own heads. They were simply roommates, friends, and confidants, who shared books and booze and sometimes beds. And, as history would largely soon forget, there was a fourth.

Lucien Carr was a recent transfer from the University of Chicago who seemed to attract admirers wherever he went. Uncommonly handsome, charismatic, and well-read, he was the force that initially united the group: he bonded with Ginsberg in a Columbia dorm over a shared love of Brahms, befriended Kerouac through his girlfriend at a nighttime painting class, and renewed ties with Burroughs, an old acquaintance from his hometown. Independent friendships formed between members of the quartet, but Carr was always at the center.

While his friends wrote books and became revered cultural and literary figures, ringleaders of the Beat movement, though, Carr lived most of the next sixty years in relative obscurity, quietly building a career and raising a family, and avoiding even the reflected glow from the spotlight on the others. Since his death in 2005, interest in the Beats has grown even more, at last illuminating the lost member.

From my twitter feed this week:
 
UK GPs prescribe self-help books for mental health problems Guardian I am sure @Borisk would like this.
FamilySearch-OCLC partnership OCLC
ALA Midwinter 2013: ALA Creates E-book Scorecard PW
U.S. Attorneys May Weigh in On GSU E-Reserves Case PW
Ex-Apple Guru Kawasaki Is a Self-Publishing Expert BusinessWeek

Bora Bora Fish Story 1971

I've posted images from this little sequence before and there are five or six images of this old guy spear fishing (almost without getting his feet wet).  PND senior took a series of trips to Bora Bora, Tahiti and New Caledonia in the early 1970s looking for hotel development sites.  On this particular day he told me he followed this old guy for two hours before he finally speared this fish.  Not sure that's enough for dinner though.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

Revaluing Libraries: ARL Presentation

Presentation by Char Booth at recent ARL meeting in Oregon.

Revaluing Libraries: Content, Container, or Concept? from char booth

Keynote given at the 2012 ACRL-Oregon conference in Corbett, Oregon, 26 October 2012.

This is probably better via the youtube below.


Audio available at http://bit.ly/acrlor12-boothaudio, video courtesy of Jim Holmes at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N16b2sMd_Ww.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 4): Open Access UK, Tapscott on MOOCs, Personal Data Ownership +More

The fight over open access in the UK has been joined by David Willets, the governments Universities Ministers proclamation that all publicly funded research will be immediately publically available by 2014 (Guardian):

All the concerned groups said they agreed with providing easier access to academic research, but Professor Howard Hotson, a fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, who sits on the steering council for the Council for the Defence of British Universities, said they all shared grave concerns at the pace of the changes being rolled out.

He said: "One of the things which flabbergasts me is the seemingly insatiable appetite for this government to pursue multiple radical changes simultaneously. It seems extraordinarily naive to suppose that on the basis of a few months of consultation, in a very short space of time, you can radically change the basic way in way academics communicate with each other without having a huge number of unintended knock-on consequences. Open access in principle has a great deal to be said for it, but it has to be handled with care."

Don Tapscott writing from Davos on The Week the University as we know it died (Globe&Mail):

But Mr. Summers is missing the point. From my perspective, we should eliminate all lectures as a method of instruction. Universities must shift their business model from the centuries-old notion that a professor lectures students, to a more collaborative, interactive model.

Any subject where students need to absorb fact-based material – that is, where there is a right or wrong answer – should be taught using computer-based learning. Instead of being the “sage on the stage,” teachers should be the co-pilot for students as they explore and collaborate online to acquire knowledge. Without changing the model of pedagogy, the physical campus will not survive.

One can easily see a day when students treat all the universities as one big à-la-carte menu that can lead to something we could call a “MOOC degree.” Take some law courses at Harvard, economic courses at McGill, some engineering courses at MIT, and round out the degree with courses from Queen’s, Yale and the London School of Economics. The result will be students acquiring a better education by shopping around then they could have acquired at just the one institution. And it won’t take long before employers recognize this.

The biggest obstacle to this happening is the question of credentials. Aside from the couple of experiments I mentioned earlier, none of the prestigious universities will grant a course credit – let alone a degree – based on the strength of online courses.

Your body as a data factory (Guardian):

It's not quite right to say that internet users are giving away their information. Access to "free" services like Google or Facebook relies on a value exchange and it is your data that is being exchanged. A general haziness around what value that data represents means most people accept this deal. After all, would you be prepared to pay "real money" to fund your Google Chat habit? Research shows you're paying Google around $5,000 in personal data in exchange for its services. Given the option to pay that $5,000 via cash, credit or cookies, I imagine most people would plump for the cookies.

But things are changing. France's proposed data tax is unlikely to become law any time soon but the fact that it has been mooted is indicative of a gradual drive towards a more official quantification of data. This can already be seen in the slew of start-ups trying to help people transform their personal details into dollars: an industry which could be worth £1bn by 2016 in the UK alone. Now, it seems, governments are beginning to wonder if they too can cash in.

Where's the app that lets me monetize all my data?

Re-inventing Academic Publishing: 'Diamond' Open Access Titles That Are Free To Read And Free To Publish (TechDirt) but from the comments this time:

I am a librarian:
I am a librarian at a small four year university. What we pay for journal subscriptions varies widely from thirty or forty dollars a year for some mundane stuff, to several thousand a year for the hardcore upper level science and engineering. My most expensive subscription is $10,206 per year and it goes up every year. A typical price is between about $400 and $1,200. We only keep about 750 print titles, larger institutions often keep many more. Also, some of the titles that cost into the thousands might only be printed bimonthly or even quarterly, so you're looking at hundreds or even thousands of dollars per issue. People could steal our laptops and Kindles and it wouldn't hurt as bad as when some of the journals go missing.

Furthermore, because prices are generally based on FTE (full-time equivalency, or roughly the number of students we have), we pay only a modest fraction of what the larger universities pay. Also, you have to keep in mind that they count ALL students. We might have only a few hundred students in an upper level engineering or science program, but to get those subjects' journals they count EVERY student, right down to the slack-ass stoner freshmen and the absentee football majors.

Don't even get me started on the electronic journals and databases...

quote:
Also ask any university librarian how mush of their budget goes to Elsevier, also ask about the quality of some of the journals they end up buying because of bundling. Just make sure you escape route is open when you do so, you may provoke an angry reaction.

^^ Truth. ^^

Speaking of which what do the comments look like for a MOOC class you ask? (IHE)

From Twitter this week:

Pew Internet Releases New Report on Library Services (Plus Commentary) | Pew Center
Software patents 'a bit of a mess' says Martin Goetz, the first man to get one Guardian
New Exhibit Honors New York Public Library’s Massive Photo Archive: Wired NYTimes
Association of Research Libraries: Licensing E-Journal Bundles from Large Publishers: ARL Releases Pre-Pub from RLI 282 ARL News
For open access journals, price doesn’t buy influence Smart Planet
Amazon Touts Self-Publishing Benefits Front and Center: Publishers Weekly

Bangkok: Siam Spirit House

In Thailand, every house and building has a spirit house and this impressive example was located on the grounds of the Siam Intercontinental where the PND family lived in 1968-9.  I've since been told that the next brother down in the clan used to rearrange the figurines and other movable objects around the house which I am pretty sure that's not what they are there for.

During one particularly colossal down pour, I remember being very close to this spot and a large cat fish about a foot long came out of the Klong on the left and up the bank to the concrete path about mid photo.  Scared the crap out of me and it was one of the ugliest things you've ever seen.

When I stayed at this hotel in the mid-1990s, I went looking for the spirit house.  The hotel decided it belonged hidden in the back of the property and out of sight.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

 

Presentation: New Culture of Learning

Presentation on the New Culture of Learning by Judy O'Connell of Charles Sturt University, Sydney.

 

Her introduction:

Web 2.0 allows students and educators to create and interact both synchronously and asynchronously, formally or informally, at school, at home, in distance education programs, in the workplace, on all manner of devices. This shift has required an open mind about future possibilities, while also documenting innovative or exemplar practices and their relationship to curriculum. Now Web 3.0 heralds a further development in online information behaviours and knowledge discovery techniques. Are we keeping up-to-date with the relevant network and social media changes that are affecting the online learning environment that we wish to embrace? Can you spot the wolf in sheep’s clothing? This was a short presentation and discussion starter. Dowload the supporting document via the QRcode on the title screen. 

MediaWeek (V6, N3): MOOCs Invade CSU, Moby Lives & B&N, Pearson Warns +More

California is testing the adoption of some MOOC into the 'traditional' carriculem (IHEd):

Gov. Jerry Brown wants California’s public institutions to take a hard look at MOOCs. Along with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he is encouraging experimentation with MOOC platforms for introductory and remedial courses.

Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford University computer science professor who co-founded Udacity, said that Brown e-mailed and called him in June to kick off discussions about a partnership with public universities in the state. “We need your help,” Thrun said Brown told him.

While the state’s public institutions have plenty of experience in online education, their emphasis in digital learning may be shifting. The governor’s budget proposal, released last week, puts a priority on popular, often overbooked courses, while most previous online efforts in the state have been housed in extension programs, which are relatively expensive and often don’t lead to credit.

Both the California State University and University of California systems would receive $10 million under the budget proposal to expand online courses. California’s community college system would receive $16.9 million.

Dennis Johnson from Moby Lives published this longish blog post on the slow demise of B&N bricks and mortar stores:

For a couple of years I’ve been predicting in column after column that B&N was going to get out of the brick-and-mortar business of selling books, but seeing it finally kick into high gear was no fun. If you include the company’s college stores, this is going to mean 1362 bookstores disappearing from the American landscape — less than two years after 686 Borders stores disappeared.

The big chains deserve opprobrium for their vicious tactics against America’s independent booksellers, certainly. Back in the last century, I wrote a column attacking B&N for putting indie booksellers in Melville House’s birthplace, Hoboken, New Jersey, out of business with under-pricing, as if selling books was like selling widgets. Can you guess the rest of that story? Having poisoned the well, the Hoboken B&N itself went out of business, leaving the town — a big Manhattan bedroom with lots of well-educated, well-off residents — without a bookshop, probably forever.

And yet, and yet … that development gave me no pleasure, nor does the fact that this scenario is playing out across the country with increasing frequency. And my brother and sister indie fanatics shouldn’t get too righteous about it either. Two thousand fewer places for people to be exposed to books is pretty obviously not good for our culture.

(As as side note, before the B&N in Hoboken opened there were at least four or five small bookstores on the main drag - predictably named, Washington Street - and then they all closed. Now we have no except a small second hand store).

Mendelay which has had a pretty incredible run and an interesting business model gained the attention of the FT possibly because the company is to be acquired by Elsevier. (FT):

But as they continued their PhDs, they realised they were struggling with the same problem: managing information efficiently.

“We were finding it difficult to keep track of the hundreds of PDF documents that we had to manage,” says Dr Henning. “We were doing collaborative work too with researchers in Germany and the UK and found that discussions and emails often got lost as documents were emailed back and forth. That’s what brought us to the idea of Mendeley.”

The first question was whether they could extract meaningful information from documents. Dr Reichelt, who was supervising masters thesis students at Cologne, commissioned two students who proved it was possible to turn a PDF into plain text, then use algorithms to extract information from it. “It reinforced our belief that it would work and convinced us we could build a prototype without funding,” says Dr Henning.

The reason for their optimism – and their decision to jump full-time into developing Mendeley – was a hunch that researchers would find the service valuable once their individual research libraries were crowdsourced into one large searchable database.

Also from the FT,  E-Books lift Bloomsbury (FT)

The strong growth in ebooks before Christmas came in spite of traditional trends, which tend to see ebook purchases spike in the months after Christmas as customers try out their new ereading devices. The company said it expected to know more about crucial post-Christmas ebook sales over the next six weeks.

Sales in the run-up to Christmas were helped by cookbooks such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s Three Good Things and How to Bake by Paul Hollywood of the BBC’s hit TV show The Great British Bake Off. The company also revealed that it is publishing And the Mountains Echoed, the next novel by Khaled Hosseini, the best-selling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

And, Pearson warns of sluggish full year growth (FT)

The publishing group attributed the year-on-year earnings per share slip to the £450m sale of its 50 per cent stake in the FTSE International index business, which in 2011 contributed £20m to Pearson’s operating profit, equivalent to 2.2p of EPS.

“Market conditions remained weak, as expected, in the key fourth-quarter selling season for higher education, consumer publishing and corporate advertising,” said Pearson.

“Pearson’s businesses continue to face tough market conditions and structural industry change that we see continuing into 2013.”

Pearson’s core North American education business was held back in 2012 by cash-strapped US schools paring back spending on books, educational software and other teaching materials.

However, the publishing group said that its services and digital learning revenues continued to grow strongly and it benefited from a strong performance from recent acquisitions and tight cost control.

Aerial View Harbor Freeway @ Manchester On Approach to LAX 1971

Aerial View Harbor Freeway @ Manchester 1971

Flying into Los Angeles in 1971 was a smoggy experience which accounts for the bad scan.  Flying into LA can be an awesome experience especially for the first time.  As the aircraft clears the last bare hills to the east the city spreads out like a wall to wall carpet of regimented lines and cross hatches.  Leaving at night can be even more impressive but I don't have an image of that but I'll be back out there soon. 

Everything is a Service Presentation

"Everything is a service" (Redux) from Sylvain Cottong

Consultant Sylvain Cottong's presentation on the evolving development of 'service' as a products defining attribute and in this presentation he takes us through how you might define a service as a product.

A new marketing paradigm ⤑  The basis of all exchange is service ⤑  Goods are a distribution mechanism for service provision ⤑  Value is always co-created with“Evolving to a New the customerDominant Logic for ⤑  A service-centered view is inherently customer oriented andMarketing” relationalPublication of an award-winningarticle by Stephen Vargo and RobertLusch in a 2004 edition of Journal of ⤑  Value-in-use replaces value-in-Marketing exchange

The Death of the Middle Man - Predictions for 2013

FDR, WSC and Middle Man - Mayfair 2009

It seems to some that we’ve entered a period of stasis in the ongoing transformation of the publishing industry.  This time last year, I noted that the routine operations of many publishers had fully realized the transition to electronic content and absorbed its implications.  So perhaps the last twelve months have been about catching our collective breath. But anyone who thinks the big changes are behind us is probably fooling himself, and may be lulling himself into catastrophic inaction.

The harbingers of dislocation are easy to see . . . if you know where to look.  In the second half of 2012, we saw a slowdown in the growth rate of eBook unit sales; indications of a possibly significant substitution of tablets for eBook readers; a major strategic publishing merger destined to create a trade publishing goliath; and the sale of one of the big three education companies.  Any one of these developments occurring independently could have been analyzed at length but, taken together, they suggest to me that more-- rather than fewer-- changes are on their way.

The expectation that the big trade houses would consolidate has been going around for at least five years: in fact, it may be more surprising that the Random House/Penguin deal didn’t happen sooner.  Now that it has, it’s a foregone conclusion that there will be another trade merger announced in the next few months, involving some combination of Harpercollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette.  Perhaps all three will combine and, if so, that deal would equal the one announced last year in scale and significance. But that’s probably unlikely.  One publisher will almost certainly end up the “odd man out” and it will be interesting to see which it is and what they do next. 

On the education front, there has been widespread speculation that some merger of Cengage and McGraw-Hill Education will take place this year, since the two companies may end up with a common owner.  In the short term, there may not be a full combination but some trading of assets may take place immediately to rationalize the respective businesses with deeper integration to come, perhaps, in 2014-5. 

In education more broadly, all education content companies (other than Pearson) are only at the beginning of their transition from content providers to embedded content and services providers.  Professional information publishers provide content and services at the point of need and education publishers will be doing the same thing in the not-too-distant future.    At CES this week, McGraw-Hill made some interesting announcements about product development investments they have been making which presage how this “services approach” may take shape.

To segue slightly, the justification for a merger is often presented as an opportunity to save cost, apply economies of scale and/or gain access to a new market.   At this point, expense and efficiency gains are more likely to be the primary drivers in both the McGraw-Hill and Random House Penguin cases.   Each publisher anticipates significantly reducing costs in headcount, facilities, distribution and other areas in order to deliver the same total quantity of titles.   They need to undertake this effort because the publishing value chain is compacting, making it easy for content producers/authors to reach consumers directly which, in turn, is also changing the financial model on which publishing is based.   The functional areas where publishers added margin in order to make a profit – overhead, distribution, marketing & sales--are becoming less important (though not unimportant) when authors and contributors can reach their market directly.   The implications of these changes for publishing houses have been clear for many years but addressing how their businesses must change to cope with them is nowhere near complete in the larger houses.  Smaller, more nimble companies like Hay House and SourceBooks have travelled much further down this path.

Education publishing is seeing similar changes but the process of dealing with them will be different.  I expect we will see an aggregation model emerge in education, where content ‘platforms’ deliver content and services on a per-user basis.   As I’ve mentioned before, this model is already in operation. Academic librarians and universities will be offered an extensive database of educational material from which faculty can choose the material – probably pre-selected, topic-driven packages – best suited to their classes.   Platform providers such as Amazon, Blackboard, Pearson and EBSCO may soon be the only efficient way for publishers wanting to sell content (or access to their content) to reach students.    The platform providers will negotiate distribution agreements with all other content providers and may compete against each other to offer the best combination of content. But a more likely and important point of differentiation will be the unique services and level of integration they can provide faculty, administrators and students.  Instead of Pearson and EBSCO, think Reuters and Bloomberg . And instead of profit models based on revenue per book, think per head or per desk.  (This model may begin to undermine the argument for DRM in education.)

A very positive byproduct of this change in education will be a complete integration of library resources, institutional resources and consortia buying/negotiation that will allow better alignment with objectives for student success.  It seems odd (to me) that educational content components, as they are currently supplied to students and faculty on campuses, often stand independently of each source and can only be ‘integrated’ through a manual, rudimentary process.   And it’s even more odd when you consider that libraries have long been licensing tools and services from EBSCO and Serials Solutions which provide deep integration of and access to the databases and content the academic library licenses.   It will only be a matter of time before pan-university content assets and access are brought together.

Ultimately, 2013 may bring more significant change in the trade and educational landscape than we’ve seen in many recent years.   While there will be a lot of focus on the big trade merger and its constituents, the industry’s other players will have to fight aggressively not to lose any advantage—we all recognize that “bigger is better” when it comes to applying economies of scale in a business whose underlying business model is changing radically.   In education, we may be paying attention to McGraw-Hill and Cengage but Pearson, as the market leader, is likely to embark on even more aggressive strategies this year--under its new CEO, and with the divestiture of Penguin and possible sale of the FT Group, the company has forcefully declared education to be its focus.

Opportunities for innovators will continue to emerge, as one would expect in a rapidly changing market.  However, many of the niche or narrow solutions currently on offer--whether they be assessment , content-delivery  or search tools-- are likely to ‘run out of market-space’ as these solutions become embedded in, and offered as an attribute of, the platform solution.   I see opportunity in the delivery of solutions that help specific users – say, university faculty – take full advantage of the integration of content and services that will occur—for instance, on campus-- since many user groups may need to change the way they conduct their usual activities.  The outcome of these work changes will be to produce more productivity and better solutions, but getting there will require ‘intelligent agents’ to facilitate—to help assemble content,  training programs, workflow and productivity tools and similar applications to rewire their work environments.  In education, this requirement may give platforms like Blackboard and Desire2Learn an advantage, given their installed base on campus.

While change often produces anxiety, I see dynamism in the book (and “content”) industry that is exciting and invigorating.  There will be many big changes in 2013 but in contrast to the most recent past where publishers were buffeted by macroeconomic changes, I expect these changes to reflect the elements of a positive shift in the way publishing companies operate and consumers – especially in education – consume content.   We're going to end 2013 thinking completely differently about this industry.

Some other trends I see emerging during 2013:

• There will be more experimentation with subscription programs, possibly similar to the old book club model, with curated collections and incentives (such as free eBook readers).  These could also be combined with social network capabilities to allow reading group subscription models and social networking.   For example, these could be ‘self-defined’ groups: A reading group could set themselves up and choose from a variety of subscription models that allow their group to read a specific number of books, use a unique set of social tools and pay by subscription rather than per book.
• A Chinese- or Middle-East- based publisher will acquire a major, brand-name media company.  CurrentTV notwithstanding, this will be in information/professional or education.
• “Self-publishing” will see huge international growth as Asian and Latin American markets develop.
• The unlucky leftover of the three trade houses in play will be immediately acquired by Amazon (just wanted to see if you read this far).
• There will be some consolidation in the eBook provider market.
• The Apple bookstore will be re-launched and will end 2013 poised to surpass the Nook and move into second place behind the Kindle.
• Similar to what takes place in gaming, innovative publishers will begin to engage readers in new book and content ideas even before the book is ‘completed’.   In game development, it isn’t unusual for games to be released with only the first three out of 10 game levels completed--why build the whole product if no one wants to play?  Book and content producers may try to adopt and adapt this model for their new product development.
• Manchester United will win the English Premier League title.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 2): Kno ExTextbook, Al-Mutanabbi Street, Houghton Mifflin Refinancing, + More

Kno launch ExTextbook Analytics tool that they hope will improve learning. Is it creepy? From LibraryJournal:

What’s interesting about Kno’s new analytic tools is that the company claims it will be leaving teachers and professors out of the loop. The student’s metrics and their dashboard information will be private unless they want to share information with friends.

“It’s a personal study dashboard,” Osman Rashid, CEO of Kno, told me. “It helps students measure their engagement with each Kno textbook that they use. So, students can check in to see their stats for time spent reading, notes added, flashcards mastered. This helps them monitor their progress and give them insight into how well they are studying…The more we can help students understand their own study behavior, the more they will be engaged, and the better the outcomes will be. This has everything to do with the student improving themselves, versus being a surveillance platform for everyone else to see what the student is doing.”

If a student is struggling in a particular class, he or she can use the Kno Me dashboard and request to “follow” a peer who is performing well, making an effort to mimic his or her studying habits for that class.

“There’s a social element to it,” Rashid said. “You can begin to see how other people in the class are studying for the final exam, or what else is going on. It gives them a ‘learning GPS’ for how they can better study themselves. The only time information is shared is if a student gives permission. It doesn’t automatically start sharing just because someone requested it.”

After the bombing Al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad is still a long way from where it was. (Economist)

A world away, a San Francisco bookseller read about the attack in his morning paper. Beau Beausoleil, a poet and proprietor of the Great Overland Book Company, a second-hand book store, waited for the outpouring of support and outrage that would surely follow. Nothing happened. Mr Beausoleil felt compelled to act. An attack on writers and booksellers anywhere in the world was an attack on them all.

So he began an art and writing project called “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here”, to express solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The project started with a first wave of letterpress-printed broadsides responding to the attack and has evolved over five years to include an anthology of writing, published in August, and 260 artists’ books—unique works of art in book form—from contributors all over the world.

No one has been more amazed at this outpouring than Mr Beausoleil. The initial call for broadsides rapidly exceeded expectations; in all, 130 were printed, one for each person killed or injured. When he asked for artists’ books to commemorate those lost on al-Mutanabbi Street, double that number arrived, in various shapes and media. Some are poems, some innovative book structures; others offer visual images of Baghdad’s “Street of the Booksellers” or meditations on the value of books, using microfilm or Plexiglass or e-ink. All respond in some way to Mr Beausoleil’s request that they reflect both the attack and the “ultimate futility of those who try to erase thought.”

The attack “wounded people in a very specific way,” he says. Like other writers and artists he could see that “if I were an Iraqi, that would be my street—that’s where my bookstore would be, this would be my cultural community.” The project’s title, “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here”, conveys the notion that wherever someone sits down to write towards the truth, or sits down with a book, that’s where al-Mutanabbi Street starts, explains Mr Beausoleil.

Eric Shuman, the CFO of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt talks to CFO magazine about their restructing (CFO):

HMH didn’t wait until it was on the brink. The 180-year-old publishing company had about $400 million in cash at the end of 2011 when CEO Linda Zecher and Shuman sat down to assess the situation and figure out the rate of burn. Although previous management believed the company had enough liquidity to make it through 2014, Shuman and Zecher’s projection showed it would hit the wall a year earlier. Thus, while HMH had some wiggle room, the executives immediately went to work on a restructuring plan. “We didn’t want to have negotiations with [creditors] when we were on our last nickel, so part of the strategy was to do it when we didn’t absolutely need to, as opposed to when we had no choice,” says Shuman. As a result, HMH retained some leverage in negotiations and had the ability “to delay the process if things weren’t going the right way.”

HMH sought full capitalization of its debt. Shuman credits Zecher with setting the goal of converting the entire $3.1 billion of debt into stock. “I think everyone was skeptical we could do it, because you almost never get that,” says Shuman. But “investors understood the situation and were willing to take an equity ride with us.” The makeup of the debt and equity holders was key. Many firms owned both equity and some of the company’s senior secured debt. “It made the process go a little more quickly than it might have had we not had the crossover,” says Shuman. It also helped that equity holders who voted in favor of the deal would get warrants exercisable for up to 5% of equity in the restructured firm.

BBC makes Space for cultural history The Digital Public Space is set to give unprecedented access to the nation's cultural heritage (BBC):

Fortunately for the archive team, incoming BBC director general Lord (Tony) Hall is very likely to be fully archive interoperable himself, having already sat on the advisory board for its first practical incarnation, The Space, in his previous job as Royal Opera House chief executive. Initially launched in May 2012 as a six-month pop-up service and extended until March 2013, The Space knits together BBC technology expertise and content from the corporation, BFI and UK arts bodies with £3.5m in Arts Council commissioning funding. Under the strapline "the arts – live, free and on demand", it has hosted live streams of Shakespeare productions at the Globe Theatre and David Shrigley's opera Pass the Spoon, while interactive ventures include Torsten Lauschmann's Digital Clock and Arena Hotel, pictured right, which reimagined the archive of the BBC's long-running arts documentary strand in the style of New York's Chelsea Hotel.

The triumph, however, was proving not just the concept but the practicalities of the Digital Public Space vision. "The real point of the Digital Public Space is not the archive — it's working together with other organisations," says Thompson, who explained the painstaking technical negotiations behind The Space over linked data and metadata, cataloguing, file formats and streaming that identified and ironed out many of the key principles of collaboration.

From Twitter:

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The return of David Bowie: Golden years? The Economist