MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 38): John D. MacDonald, Banned Books Reviews, Google & edX, Author Franchises + More

Random House if bringing back a load of John D. MacDonald books. (WSJ)

He had in fact a grand theme, which he nibbled at in book after book: the ruinous postwar overbuilding of the Florida Gulf Coast. (It even runs, much subdued, through the McGee series.) MacDonald knew the landscape well; it was where he lived for most of his adult life, and he was horrified by what he saw happening to it. He wasn't a passionate environmentalist, and he spared his readers any laments for drained swampland. He had no objection to sensible development as such. But he saw the mechanics of the Florida land boom from the inside; he was able to write knowledgeably about county boards and real-estate investment trusts, building codes and rezoning applications. He was fervently certain that the countless petty instances of greed and corruption and fecklessness and indifference and incompetence were sooner or later going to add up to a disaster, and he was right. When Hurricane Andrew destroyed a large swath of Florida in 1992, six years after MacDonald's death, the catastrophe was multiplied several times over by the astonishing shoddiness of the housing there, of whole communities constructed in open defiance of the building codes, almost exactly as MacDonald had described.

The New Republic is publishing reviews of banned books (New Repub):  Here is Slaughterhouse 5 reviewed by Michael Crichton

Only the commercial explanation, which is really no more than a simple observation of verifiable fact, holds water; the others are demonstrably wrong. For example, nearly all fictional forms have come from pulp, or its equivalent in previous generations. The majority of "classic" authors were very popular in their day. And when one surveys the great triad of pulp writing—science fiction, westerns, and detective fiction—from the early part of this century, the results are interesting. Westerns, being closest to the heart of American mythology, have been almost entirely absorbed by the ubiquitous tube. Detectives have done well in films, less well on television; in straight fiction their standards have been raised markedly, partly because "real" authors like Conrad and Graham Greene have dabbled in the form and partly because talented writers have been drawn to it—Raymond Chandler, David Cornwall, and Georges Simenon. But science fiction has remained impervious to such influences. It is still as pulpy, and as awful, as ever.

 Inside Higher Ed considers a A Google E-Learning Ecosystem (IHEd)

Up until the edX - Google deal it would have been difficult. Smarter people than me were able to get Course Builder (the platform that Google is putting into maintenance) to work, but for mere mortals (read non-programmers), Google never really had any platform that was workable for online course development and teaching.  Now the edX Open platform is going to evolve and improve, as Google is putting developer and infrastructure resources behind the project.  Nobody from edX is saying that edX open or MOOC.org is intended to be an LMS replacement. Why pick that fight? But it makes perfect sense.  Why wouldn't a school want to use the same platform for their campus (private) courses as their open courses?  Wouldn't it make sense to easily be able to designate some parts of a course that are open (such as the course content, formative assessment or public discussion boards), and wall-off other parts of the course (such as internal discussion boards or graded assignment areas) for only those matriculated (and tuition paying) students?

Is there a lesson for big name authors in the actions of the All Things D staff? (CJR)

These new franchise raise the important question of whether and by how much power is shifting in journalism from publishers to authors.  I’d argue that these franchises are to a large extent sui generis and not indicative of a generalized power shift in journalism. In fact their high visibility tends to distort our view of the author-publisher, that is to say, labor-management, power balance.  First, it’s important to note that these particular franchises were (for the most part) all nurtured within big, traditional news organizations, which provided salaries, health insurance, tech support, legal backup, etc. etc., plus and importantly the imprimatur of their brand names built up over decades. So these are not autonomous operations, but in fact highly dependent ones.  It’s significant, for instance, that when Nat Silver moved his Fivethirtyeight franchise in July (which prompted Jay’s post), it wasn’t to go off on his own but to join another big company, in this case, Disney. In that sense, his move wasn’t so different from past jumps by media stars such, as, say, in 1984 when Mike Royko left the Sun-Times after Murdoch bought it and joined the Tribune. True, Silver was already a success before he went to the Times in 2010—he was on one of Time’s most influential of 2009. But the Times’s perch certainly helped to propel him to new prominence, and his next destination, even if it’s not his last, turns out to be within the MSM.   People wonder if Andrew Ross Sorkin will ever make his DealBook independent. Not only is there no sign of that, in order to expand his influence, he took a second job at another MSM outlet.

From twitter this week
Conan Doyle estate seeks to preserve US copyright of Sherlock Holmes's 'complex personality' Guardian 
Netflix looks at pirate sites to decide which shows to buy Telegraph
Fairfax County libraries under fire after 250,000 books are tossed WAPO

Pisa 1961

I should ask my parents why they chose Milan and Pisa for their honeymoon.  I've never visited but I should before the tower falls down.  This is the Duomo, the medieval cathedral of the Archdiocese of Pisa in 1961.

CHORUS Update from AAP

From the AAP website, an update on the CHORUS initiative. The link to the proof of concept is to a 47 page pdf deck describing the status of the project.

Latest CHORUS Updates (posted 9/10/13)

Read the complete CHORUS Proof of Concept as presented to signatories, agencies and other stakeholders beginning August 30. This conceptual design report, presented by CHORUS Director of Development Howard Ratner, was the first milestone met in the rollout plan. Any questions, email info@publishers.org

Want to know How CHORUS Works? Check out this infographic.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 37): New Zealand, College Bandwidth, Google Translation, Flipped Classrooms + More

Could New Zealand be the first country to go entirely self-publishing?  Here's a reflective article about the state of New Zealand's publishing industry after several large publishers pulled out. (Stuff)

So, take out Hachette’s 30 titles, cut HarperCollins’ list by half and factor in the likely rationalisation of Random House and Penguin’s publications following their July global merger, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that fewer Kiwi writers will end up in print. Unless they slap a self-published text on Amazon and embark on the difficult task of self-spruiking. “I think it will mean that,” says International Institute of Modern Letters director Damien Wilkins. “The idea that you could become a writer is absolutely mainstream now and that’s been a huge change over the past 20 years. But you have that at the same time as these eroded outlets and potential for getting your work to readers. So it’s a very curious paradox.”

The need for bandwidth  is stressing out many college campus CIO's (IHE)

Howard’s experience is far from the norm. Many CIOs, facing tight budgets and pressure to keep costs from rising, are using their funds merely to replace aging hardware once it powers down for good or is rendered technologically obsolete.  “I have an adequate budget to replace 20 to 25 percent [of access points] every year,” Rowe said. In other words, if she spends part of her $90,000 budget to increase the number of access points on campus, fewer will be replaced. “In the meantime, I expect bandwidth demand and drain on the access points to continue.”

Google has long been looking at ways to eliminate the language barrier but their efforts may be intesifying (DerSpiegel)

For now, however, the company's goal is to perfect the service, and its path leads through the smartphone. The Translate team has developed an app that transforms smartphones into a talking translation machine, with the ability to handle about two dozen languages so far.  The app works very well, as long as sentences are kept relatively simple. For instance, someone who wants to tell a taxi driver in Beijing that he urgently needs to get to a pharmacy simply has to speak into his smartphone in, for example, German, and it promptly repeats the sentence in Chinese, correctly but in a somewhat tinny voice: "Qing dai wo qu yijia yaodian."  Och feels that the application is still "slightly slow and awkward, because you have to press buttons." The quality of the translation is also inconsistent. But only a few years ago, people would have said he was crazy if he had predicted what Translate could do today.

The Altantic wonders in the 'post-lecture' classroom how will students fare?

A three-year study examining student performance in a “flipped classroom” — a class in which students watch short lecture videos at home and work on activities during class time — has found statistically significant gains in student performance in “flipped” settings and significant student preference for “flipped” methods.  The study, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, is one of the first to examine a “flipped” classroom in the current state of its technology. Russell Mumper, a Vice Dean at the University of North Carolina’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy, conducted the study, and two separate articles based on its findings are now in press in the journals Academic Medicine and The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. The education technology company Echo360, whose technology was used in the classes examined, funded the study with a $10,000 grant.

An obit from The Economist on Elmore Leonard:

For years Elmore Leonard had a recurring dream that he was falling down a flight of stairs, never reaching the bottom. After some professional success, this changed: he continued to fall from great heights, but somehow survived. Leonard associated great heights with visibility, with vulnerability. It was better to be at ground level, amid the flow of people, unseen and observant. Meanwhile his bad-guy characters fell from balconies, through windows or drove over cliffs.
Like a jazz musician, he returned to familiar scenes and motifs in his work, discovering novelty in the repetition. “I begin with characters … and see what happens.”
In fact Leonard began with westerns. He thought it would be easy to write a good one (“when I picked up Zane Grey, I could not believe it was so bad”), and he swiftly infused this moth-eaten genre with a new psychological tension. But television killed the market for westerns, so Leonard turned to crime writing.

From Twitter:
Fairfax County libraries under fire after 250,000 books are tossed WaPO
Why is Netflix for books a better proposition than Spotify for books? It's all about the business model. Pub Technology 

The Cairns & The County Hotels 1972

My Grandfather (GrandPND) was a bit of an entrepreneur and owned a number of businesses over his life.  In the early 1970s he had turned to operating bed and breakfast hotels around Manchester and at one time owned four in converted multi-family buildings like the two above.  The hotels were located on Talbot Road about a quarter mile from Lancashire County Cricket Club (where PND Senior is Chairman) and about a mile from Manchester United FC (Champions!).   None of these buildings exist now and were knocked over under an urban renewal project in the 1980s that ultimately resulted in an uninspiring office building.   I drove down this road last weekend with the PND family and if I were to retake this photo now it would be completely unrecognizable.

Slideshow: Brands as Publishers

Brands as Publishers. from Huge

Ten Educational Start-ups to Watch

Ginkgotree is a web app which aims to completely replace costly, bulky textbooks. It’s not another LMS (a Learning Management System, like Blackboard); it’s a content platform that integrates seamlessly with your LMS, with the goal of giving students and faculty a solution superior to textbooks for much less money.  Faculty create a complete bundle of learning materials for their course, from nearly any source, including published textbooks, documents, websites, and videos. Then, students can read and discuss all the course materials in one place through a simple and beautiful interface. 

MasteryConnect: The Salt Lake City-based startup focuses, particularly, on formative assessments — a type of assessment that involves qualitative feedback (instead of relying on scores) and takes place during the learning process, with the goal of helping educators tweak their activities and approach to teaching with the goal of helping students learn more effectively. MasteryConnect, then, makes it easier for teachers to create these types of assessments and share them with colleagues, parents and students.  (Techcrunch)



Panorama Education: “We’re helping schools measure things, gather feedback and then use that data to improve,” Feuer said in an interview. “The big reason schools use us over SurveyMonkey is that we help them figure out what to ask, and we help them figure out what to do with the information. Tools like SurveyMonkey are great to just tell you the answers to whatever your surveying someone about, but if you want to understand what that actually means and how to interpret it, and you want to look at it in context with other data than you need something like Panorama.”  (Techcrunch)

StraighterLine is focused on bringing price transparency to online education, offering general ed courses that students generally take (and are often required) during their freshman and sophomore years, like Algebra, Biology, Calculus, U.S. History, and English Composition, to name a few — on the Web. If we say the average price for a private institution is about $32K per year, StraigherLine’s pricing compares favorably, with the option to pay $100 a month, plus $39 for each course started, $399 per course, or a full freshman year education for $1K.  Included in this pricing is free live, on-demand instruction, although if students choose to buy a textbook, they have to do so separately. But the cool part is that the startup’s courses are ACE Credit recommended and can be transferred for credit to a number of degree granting institutions. Over 25 grant credit today, with more than 200 universities across the U.S. having accepted post-review. (Techcrunch)


StudyBlue: Today, StudyBlue has become a “digital backpack,” with its web and mobile study tools enabling college and high school students to store and organize their course materials, turning them into flashcards, quizzes and study guides that can be accessed on the go. By allowing students to share the content they create with others, the startup has amassed an enormous library of user-generated study materials — over 100 million in total — which cover a wide array of subjects, from zoology to anthropology.  (Techcrunch)


GroupNotes: To address what educators were looking for, Groupnotes developed a collaborative platform that can get an entire class on board working together on a single topic or course of study. As members of a group browse the web, they can take notes and annotate pages with drawings and text comments, and as other users also browse, they can see and add to those breadcrumbs. It also collects notes in a group dashboard, and information is communicated between group members in real-time, meaning that a prof leading a class could be viewing materials as students in the class comment, note and ask questions on their individual devices. (Techcrunch)


Noodle Education: The startup is on a mission to bring a Netflix-style recommendation engine to the fragmented and noisy world of education. Not unlike Google, Noodle Education wants to organize the world’s learning platforms and aggregate the huge amount of educational info out their on the Web into a learning-centric, personalized search and recommendation engine.  The company announced the acquisition of Lore (formally CourseKit).  Initially focused on building forums around courses with tools designed specifically for teachers, last fall, Lore launched its student-facing platform to let students create academic profiles, follow classmates and professiors and join study groups, clubs, and so on. The network had its first semester live last spring, and since then has signed up more than 600 schools and added thousands of courses across a range of disciplines. (Techcrunch)


Pearson Education acquires Learning Catalytics: Founded in late 2011, Learning Catalytics is a platform that allows teachers to ask their students open-ended critical thinking questions and receive feedback in realtime. But beyond simply being a student response system and allowing teachers to get a better sense of what areas students are struggling with, the startup’s platform allows teachers to split their class into groups of similar ability. (Techcrunch)


Grades.io which launches today as an early MVP, after around six weeks of total development time. While not as feature-complete or as final in terms of design as Lowry plans to make it, even the MVP of Grades.io is worlds better than the bulk of available class management software, and that’s mostly because its design and user experience has been approached with a light touch.  (Techcrunch)

General Assembly, the New York-based education startup that offers classes and mingling space to tech developers and entrepreneurs, has raised $10 million in new funding, via an SEC filing. General Assembly originally launched as a co-working space but quickly evolved into an urban educational facility and event space for the technology and design industry. (Techcrunch)

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 35): The Cassette Tape, Birmingham Library, Google Glass, Economist Newspaper +More

Missed last week. Apologies.

Who knew the lowly cassette tape is celebrating 50 years of age.  Not much chance of making 60 I shouldn't wonder.  From the Guardian 10 Key Moments in Cassette history (Guardian)

Tape for audio storage was first showcased at the Berlin Radio Show in 1935, on the reel-to-reel Magnetophon machine, but it would take another three decades for the stereo compact cassette to arrive. Dutch manufacturer Philips got there first in 1963, alongside the first battery-powered lightweight cassette player.
Albums on cassette arrived in the US in 1966, with Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt and Johnny Mathis among the first artists on tape; the UK followed suit in 1967. Intriguingly, cassettes also made the album a more significant format. As it was harder to select tracks on cassette than on record, listening to an album serially, without skipping, became ingrained in music culture. Cassettes also allowed more time for the album than vinyl. The standard LP length was 45 minutes in total; compact cassettes allowed up to 45 minutes per side.

A lengthy review of the new library in Birmingham. (Guardian)

The new £189m Library of Birmingham, which calls itself the largest public library in Europe, is as grand a civic statement as that city has attempted for many years. It's also a product of the package and wrapping way of building. Its maker, ahead of its architects, is the project management company Capita Symonds. It was on board first, and made many of the decisions that would determine the experience of the finished building. It managed the process that led to the selection of the Dutch architectural practice Mecanoo. Once architects would win a competition with a design, and ways would be found to achieve it, but Mecanoo was partly chosen for the ability to work with a pre-existing process. The question is: can it be "the best library in the world", as was hoped for, and be built in this way?

From the New York Times magazine this weekend a discourse on Google Glass.

Ultimately it’s difficult to assess how a tool like Glass might change our information habits and everyday behavior, simply because there’s so little software for it now. “Glass is more of a question than an answer,” in the words of Astro Teller, who heads Google X, the company’s “moon shot” skunk works, which supervised Glass’s development; he says he expects to be surprised by what emerges in the way of software. Phil Libin, the C.E.O. of Evernote, told me that my frustrations with Glass were off-base. I was trying to use it to replace a phone or a laptop, but the way head-mounted wearables will be used — assuming the public actually decides to use them — will most likely be very different. “This is not a reshaping of the cellphone,” he added. “This is an entirely new thing.” He predicts that we’ll still use traditional computers and phones for searching the Web, writing and reading documents, doing e-mail. A wearable computer will be more of an awareness device, noting what you’re doing and delivering alerts precisely when you need them, in sync with your other devices: when you’re near a grocery store, you will be told you’re low on vegetables, and an actual shopping list will be sent to your phone, where longer text is more easily read. Depending on your desire for more alerts, this could be regarded as either annoying or lifesaving. But as Libin puts it, “The killer app for this is hyperawareness.”

The principal associations for higher ed (The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)) announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the US that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data.  (Press Release)

I know I've asked myself this question; "Why does the Economist call itself a newspaper?" (Economist)

The Economist, moreover, still considers itself more of a newspaper than a magazine in spirit. Its aim is to be a comprehensive weekly newspaper for the world. If you are stranded on a desert island and can have only one periodical air-dropped to you to keep up with world news, our hope is that you would choose The Economist. That goal is arguably more in keeping with the approach of a newspaper than a magazine. The latter term derives from the French word for storehouse and implies a more specific publication devoted to a particular topic, rather than coverage of current affairs.

From Twitter:
CourseSmart Rolls Out Digital Textbook Subscriptions for College Students Goodreader
Scientific American devotes a special report to digital reading. Scientific American
BBC News - Elmore Leonard, crime novelist, dies aged 87 BBC
Will copyright be extended 20 more years? An old debate returns Gigom  

Sir David Frost on Political Satire

PND Senior was reminising with Sir David only a few weeks ago.  Sad to see him go.

Australian Open 1976 & John Newcombe

Newk has just finished a quarter final match against Ross Case which he won 6-4, 6-4, 6-1.  Somehow, I was sitting in a box seat at court side and a family friend lent me his 35mm camera which was the first time I had used one.  From then on I was hooked.  In those years, the Australian Open was held at Kooyong Tennis Club on grass and it was a little like the old US open set up at Forrest Hills.  Just like Forrest Hills the club is still there.  In the years I lived in Melbourne I went to Kooyong many times to watch the Open since the tournament also coincided with the long summer school break. 

Newcombe made it to the final where he was beaten by fellow Aussie Mark Edmondson which must have been a disappointment because it was Edmondson's only major win.

The Death of the Copyright Agency

The combined impacts of technology, legislation and judicial decisions on copyright licensing are beginning to show how rights licensing agencies are likely to face a difficult time extending their current business models in the future. In Canada, Access Copyright (AC) has struggled to impose a new pricing model on universities which accords a high per student fee for unlimited access for publisher content covered by an Access Copyright agreement. Since AC imposed their new model about two years ago, the agency has lost out in court over the concept of ‘fair dealing’, with the practical impact being, that universities are now requesting significant revision to their AC agreements. Led by the University of Toronto which has refused to renew their current agreement, academic libraries in Canada believe that their content rights under the court’s interpretation of ‘fair dealing’ are already broad based and that the universities do not require a license anywhere as expensive (and potentially limiting) as the license imposed by CA. As a result of these interpretations it is a widely held belief that CA faces a very difficult future given their main revenue model has been significantly undercut by the courts.

For an interesting review of the legal situation in Canada here is a quote from an interview with Prof Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto:

So does Access Copyright still have a role to play with universities?

It’s not clear at all. For one thing, it’s not that Access Copyright offers a very generous license. Even though it’s now well established that fair dealing could have a generous application in education, fair dealing doesn’t cover everything, it’s not a carte blanche that allows the free copying of everything. Therefore, educational institutions may still need licenses for activities that go beyond the scope of fair dealing, and they have always been willing to pay a lot of money for such licenses. The problem is that Access Copyright’s licenses do not offer a generous license at all. In fact, the licenses they offer are very restrictive – you can copy no more than 10% of a work or a chapter from a book, and this permission comes not only with payments but also with many strings attached. In fact, many believe that what AC offers for a fee would very likely be considered fair dealing anyway.

Are there any universities still subscribing now?

Yes. About half of Canadian universities (outside Quebec, which has its own collective) are still licensees of AC. U of T and Western were the first to sign new licenses outside of the Copyright Board proceeding tariff, but to their credit they signed a short term license, which expires by the end of this year. Both of them announced that they would not renew it, but invited AC to negotiate a new license on more favorable terms. It’s still unknown whether AC can or will be willing to offer something that would be worth paying for.

Technology is also enabling a shift away from permissions based commerce as more and more content is made available via publisher’s electronic platforms. As these platforms become more sophisticated and comprehensive (as well as easy to use), libraries are able to provide immediate access to content for their academic patrons as part of their base subscriptions. Content on these platforms is then integrated into course management systems and other similar distribution vehicles directly to students. Where in the past fees for this use needed to be negotiated (and the content retrieved), we are increasingly seeing ‘all you can eat models’ which include course pack use, researcher access and on/off campus access to name only a few of the options. Where publishers include these additional rights in their platform agreements, they enable a more functional site for users and will potentially begin to reduce the amount of content fees generated by collecting agencies such as copyright clearance center (CCC) and others.

In the US, CCC is a more-broad based collecting agency with less reliance on the educational segment and the blanket license approach followed by the UK, Canada and elsewhere has not been widely adopted by US academic institutions. In the US, the impact of technology as described above is likely to eat away progressively at their model as publishers place more of their content in easily accessible locations. That said, CCC is unlikely to face the issues that AC and the UK and Australian agencies are currently facing.

In Australia, as documented by fellow traveler Peter Donoughue, similar issues surround the interpretation of ‘fair dealing’ and the elimination in Australia of the so-called statutory license governing academic use of publisher content. As Peter states:

The next five or so years will see most educational publishers sign tailored subscription-based licenses with tertiary institutions and premium school customers. They will have the option of using newly developed Copyright Agency voluntary licenses for the rest if that makes sense.

Under these emerging business models publishers will have the freedom to offer comprehensive content offerings - primarily digital but inclusive of print. And the schools will demand liberal free use provisions as part of the deal, particularly involving content distribution in the classroom. Remunerable 'multiple copying' will be a thing of the past and the concept itself deemed quaint.

Such arrangements are the mainstream future. As content goes digital, primary exploitations (formerly sales of books) and subsidiary 'bits and pieces' (eg photocopying) will collapse into comprehensive content offerings via licenses.

Peter does believe the Australia copyright agency (CAL) will be able to support a business in this new environment; however, he does note that pending legislation in Australia may halve the amounts collected under the current permissions based program. With much less money to go around it will create a challenging environment for any agency like CAL.

Earlier this month I attended a user group meeting for the library permissions tool “Heron” which is one of my Publishing Technology business units. Heron helps libraries manage their permissions reporting obligations to Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) using PubTracker. Pubtracker is a simple tool which saves libraries days’ worth of time each month to compile content usage. At this meeting, there was a lot of discussion about the new CLA universal license which had recently been negotiated and agreed between CLA and academic libraries. Here the issue was less with the model and more about what was ultimately covered by this agreement. The view of most of the librarians in attendance was that CLA had misled the group with respect to the extent of content covered by the agreement. Indeed, most librarians believe the content covered was significantly less than the prior agreement with specific reductions in access to US based content. Some librarians were contemplating not signing this new agreement.

The UK Librarians were most angry about the impact the new limitations would have on their roles on campus. One librarian stated that they’ve been focused on educating lecturers about the appropriate use of content and to seek the right authorizations however; with the new CLA license they would be stuck trying to explain to a lecturer why last year authorization was available but this year it wasn’t (or was much harder to gain). They felt this would lead to more disobedience by lecturers. The crux of the issue is that US content may not be covered by the new CLA license and UK librarians will be forced to go directly to US publishers which almost by definition is a more cumbersome and frustrating process.

By far the most difficult situation is being faced by the Canadian Access Copyright office which has already downsized and faces stiff opposition from it’s’ user community. Other licensing agencies also face challenges related to technology advancement, legislation and judicial challenges, and as more and more content becomes digitally available, all these agencies will need to undergo comprehensive change in order to maintain their role and relevance.  Whether the experience of AC is a trend setter is an open question but there is certain to be much more on this subject over the coming years.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 34): Georgia Tech MOOC'd, Renting from Amazon, City Hall Library, + More

NYTimes on Georgia Tech's approach to MOOCs

Although it is just one degree at one university, the prospect of a prestigious low-cost degree program has generated great interest. Some educators think the leap from individual noncredit courses to full degree programs could signal the next phase in the evolution of MOOCs — and bring real change to higher education.

“Perhaps Zvi Galil and Sebastian Thrun will prove to be the Wright brothers of MOOCs,” said S. James Gates Jr., a University of Maryland physicist who serves on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “This is the first deliberate and thoughtful attempt to apply education technology to bringing instruction to scale. It could be epoch-making. If it really works, it could begin the process of lowering the cost of education, and lowering barriers for millions of Americans.”

The plan is for Georgia Tech to provide the content and professors and to get 60 percent of the revenue, and for Udacity to offer the computer platform, provide course assistants and receive the other 40 percent. The projected budget for the test run starting in January is $3.1 million — including $2 million donated by AT&T, which will use the program to train employees and find potential hires — with $240,000 in profits. By the third year, the projection is for $14.3 million in costs and $4.7 million in profits.

The Economist reports on education standards and teaching students to think (Economist):

Though America’s grim education results come in for special drubbing in this book, the country is not alone in failing to teach its children how to think critically. This, at least, is the view of Andreas Schleicher, the “educational scientist” behind what is known as the Program for International Student Assessment, or the PISA test. If most exams quantify students’ ability to memorise material, this one aims to assess their effectiveness at problem-solving. Since 2000 it has been administered to millions of teenagers in more than 40 countries, with surprising results. Pupils in Finland, Korea, Japan and Canada consistently score much higher than their peers in Germany, Britain, America and France. The usual explanations for these achievements, such as wealth, privilege and race, do not apply.

Inside Higher Ed looks at Amazon's limitation on usage of your rented textbook

According to the Textbook Rental Terms and Conditions page on Amazon.com, when renting through Warehouse Deals, which is an Amazon subsidiary, “You may not move the textbook out of the state to which it was originally shipped. If you wish to move the textbook out of that state, you must first purchase the textbook.”
If Amazon does determine that a renter has moved his or her book to a different state “at any time during the rental period,” the company at its “sole discretion” can charge the consumer the buyout price of the textbook.
Some experts believe the policy is another reflection of the extreme lengths to which the company continues to go in order to avoid collecting state sales taxes. But could Amazon’s use restriction and other complicated rental conditions cause problems for students or lead potential textbook renters to take their business elsewhere?

Interesting video article on City Hall's hidden library of special collections.



From Twitter this week:

Muscle Shoals: watch an exclusive trailer for a documentary about the music born in the Alabama town Guardian
News International could face corporate charges over phone hacking Guardian 
E Ink Reports 46% Sales Drop, Expects E-Reader Shipments To Be Flat This Year Techcrunch 
BBC News - British Library's wi-fi service blocks 'violent' Hamlet BBC 

American Accessories in Kings Cross

There's still a sordid underbelly to London's Kings Cross area.  I wasn't interested in going inside and neither was she although I think she had other things in mind.

Ten (+One) Newish Publishing Technology Start-ups

Sellfy is an e-commerce platform that enables anyone to sell digital products directly to their fans and followers using just a link. Whether it's an e-book, music, video, photos, software, or any other type of digital content, just upload your product, enter the price and start selling on Twitter, Facebook or your own website. Sellfy takes care of file storage, payment processing and product delivery to the end customer.



24symbols is a service to read digital books on the Internet based on a subscription model. It's like a Spotify for book.

Marquee is a flexible publishing platform that helps you craft great content for your audience. It operates as a fully hosted service, or can integrate into your existing workflow.

Livrada creates and distributes e-book cards at retail. Each Livrada gift card represents a specific title, and can be redeemed wirelessly on Kindle, NOOK and Kobo platforms (more to follow). Livrada makes the browsing, discovery, and gift giving of digital content tangible, and gives digital content a presence in stores. Livrada also works with authors to sell, promote, and give away their digital works at live events. Finally, we work with organizations to distribute e-books in bulk.


Medium is a new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories that are longer than 140 characters and not just for friends. It’s designed for little stories that make your day better and manifestos that change the world. It’s used by everyone from professional journalists to amateur cooks. It’s simple, beautiful, collaborative, and it helps you find the right audience for whatever you have to say.


GENWI is a cloud-based smartphone and tablet app publishing platform continues to push forward in the mobile app development space, today launching an iPad app publishing solution and mobile content management system (CMS). As the company’s evolution has led it to a focus on providing media publishers with tools to create and manage newspaper, magazine, and catalog apps for iOS and Android, the iPad app solution is a logical extension to prior platform iterations — especially with the escalating adoption of tablets, specifically the iPad, as a content production tool and a source for some of the best (and most well designed) media apps. (Techcrunch)




Draft, a streamlined online word processor with version control, is getting deeper into the new professional publishing ecosystem.  The one-man team of Nathan Kontny has just introduced a new REST API that’ll let any news outfit or other publishing organization connect Draft to the other software it uses. If you’re BuzzFeed or The Huffington Post* or another media company with a big mix of full- and part-time writers, you could use the API to let writers and editors work through versions together in Draft then publish straight to your custom content management system. (Techcrunch)


7write wants to provide better writing software for wannabe authors, help them market their work in better ways and help them sell across multiple markets including digital and print.  (Techcrunch)




Pressly mobile publishing platform is designed to help brands, marketers and traditional publishers succeed in the growing world of tablet and smartphone reading. A flexible, turn key solution, there are a number of creative ways you can use it to drive results and engage your audience.


Open Air Publishing is a leading digital-first nonfiction publisher. Our team is redefining what a “book” can be by creating reading experiences tailored for touchscreen devices.  Examples of the platform technology are found here: BetterBooks Library

Master Your DSLR Camera: A Better Way to Learn Digital Photography from Open Air Publishing on Vimeo.


Graphicly provides authors and publishers the simplest and most cost-effective access to digital content conversion and distribution, across every marketplace imaginable, with comprehensive actionable insights on reader behavior.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 33) Belle de Jour and "Boy", Thoughts on Pricing, DA Information Administration + More

Girl: I am a prostitute! Man: I never knew. Now I look stupid! Indeed. (Daily Mail)

At first Owen was unaware that he was in a relationship with the anonymous blogger, who was gathering thousands of readers with apparently true tales of prostitution.
He says: ‘I knew she was writing a blog as she was often typing away but she said it was science fiction and I believed her. I didn’t read it and I had no idea what it actually was.
‘But in spring 2004, I thought she’d been writing down things I said so I put one of my exact phrases into Google – something extremely unique – and the blog popped up. I was absolutely horrified.  'I remember sitting on a bench feeling numb and shocked with that silly [J Geils Band] song going round in my head – “My girlfriend is a centrefold”.
'But I didn’t actually realise I was in it as all my quotes were as clients, and I didn’t think she was actually a prostitute.’

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Interesting article on pricing theories from The Economist:

WHEN bosses promise to make their companies more profitable they usually say they will do so by increasing sales or cutting costs. But a third road to profits is rarely mentioned: putting prices up. Managers often fail to ask how they might do better at plucking the goose to obtain the most feathers with the least hissing. The spiel from the management consultants who advise companies on pricing—whether specialists like Simon-Kucher or giant generalists like PWC—is that it is now more vital than ever to be smart at it. In today’s austere age many businesses cannot depend on rising sales volumes to lift their profits. As for cutting costs, most have already pared them to the bone. Prices are all that is left. And a business can do a lot with clever pricing, to boost its share of the limited spending-power that is out there.  

Makers of high-tech products such as smartphones can opt to add whizzy new features and push up prices. In the case of luxury goods, their exclusivity is a large part of their appeal, and this in turn is a function of their price, so firms usually have scope for limiting supply and charging more: Ferrari, a sports-car maker, and Mulberry, a purveyor of posh bags, have both recently signalled that they plan to do just that. But raising prices by making products better or more exclusive is a strategic decision, open to only a few types of business. For all sorts of mundane goods and services there is much that can be done tactically, the consultants say, to charge more for the same thing.

By the time this eBook case gets done it won't matter. Here's the publisher's filing opposing the penalties imposed on Apple for contesting the DOJ case against the publishers. (Apple Insider)

DA Information Services in Australia has gone into administration (SmartCompany)

An academic book publishing company with $40 million in turnover has now collapsed in administration, yet another sign the print and publishing industries are continuing to face severe transition pains.  The news comes after discount book group allbooks4less also fell into administration last week, following an aggressive expansion plan.
Publishers have commented bookstores and booksellers have struggled to prop up book prices in the face of dynamic online competition.  DA Information Services Group, which contains the businesses Information Specialists, DA Information Services Pty and Central Book Services, has been placed into administration.  The company claims to be Australia’s largest locally based full service academic library supplier, providing books, journals, eBooks and other media products for professional purposes across Australia and New Zealand.  The business was founded 60 years ago. Customers include academic libraries, research facilities, medical centres, government departments, universities and TAFEs, along with law libraries.

From the TwitterFeed this week:
Digital libraries are developing from the old model. WAPO
Bauer under renewed fire over magazines that glorify Nazi regime Guardian
Philip Hensher: There’s nothing out of date about duty (and other words). Telegraph
Google results will now show 3 in-depth articles - topics include censorship and Legos GigOm  

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

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

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

In sports this week from Twitter feed:

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

Hong Kong Housing 1969: Kai Tak Approach

When I first saw this photo I assumed it had been taken from a building across the street from this particular slum (and, what someone was doing in this neighborhood would have been a different story);  however, this is actually taken out of the window a a plane - probably a 707 - coming in to land at what was Hong Kong's only major airport.   KaiTak has been closed for about 10 years now and looking at the density of Hong Kong it's hard to imagine there was ever any space to land Jumbo jets once every two or three minutes.  I suspect these people in the slums got pretty fed up with the jet noise as well.

Here is the image take immediately before this one. PND

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

White House Sponsored DataJam Promotes Open Data Initiatives

There is a lot of machine-readable data coming from the federal government, as a result of the Obama Administration’s open-data initiatives. Open data was a platform initiative of the President’s first presidential campaign and, in his second term, he has reinvigorated this policy with a new spate of policy initiatives, executive orders and community outreach.

The result of the outreach program was on display at a recent Datajam event I attended at the White House Conference Center (near, not at, the White House). Sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology and CENDI, the event invited technologists, researchers, publishers and data owners to weigh up ways of using the data and content rapidly being made accessible by almost every federal agency. As a group, we were challenged by White House Chief Technology Officer Todd Park to engage our inner entrepreneurial spirits and think up new and innovative uses for government data. In a lively opening speech, Park promised the datajam audience member who came up with a viable idea or product within 60 days that he would “make [him or her] famous.” He pointed to several examples of health data related products which had come out of similar meetings recently, and was enthusiastic about this group’s ability to produce some interesting ideas.

Government information and data is a by-product of the taxes we pay to maintain the federal agencies, and, Park confirmed “the administration is looking to maximize tax payer return of government produced data by opening it up to so many people can access and use it.” Citing as a guiding principle ‘Joy’s law’--that the smartest people in the world will always be working for someone else and that collaboration is an imperative if real progress needs to be made--Park suggested that bringing people together in groups like ours is important for both promotion of open data and for actually devising worthwhile uses for it. Furthermore, he made the point that “open data by itself is useless and only useful if it gets applied to something and produces value.” He encouraged us to “use ‘our data’ to produce awesomeness - where stuff can actually happen.”

Earlier this year, President Obama signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to open access to all government-sponsored published content by the end of 2013. This has produced a frenzy of activity at some agencies to determine what they have and how to make the materials accessible. Some agencies are more mature in this respect than others but, CTO Park confirmed, the President is passionate about open data and has made specific commitments to fulfilling this policy.

In a speech in Austin, TX, in May, the President cited several examples of start-up companies working with open data: “StormPulse uses government-produced weather data to help businesses anticipate disruptions in service. Another company based in Virginia called OPower uses government trend data to save consumers $200m on their energy bills.” Obama also mentioned an app called iTriage, founded by a pair of doctors, that uses data from the Department of Health and Human Services to help define symptoms and find appropriate health care for the patient. In the same speech, the President announced that his administration is making even more government data available and he expected that this and his other open-data initiatives would help launch even more start-ups similar to the ones he mentioned. 



The data available would help “more entrepreneurs come up with products and services that we haven’t even imagined yet”.

More recently, in a speech just two weeks ago, President Obama suggested that we are part of a process to build a better, more open-data America. Hyperbole aside, there will be no coming back once these policies are in place and this policy by the executive and agencies of the Federal government is likely to have profound changes on how we, as citizens, interact with the government. Frequent examples of open data initiatives cite the use of satellite imagery and data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) which have produced the now ubiquitous mapping and weather apps; however, given the “fire hose” nature of the data and information on offer, these early examples are likely to represent only isolated examples of the opportunities represented by the government’s open data initiatives.

Commercial publishers of government-funded and/or -produced content and data are spooked by some of these moves by the government. During our meeting it was mentioned that one only needs to search for “aspirin” on Google to see how accessing government-produced content via API can produce content that looks very much like a drug handbook entry from Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer or some other commercial medical publisher. The government often makes reference-like content a requirement of various approval processes, and thus, we may be about to see professional reference content undergo some profound changes. And that is just one small example of what could happen to commercial publishing.

As a direct result of the open-data initiatives both in the US and Europe, the Association of American Publishers and Society of Scholarly Publishers (in collaboration with partner CrossRef) have established an initiative named CHORUS. (The EU is said to be about to press for greater open-data requirements than we have in the US.) Through CHORUS, publishers aim to avoid a PubMed situation and manage the open data and open access content requirements themselves; publishers who publish content which is also available on PubMed see significant decreases in traffic once PubMed opens access to the same content. Publishers believe that, by setting up their own open-access service, they will be able to fulfill the government’s open-access requirement and mitigate the impact(s) on their own business models.

Regardless of the risks to current publishers and their business models, it appears that the government produces a lot more content and data than is currently being commercialized by publishers. The sheer amount of data is overwhelming and, as long as the President continues to promote open data, we’ll see hundreds of new products and services develop in the short term as entrepreneurs take CTO Park up on his promise to make them famous.

My Big Book of Posts & Predictions

I have compiled all my annual predictions posts and a selection of more thoughtful posts that have appeared here since 2006 when I started PND. Here is the slideshare link to the book.

If you would like a pdf file of the book directly from me just send me a note.  Here is a link to all the other presentations I have placed on slideshare.net which have been viewed 35,000 times!

 
Personanondata Predications and Posts: 2006 - 2012 from Michael Cairns

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 30): Colbert Mocks MOOCs, Private Eye, Barnes & Noble + More

Steven Colbert interviewed Anant Agarwal the President of edX, who explains the reason for offering free university courses online. Steven proclaimed ignorance of the free MOOC model and compared the model to a shoe store.



And at the Chronicle of Higher Education a more serious opinion piece about who's driving the MOOC locomotive:

I understand that politicians have a duty to be good stewards of public money, as do college administrators; and I certainly don't have any objection to cutting costs where we can. But when our primary objective becomes making degrees as cheap as possible, rather than providing the best education possible, we're missing the mark as educators and doing no good for the future of our students or our nation.

That's why it's so important for us as faculty members to realize who's driving the online locomotive. It's not students, only about a third of whom take any online classes. It's not our colleagues, the vast majority of whom still aren't fully on board with online learning in general, much less with MOOCs. And it's certainly not employers, who over all seem to prefer that students take most of their coursework in traditional classrooms. It's the administrators and the politicians, whose priorities—let's be honest—are not the same as ours.

I sometimes wonder if the train is so big, and moving so fast, that it's just going to derail itself due to basic physics. But unless that happens, and until it does, the only way to slow it down is for enough of us to refuse to get on board and instead line the tracks, signaling "proceed with caution" with all our might.

From BusinessWeek; Barnes & Noble, the obituary.

Barnes & Noble is a $6.8 billion company with 675 carefully selected locations in every state in the country. It also operates 686 college bookstores, which with the e-reader operations make up the company’s Nook Media unit. Sales at its regular stores declined almost 6 percent in the company’s 2013 fiscal year, to $4.6 billion. But because their margins are getting higher and their expenses lower, the bookstores still make money: Ninety-five percent are profitable. Lynch may not have been reading real books, but Barnes & Noble’s customers still do.

The company hasn’t announced its plans yet, but it will probably sell the e-reader business or shut it down. Barnes & Noble’s Nook misadventure may look like one of those inexplicable unforced errors businesses make from time to time, like New Coke or the Edsel. But it’s hard to blame Lynch for trying to transform the company. The digital revolution is changing the dynamics of the business. The company had to respond, and it still does. The problem was that Lynch tried to transform the wrong thing.

Barnes & Noble has a history of ill-timed technological decisions. In the 1990s it was focused on beating Borders and didn’t set up its website until 1997, a full two years after Amazon.com went live. It introduced a primitive e-reader too early, in 2001 (on Sept. 11, to make things worse). After Amazon introduced the Kindle in 2007, Barnes & Noble needed someone to take control of its destiny and hired Lynch to do just that.

Eye Full: Ian Hislop explains why Private Eye’s blend of humor and investigative journalism wouldn’t work in the US (CJR)

Britain’s bestselling current-affairs magazine, Private Eye, has been producing its biweekly and decidedly English mix of satire, industry gossip, cartoons, and investigative journalism since 1961. Despite its print-focused operation (there is no digital version, and its website offers just tidbits of what’s available in the print edition), the magazine’s 200,000-plus circulation is the highest it’s been in recent years, buoyed by its recent 50th-anniversary issue and various government and media scandals. Much of the success is due to editor Ian Hislop, 52, who’s been at the helm since 1986. A self-professed workaholic, Hislop also writes for and appears on television, most famously as a panelist on the BBC’s long-running comedic news panel show, Have I Got News For You. As his profile has risen over the years, Hislop has become a regular on various power and influence lists, from The Guardian to GQ, and has been called “the king of British satire” and even a “national treasure.” CJR’s Sara Morrison spoke to Hislop about mixing satire and seriousness, and why American publications and TV shows either don’t or can’t.

Remember Suzi Quatro? (Telegraph):

And she made a pretty big impression on us teenage boys too. I tell her, slightly guiltily, about a rumour that spread around the school that if Devil Gate Drive hit No 1 in 1974, she would strip off on Top of the Pops. She’s laughing so much she can hardly speak. “Rock ’n’ roll! It’s the music of puberty,” she splutters. “I’ve always maintained that you can be sexy with your clothes on. Sexier maybe.” In 2007, Quatro published a candid and entertaining autobiography, Unzipped, in which she told stories about throwing a drunken Iggy Pop offstage, shooting an amorous Alice Cooper with an arrow, and turning down advances from Elvis Presley. Last year, she developed it into a one-woman, multi-media show for a brief run at London’s Hippodrome. This September, she brings a revised version to the Play Misty Club in Hackney for six nights.

From Twitter:
What is a publisher now? New interview with Victor Henning on scholarly PublishingTechnology
Springer Science buyout loan revised to attract investors IFR Asia
Here’s how Amazon self-destructs Salon
Previously unseen Joseph Heller story out this week Guardian