Berkery Noyes Quarterly Media Deals Reports

Berkery Noyes just released its Information Industry report for Q3 2013, which covers merger and acquisition (M&A) trends over the past 21 months. Click here to view the industry’s median multiples, as well as transaction data from the two-page PDF.

Using a database product from D&B they have also presented segment analyses:

Private Equity Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

The number of private equity acquisitions in the Information Industry increased 18 percent in third quarter 2013. Meanwhile, deal flow between private equity firms rebounded sharply. After falling 50 percent between first and second quarter 2013, secondary buyout volume increased almost fourfold over the past three months.

Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Media and Marketing Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

M&A volume in the Consumer Publishing segment increased 27 percent in third quarter 2013. There were several notable newspaper transactions during the quarter that were completed by individual billionaires. This included Jeffrey Bezos' acquisition of The Washington Post Company for $250 million and John Henry's acquisition of The Boston Globe from The New York Times for $70 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Online and Mobile Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

There were two high profile mobile advertising transactions during the quarter, each of which highlights the growing interest in real-time bidding solutions. Within this subset, Twitter acquired mobile ad serving platform MoPub for an estimated $350 million while Millennial Media acquired mobile ad network Jumptap for $239 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Software Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
Deal value in the Infrastructure Software segment throughout the first three quarters of 2013 was driven in part by the cyber-security subset. Along these lines, three of the top five transactions by value in the segment year-to-date were related to cyber-security. The largest Infrastructure Software deal in third quarter 2013 was Cisco Systems’ acquisition of SourceFire for $2.7 billion.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Healthcare Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
The Healthcare IT segment underwent a 56 percent volume increase on a quarterly basis. It also accounted for nearly half of the industry’s aggregate M&A volume, as opposed to 31 percent in the prior quarter. Deal volume in the Pharma IT segment also increased 33 percent year-to-date when compared to the corresponding period in 2012.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.
Education Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013
The industry’s largest transaction in third quarter 2013 was TPG Capital’s acquisition of TSL Education, a digital education publisher, for $549 million. Financial sponsors accounted for 23 percent of volume but 41 percent of transaction value year-to-date. In addition, six of the top ten highest value deals thus far in 2013 were backed by private equity firms.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

Financial Technology and Information Industry Merger & Acquisition Trends For Q3 2013

As for the Payments segment, M&A volume experienced a 142 percent increase in the quarter, with a total of 29 deals. This came in the aftermath of a 50 percent decrease between first and second quarter 2013. Regarding strategic acquirers, the segment’s highest value transaction in third quarter 2013 was EBay’s acquisition of Braintree Payment Solutions for $800 million.
Click here to read the two-page PDF.

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

Why writing for free is wrong (The Atlantic):

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

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

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

Comic Sutra: Big in Bombay (New Republic)

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

Autobiography as public relations (Guardian):

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

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

I love you Suzanne

NATO Base Reykjavik

Just finished scanning a small number of slides from my father in law's collection when he was stationed in Iceland in the mid 1950s.  Those bombs aren't for show.  The jets are F-100 Super Sabre.  The one on the right was shot down in 1968 and the one on the left crashed on landing in 1959.  My research may be unscientific however.

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

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

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

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

• 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo - Good Morning

Somewhere over southern England early in the morning.  Just passed 75,000 actual miles flown for 2013 and still going strong; most fun in years.

Wiley(ie) Beyond Print

Last week at the Frankfurt bookfair sponsored Contec digital conference, John Wiley & Sons CEO Steve Smith made it clear that not only is Wiley moving aggressively into digital content but the company is also moving beyond traditional educational publishing into services and data products. Smith mentioned the recent Wiley acquisition of education services provider Daltek and, in the process, he displayed and discussed a much expanded value chain that describes the current Wiley business.


Following the model of industry leader Pearson, Wiley is in the process of transforming its' business and this change has fundamental implications for the company. As Smith stated, "The old model with students was rather ephemeral and quick: they came in, we sold them a book. Now we are developing ongoing relationships with students that will last four years or more." Not only is this changing Wiley's approach to its' market but their total market opportunity is also growing.  This business strategy is a model we have seen content companies like Pearson and Lexis Nexis follow very successfully over the past ten years. Smith admitted during his speech that the market growth expectations for their new value chain are 'explosive' and far above the financial limitations which their traditional library market imposes on them.


In describing the strategy behind how Wiley is reinventing themselves he admitted that while the company is now digitally based, if they exited this phase of their reinvention as "a 100% digital publishing company, that is still not enough. We need to develop products and services that go beyond digital.”


As he outlined his company's tactics they seemed to fall into three focus areas: process, network and corporate development.


From a process stand point the company will need to,

• go deeper into the communities served to gain a deep knowledge of workflows
• invest in new solutions to solve pain points
• evolve content to include semantic enrichment and other enhancements facilitated by the web and social networking
• include a broader community of researchers, scientists, teachers, etc. and enable solutions for more job and task functions and purposes
• a focus on outcomes that can be proven to work as a result of the Wiley products and services

Attributing the benefits of a network and community approach to their community the company will:

• establish a mechanism for finding researchers, experts, authors and other key participants
• develop more education solutions for teachers and students
• leverage strengths and assets - particularly their content strengths - that support collaboration and community
• expand knowledge and links with communities served and support the development of creativity and innovation in communities

From a corporate development perspective, Smith admitted that the company needed to acquire companies in order to support the value chain proposition he described.  Notably, he spoke about the Daltek acquisition and how that business had filled out his value chain beyond the capabilities of the traditional Wiley business.  Wiley he said, would always be looking for "companies that can accelerate our transformation".

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 41): Frankfurt Sessions, Libraries and Offsite Storage, State of Publishing from New Republic + More

Publisher's Weekly round-up of some of the early educational sessions at Frankfurt last week including mine on responsive web design. (PW)

Uncertainty is one big obstacle holding publishers back from outsourcing their distribution, observes CEO Gareth Cuddy of ePubDirect. “As the marketplace shifts, margins are squeezed on print, and industry reports showing e-book prices for bestsellers continue to average between $2.99 and $7.99, publishers are cautious about entering the e-book market. But distribution services such as ePubDirect not only share the digital publishing expertise but also allow publishers to access new markets, grow sales internationally and ultimately sell more books.”

And publishers do have a much stronger appetite to sell content directly to consumers nowadays, says executive director of publishing services Walter Walker of code-Mantra, attributing it “to either the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision on e-book price-fixing or simply the astonishing level of activities in the e-book retail business. But the XML-first mandate is one that many publishers find intimidating, and our goal is to use highly efficient plug-ins and templates at the prepress stage without disrupting the traditional Word-to-InDesign authoring environment.”

From the ALPSP blog an excellent set of notes from my session (thanks!)

It's complicated. Apple iOS has 6 different size/resolution combinations. HTC has 12. Even within these platforms there is significant deviation. And it is getting more complicated with the introduction of Microsoft and Asus tablets.
Cairn's advice on how to do RWD right starts with understanding your users and how they access and use your content. Prioritise your content based on the above, then build a site architecture that answers to these priorities. Design a site that provides content for users across device-types and contexts, with grids and typography and images that adapt.
What is responsive web design? It is where you maintain one website that services all devices and screen sizes. It provides complete support for all web pages and features, regardless of the device or screen size. And it enables you to implement changes across all devices.

And this one from the Frankfurt Bookfair blog:

As Bruce Lee said, “when you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.” So should be your online strategy…or so Michael Cairns, COO, Online Division at Publishing Technology, says.

In the “Pixel Imperfect: Serving an Online Audience with Responsive Content” presentation at CONTEC Frankfurt today, Cairns and Michael Kowalski, Founder, Contentment, discussed the need for publishers (both book and magazine) to create mobile-enabled content for the rising mobile reader. As one of those readers who is reading increasingly on my phone and less on my computer, tablet, or ereader, I appreciated that someone was trying to figure out something to fix all of those books, sites, and magazines I so love so I can read them on the go and not fumble through poorly-converted web-focused content.

From Eoin Purcell on the fair itself: (Blog)

If I was to put my finger on one key root cause though, I think that what’s going on is that publishers have, as an industry, come to terms with the fact that they are in the midst of a great disruption, one that they cannot individually predict the long term outcome of (and Michael Bhaskar spoke eloquently on this on Wednesday). There is general acceptance too that while individual companies retain huge power over their own destinies, the technology giants who have moved heavily into the content and media space, the rise of self-publishing and the general shift of digital distribution means that publishers are no longer the only forces in publishing and that increasingly they accept that they are not even the preeminent force in publishing.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, as people return from summer vacation perhaps they are finding their libraries significantly changed. This is not a new story:

Talk of digital revolutions and bookless libraries notwithstanding, academic libraries around the country are feeling the squeeze as legacy collections outgrow shelves, and shelves give way to learning commons and shared study areas. Those twin pressure points—too many print books plus new demands on library real estate—have spurred academic libraries to try a set of state and regional experiments to free up library space to suit modern learning styles and still make sure that somebody, somewhere, hangs onto books that make up part of the intellectual record, even if those books haven't circulated in years.

For such experiments to succeed, librarians say, they should build off existing relationships among libraries, and they should draw on solid data—on persuasive and detailed analyses of what's in a collection and how it's used and whether those books are available somewhere else. The streamlining of collections has to be handled in a way that doesn't enrage faculty members who still cherish access to physical books. Many disciplines, especially the sciences, favor electronic resources, but print still holds powerful appeal for a lot of scholars

(No mention of NY public library)

Books Don’t Want to Be Free How publishing escaped the cruel fate of other culture industries from the New Republic.

Step back and look at books in a wider context, though, and the picture changes. If you’re in the business of selling journalism, moving images, or music, you have seen your work stripped of value by the digital revolution. Translate anything into ones and zeroes, and it gets easier to steal and harder to sell at a sustainable price. Yet people remain willing to fork over a decent sum for books, whether in print or in electronic form. “I can buy songs for 99 cents, I can read most newspapers for free, I can rent a $100 million movie tonight for $2.99,” Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s vice president of Kindle content, told me in January. “Paying $9.99 for a best-selling book—paying $10 for bits?—is in many respects a very strong accomplishment for the business.” At the individual level, everyone in the trade—whether executive, editor, agent, author, or bookseller—faces threats to his or her livelihood: self-publishing, mergers and “efficiencies,” and, yes, the suspicious motives of Amazon executives. But the book itself is hanging on and even thriving.

From Twitter
Frankfurt Session on "What is a publisher" (#pubnow)
Book market gains new momentum http://dw.de/p/19w2r
Frankfurt Contec twitter feed (#contec13)

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

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

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

What the magazine got wrong: Guardian

Favorite fonts from the Observer a pictorial:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 39) Debrett Manners, ALPSP Journals report, Textbook pricing, K-12 Education + More

News that publisher Debretts is to offer the socially inept life skills for surviving in the modern office had more than a few recalling the famous job interview scene from Trainspotting.  How likely the average new hire is going to be able to scrape together £1,000 remains to be seen.  From The Guardian. 

They are not ignoring new technology, and will offer guidance on "netiquette": when to put a smiley face or kisses on an email (never in the workplace) and why you should never text the boss unless they have texted you first. Debrett's developed its programme on "social intelligence" for under-30s after a survey of business leaders threw up some serious issues around young people entering the modern workplace.  "Manners, social intelligence, personal presentation and impact can be as important as academic qualifications," says Debrett's. "With so much focus on exam results and the hectic informality of modern family life and technology, social graces can be a casualty."
Along with a slew of other surveys, including one by YouGov today which says that half of employers find graduates they are employing are not "work ready", the Debrett's research flags up rising concerns among business people about the employability of graduates and school leavers who have been tested to the maximum academically, but have no notion of what to expect from a job. The accusation is that schools and universities are so focused on academic targets that they are failing to produce rounded graduates. Instead they are turning out young people who are shy and awkward after spending all their time on the internet or mobiles, who lack the ability to spell or write a letter, and are unable to get through a day without regular online checks on what their friends are up to.

Personally, I could suggest one or two of my past managers for training (or brainwashing depending on your view) and they would need suggesting since they live in complete ignorance of their appalling behavior.  (that's enough -ed).   Coincidentally, the NYT published an opinion piece over the weekend that also touches on office behavior:

As the book and her columns make clear, open-plan offices, designed in the name of cutting costs and encouraging collaboration, have become dens of intense irritation. Walls and doors can no longer protect workers from unwanted visits, along with various odors, shouts, coughs, sneezes, popping of gum, belches and spitting. It’s also clear that many employees are uncertain where their professional life ends and their personal life begins — a confusion abetted by technology that enables them to take their work wherever they go, and to conduct personal business while at work.

In an interview, Ms. Martin deplored the “pseudosocial events” that many businesses arrange in the name of teamwork. You should be collegial with co-workers, “but they’re not friends,” she said. If you genuinely become friends with someone in the office, by all means spend time with them, she said. But too many managers are dragging entire groups to retreats, dinners and after-work drinks, and to events where some people mistakenly think they should be able to behave just as they would at a normal party, she said. Ms. Martin suggests that workers who dread attending social events try to bow out by saying that they have work to do. 

In my experience no belching and spitting but lots and lots of coughing fits.  Priceless.

And from the movie Trainspotting: How to interview for a job (not):

ALPSP has released a report on academic journal publishers' policies and practices in online publishing.  This international survey, the fourth in this research series from ALPSP, was undertaken to establish current scholarly publishing practices and assess changes in practice and policy across the industry. More than 300 publishers took part, including more than 180 small publishers (ie 1 - 10 titles). For the first time, the ALPSP survey included societies who have outsourced their publications to a publishing partner.

Time for classes to start which means articles about high textbook prices.  This time from The Times Higher Education which quotes an unlikely American Enterprise Institute study on the price of textbooks.   The article purports to suggest that digital textbook use is increasing because of high pricing but also notes that students prefer print overwhelmingly.

For one thing, staff and students have been surprisingly reluctant to abandon print.
Nearly 80 per cent of students surveyed by the National Association of College Stores say they prefer print to e-books, and academics assign digital texts in only 14 per cent of courses.  In focus groups conducted by the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, faculty said they were concerned about whether the authors of OER textbooks were adequately paid, whether the quality was sufficient and whether the content was objective. OER textbooks do remain limited in scope and number. OpenStax, supported by grants from sources including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provides titles for just five introductory courses.  Nevertheless, OpenStax estimates that it will save 40,000 students a collective $3.7 million this year, or an average of $92.50 per student.

A better article about the digital transformation in education publishing comes from Education Week which profiles the approaches taken by the big three K-12 education publishers.

Mary Jane Tappen, the deputy chancellor for curriculum, instruction, and student services for the Florida Department of Education, says that as districts in her state transition to digital curricula, schools want to pull the very best content from multiple sources—some they might buy, the rest might be free.
"We're moving away from one book per content area per grade per student," she says. With digital capabilities already in development, Florida will be able to track what pieces of content are the most successful with students. Tools providing a rating for pieces of digital content will be visible on each teacher's desktop, allowing the teacher to sort the material by standard and the best rating.
...
Tammy McGraw, the director of educational technology for the Virginia Department of Education, says one way for big textbook publishers to figure out what K-12 educators want and need is to work more closely with teachers and administrators.
Several years ago, as iPads were just starting to be used in schools, McGraw says, she approached the major publishers and asked them to think about how to deliver textbooks through a browser. Some publishers ended up partnering with the Virginia department to convert their print textbooks to apps, and both educators and publishers learned a lot about what students liked and didn't, says McGraw, and about the difficulties in digitizing print textbooks.  Students, for example, didn't like to use the browser on the iPad—they wanted the textbook to be accessible using an app. Students liked the interactive media and the electronic note-taking and highlighting features, and they loved to quiz themselves and do assessments on the fly. Many of those features ultimately became integrated into the products offered by the publishers, according to Tammy McGraw.

 From Twitter this week:

Newest Bond author: it's not just casual sex. What 007 wants is a relationship Guardian
Robert Harris on An Officer and a Spy: 'No desire to be taken seriously by the literary establishment' Guardian
You can see some odd things at the airport: Suit coat, shorts, black socks, dress shoes. Consultant wears no pants. Instagram Photo

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.