Responsive Web Design Session - CONTEC Frankfurt Bookfair

Slide 1: Good Morning and welcome to this session on Responsive Web Design at Contec Frankfurt. I am Michael Cairns from Information Media Partners and I am joined by Michael Kowalski from web consulting firm Contentment. We are going to speak to you today about Responsive Web design (RWD) – what it is, how it works and why you should consider RWD as your method of dealing with an ever changing and growing set of screen sizes and devices. Essentially, as a content owner and distributor you will want to provide your customers and clients with a consistent and optimized view of the material you put in front of them. You don’t want to make compromises and we will show you how having a RWD strategy can help you meet your client expectations and enhance the user experience.

(Click on the cover to see the entire presentation on

Responsive Web Design Workshop, Frankfurt Bookfair 2013 from Michael Cairns

Slide 2: These are contact details for each of us and Michael K will introduce himself in a few minutes.

Michael Cairns, Managing Partner - Information Media Partners.  michael.cairns@infomediapartners.com
Michael Kowalski (Contentment) - Founder at Contentment
michael@getcontentment.com

I am going to provide an overview of RWD and Michael K will then give some real life and practical suggestions that come from his experience in working with a variety of clients on a consultative basis

Slide 3: Over the past five years (and possibly longer) there has been a constant flow of articles and blog posts about RWD but, it is really only in the past two years or so that RWD has come into the mainstream where, for example, we are seeing panel discussions at scholarly publishing conferences discussing RWD. Incidentally, most of this presentation was given at the SSP winter conference in San Francisco back in May by my colleague Toby Plewak who deserves credit.

For anyone in the audience who wants more information about RWD simply Google the term and you will find yards of material. It is quite likely that the first item returned will be something by Ethan Marcotte and his stuff on RWD is really worth reading. I read this article he wrote in 2010 again last night as a refresher and his article covers much of what we are discussing today.

For those who have some idea what RWD is all about, you will also know that the concept isn’t really a new idea, but it has gained steam recently due to the proliferation of these newer technologies and solutions such as HTML 5, CSS 3 and media queries. Michael K will speak to these in a few minutes.

Slide 4: As I noted, the proliferation of devices is probably driving your design staff crazy since they fight every day to make your content look perfect on every conceivable new device. There is a diminishing return to this effort; moreover it is unlikely to be sustainable. So here is a quote from Jeffrey Veen at Adobe who believes that RWD is the way of the future – at least for the next ten years.

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows.

Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.”

- Jeffrey VeenVice President, Products at Adobe

Slide 5: So what are we comparing when we speak of content delivered using the concepts of RWD versus the older traditional, fixed-width websites. These sites are rigid, inflexible and render legibly only when viewed at full-size on a desktop browser. They are designed to work in a single context and once we begin to interact with them outside of the context they were built for – namely sitting at a PC or full-screen laptop, they start to give us trouble.

We suggest that they represent old thinking: That the desk-top was going to be the primary – perhaps the only – way we would be consuming content. This assumption is obviously not the case.

Traditional websites will satisfy a designer’s impulse for control, predictability and order in a design however, from a usability perspective they fail on many levels for today’s typical content consumer.

Slide 6: Content access issues abound and we’ve all been there. Perhaps we find ourselves using a mobile device to access content we normally interact with on the desk top. This is a changing use pattern we are seeing more and more frequently. Your experience will instantly become confusing, annoying and frustrating when you find you can’t access the content as you would expect. You will be left to wonder why that should be the case. Why should my device or point of access matter?

Once we squish a website like this it into a small-screen device finding content becomes a needle-in-a-haystack sort of exercise: we are forced to zoom, pinch, scroll up, down, left and right to find or view what we are looking for. Navigation is nearly impossible and a finger sometimes needs to be as pointy as a sewing needle to tap a link or a button. The best/worst examples of this can be wifi access points where you are left to find the “Get on Line” button on your iPhone when it is so small it looks like a single solid line.

In short, a fixed-width website becomes virtually unusable as screens get smaller and our content becomes harder to access, navigate and interact with.

We could even end up having a Hugh Grant moment if we become too stressed out about this inconvenient experience. For those who remember his frequent refrain during that movie will know what I am talking about.

We will talk a little today about “context” and your user because it is important to understand where and how your target users interact most with your content. A nurse on station will have an entirely different requirement for access and use than perhaps a paramedic. The content they require may be the same but the ‘context’ the user finds themselves could be vastly different. A paramedic under stress is not going to want to zoom and pinch to determine what type of diagnosis to make.
Understanding how your customers access and use your content is an important first step in defining your RWD strategy.

Knowing whether they are at a funeral a wedding or some other event could prevent a melt down.

Slide 7: So this is where RWD comes in.

The Web is by nature a dynamic, flexible medium, and many people have suggested that RWD is the next natural phase of its evolution. In the past, designers and their clients spent huge amounts of effort trying to attain print-like pixel-perfection in their designs, like print projects, they attempted to make their websites look the same across the then-limited amount of available devices, resolutions, browsers and screen-sizes. But those days are over and that type of activity will begin to look anachronistic. Responsive design is a digression from this type of thinking. It forces us to think bigger, to put our USERS, our CONTENT and the Way(s) users access that content – that is CONTEXT at the CENTER of the design process.

RWD forces us to design SYSTEMS rather than just static INTERFACES - systems that can maintain the best possible access to, and presentation of, our content regardless of the device or screen-size.

Even the screen you are viewing this presentation on could legitimately be considered a ‘device’ screen and that is certainly true of television screens not just computers and mobile devices.

Slide 8: By now you should have a sense of what RWD is, but here is a specific example. The Boston Globe has been one of the pioneers in RWD and we can see how this works by viewing the Globe site using a traditional web browser. If you slowly reduce the browser window by pulling it slowly from the right edge to the center you can see at a certain point the content and design moves and changes. Content is stacked, menus are consolidated and made compact, images are resized, etc.

This process uses media queries to ‘sniff’ your browser and render the Globe content to match the device you are using. Media Queries are little bits of code that measure the width of the given screen and tell the browser how to adjust the size, placement and hierarchy of a given page’s elements. Using the principals of RWD, content is optimized based on the device you are using. RWD is a flexible, grid-based layout that expands and contracts based on the size of a given device’s screen and it uses flexible images, scalable typography and media that changes size when a different screen size is used. For example, going from an iPad to an iPhone.

Slide 9: Other examples of RWD sites are these here but I am sure you will find more on your own.

· www.ft.com
· Bostonglobe.com
· Qz.com
· Mashable.com

Slide 10: If providing a consistent optimized experience for our content users isn’t sufficient reason then consider that Google favors this approach. Google likes to access one url for site content rather than multiple urls that can exist when publishers create mobile specific versions of their content. Google doesn’t like that approach because they believe it doesn’t create a useful experience for their search customers.

On the Google web site you can also find this definition of RWD:

“Responsive web design is a setup where the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page on the device using media queries.”

One other aspect of RWD is cost and typically (in the absence of doing nothing) the alternative to RWD is often to build apps for the predominant operating systems such as iOS, Andoid, etc. Yet with as many device types as we are currently beginning to see – and we at IngentaConnect see a similar number of devices hitting our site - the ability to keep ahead of this from a development stand point has the potential to become very expensive. RWD may cost more upfront in development but over the long term it will be cheaper than the App approach as the number of device types and the need to tune your apps for every device continues to explode.

Slide 11: I almost omitted this slide, because in 2013 I don’t think I need to convince anyone here at Contac that mobile is important. It just emphasizes our point.

So why is RDW important?

Because more of our users are either going mobile or accessing our content from a variety of devices and they expect the same experience from one device to the other. All of us are consumers of content and we expect the same thing so why would we think our customers are different?

Here are some other stats:

· 2015 – 7.4 Billion wireless devices sold
· 1.2Billion smart phones devices enter the market over the next 5 years
· Enterprise table adoption grows by 50% year

Just this morning I saw this stat from Forrester - 35% of US mobile phone owners have used their device while shopping in a store in the past 6 months – which stat suggests whoever is delivering content to users in retail stores need to increasingly think about “context” as I mentioned earlier.

In this area, you don’t have to look far for some good stats.

Slide 12: So it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that mobile access is on track to outpace desktop access. This chart is reflecting internet usage in general, but we’re all seeing similar trends on our websites at PT. We’ve all known this, and for several years now we’ve all been working frantically to make our content accessible to mobile users.

Slide 13: As an indicator of how complex the delivery of content on mobile devices is becoming this page from the Cornell library website spends and inordinate amount of time and space explaining how to access the myriad offerings from a wide variety of content providers. This section reads like a rogues gallery of mobile publishers’ experiments in mobile strategy – apps for iPhone, apps for tablets, apps for Android, mobile optimized websites. Different hoops to jump through for access – paid apps, free apps that require subscriptions, mobile device pairing, etc. I don’t mean to call anyone out – there are some great apps listed on these pages: But looking at these pages got me thinking about the various problems and limitations in the mobile solutions we’ve tried so far.

Slide 14: Creating an optimized experience for your users could leave you feeling a little confused but for our users the experience is even more disorienting. We’re asking our users to access the same content in very different ways depending on what device they are using to access the internet. This can’t be a sustainable environment for content producers or users.

We suggest that without a RWD solution the typical mobile development process will not support your long term objectives as users change the way they interact with your content but naturally expect a consistent experience.

Slide 15: Without a RWD strategy our only option is to make assumptions and decisions about how to reach (and market to) our readers based on what device they have in their pocket. And as a result we are investing in mobile solutions one platform at a time. This is especially true when we are talking about native apps, but it also applies to many of the mobile sites we’ve built, optimized for one device over another. As I mentioned it becomes an expensive proposition to support all of these different solutions, especially if you’re only doing it to serve your existing subscriber base which means new costs but no new revenue

Slide 16: What typically happens is someone says we need a mobile web site or presence.

So we try mobile websites, and we strip them down and optimize them for the “mobile use case”.

But guess what this is all in vain as a recent survey from IBM suggests. Users want mobile to be *AT LEAST* as good as the desktop website. What a surprise! This is supported by the “View Full Site” button, a recommended best practice for those stripped down mobile websites. We’ve all seen that button, and importantly, most of us have had occasion to click it. At the very least that is a cop out and we can do better.

Think about that paramedic under intense circumstances having to click on that button.

Que the Hugh Grant explosion.

Slide 17: So when you begin to think about how you are going to start a RWD project these are some of the things you should consider versus the app approach.

App Approach:

· Do I want or need to be in the App store?
· Do I rely on or make use of device specific functionality like the camera?
· Do I have a specific functional focus?

RWD:
· Do I have a content focused approach?
· So I need broad device support
· I may have frequent content changes
· I need better discoverability via a 3rd party like Google

Slide 18: It is generally better to be able to start from the smallest access point outwards however most content producers already have a web presence where content access has been thought about in terms of the desktop browser. That said each of these five considerations should be thought about by your team as they think about rolling out a RWD program.

Audience
· Assumptions about your audience: what they do, how they work, what content they use and why, etc.
· The audience “contexts”: where are they using the content, are there constraints?
· Always consider the typical devices, the environmental, user, psychology.

Content & Functionality
· Do you have a content strategy in place?
· Determine whether your internal processes need to change?
· Do your users need interactive content? Multimedia or other content formats?

Capabilities
· How will you support HTML5.0/CSS3/JS expertise
· UI/User design expertise will be required
· Don’t short change testing and user acceptance

Cost – potential to lower cost over time if one code base
· RWD expenses can be up front due to increased complexity and scope but less over time versus
App development

Process
· A mobile first or the smallest screen upwards produces the best overall results: work from smallest out

Slide 19: As I mentioned earlier ‘context’ is really important and you will need to understand how your primary users interact with your content. Some things you will consider:

· How important are specific devices?
· Where are they likely to be using the devices – or do locations define the device.
· What are they doing when the use your content – that is what are their circumstances at the time? For example, are they typically under stress when using your content and is ‘time’ a serious consideration? In some cases potentially a life of death occurrence for a medical information provider.

It is important to understand how your users are using your content in a variety of situations and circumstances. That understanding can help you define your RWD approach.

Slide 20: Which brings us to the other big challenge we’re facing - the pace of change in the device space. It seems to be ever accelerating. There was even word recently that Apple may bring out a larger format iPad next year.

Slide 21 HTC has more than 20 screen sizes. Giving 30% to Apple

Slide 22: We can’t forget Samsung.

Slide 23: It is also important to understand that the lines between devices are blurring. The largest Samsung smartphone is not much smaller than the new iPad Mini. iPad + a keyboard is no smaller than my laptop. This Microsoft Surface tablet ships with a keyboard. This new Asus laptop has a touchscreen interface on the lid.

Slide 24: Publishers don’t need a “mobile” strategy. We need to completely rethink our ONLINE strategy.

Slide 25: A successful RWD project entails many if not most of the same considerations as a more traditional design implementation, and then some.

· Since we are designing for any number of devices, screens and contexts, we need to invest more time and effort up-front, gain a better understanding of our users, the way they access and use our content: what is important to them, and what is less so and use this as our foundation for planning.

· We need to prioritize how accessible our online offerings are based upon this understanding. We need to build flexible navigation structures, accommodating grid patterns, and a user experience that enables the largest amount of people on the broadest possible range of devices to find, explore and consume our content.

· We need to design for fat thumbs, for people standing on a crowded train or lying in bed, for a researcher trying to look up the name of an influential colleague whose name he forgot, who he’s about to meet with in 15 minutes.

· Lastly, we need to test our designs across devices, browsers and screen sizes. Get your site or prototypes into the hands of users and learn from them. Revise, test, repeat. It is an ongoing process.

It is a way to get your content out there, to take it beyond the bounds of the office or university walls.

Slide 26: So what is RDW in summary. It enables content owners to,

· Maintain one website that serves all devices and screen sizes
· Provide complete support for (almost) all website pages and features, regardless of device or screen size.
· Implement changes across all device

Slide 27: Lastly no presentation is complete without a quote from Bruce Lee and this one perfectly describes the RWD concept:

“When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.”

Think about that.

MediaWeek (Vol 6, No 44) Amazon Data Mining and new Literary Journal, McKinsey Business Strategy, Association Publishing + More

Amazon mines data for the next hot hit (WSJ)

Amazon Studios ramped up in earnest this year when the pilots were posted online in April. Users were able to rate pilots with up to five stars and offer comments, just as they would for a book or a George Foreman grill on Amazon’s site.
The pilot data was sliced in various ways—the percentage of five-star ratings, for example. Users also could fill out written surveys. Executives in May reviewed data for each pilot as well as recommendations from Amazon’s programming team.
Traditional networks test shows, too, but on a much smaller scale—typically focus groups of about 50 people. Amazon is testing on a vastly bigger audience and is collecting a range of metrics unique to its service, such as whether members of its Prime service liked particular shows.
...
“Amazon has lowered the barriers of getting a script in the right hands,” he says. “I don’t think anyone else would have bought this.” He feels that portrayals of kids on TV can be too simplistic—they’re often very happy—and he wanted to explore a more complex set of emotions.
Amazon pays $55,000 for scripts submitted online. If the pilot is successful and the series goes into production, creators get up to 5% of merchandising receipts and a per-episode fee of $4,000 for a one-hour show and $2,500 for a half-hour show. Deals set up offline with more established creators vary depending on the writer’s reputation. One uncertainty for Amazon creators is how much revenue potential there is from “back end” proceeds such as syndication and DVD sales.

Amazon has launched a literary magazine:

With so many things competing for your attention in this increasingly digital world, it can be tough to figure out what to read next—especially if you are looking for fresh voices and new perspectives.
That’s why we created Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction from debut writers, English translations of stories from around the world, and poetry. Day One showcases just one writer and poet each week, with issues delivered directly to Kindles or Kindle reading apps. Each issue of Day One includes a letter from the editor, as well as occasional bonus content such as playlists, illustrations, or brief interviews with the authors.
In addition to fresh voices, Day One offers unique visuals—we commission the cover art for each issue from emerging artists and illustrators—and each week subscribers can learn more about the artist as well as the genesis of the cover.

McKinsey Quarterly article on business strategy formulation is interesting (McKinsey)

It’s also easy, though, to go too far in the other direction and make the creation of strategy a rigid, box-checking exercise. Appealing as a formula-driven approach might be, it ignores the truth that strategy creation is a journey—and an inherently messy one at that. Proprietary insights are hard to come by. Shaping keen insights into good strategies requires deep interpersonal engagement and debate from senior executives, as well as the ability to deal with ambiguity in charged and often stressful circumstances. When would-be strategists overlook these dynamics, they cover the essentials in name only. Consequently, they miss opportunities and threats, or create great paper strategies that remain unfinished in practice.
In this article, we’ll outline a middle path—an end-to-end way of thinking that views the creation of strategy as a journey, not a project. This method, developed through our work with some 900 global companies over the past five years, can help senior executives approach strategy in a rigorous and complete way. We’ll also describe some principles that strategists should keep in mind as they use the method to ensure that their strategic-planning processes embody the spirit of debate and engagement, which, in turn, yields inspiration. By better understanding both the method and how to get the most out of it, companies can boost the odds that the strategies they create will beat the market.

Folio Magazine published some results of their annual Association Publishing survey (Folio):

The 2013 association publishing survey breaks down what close to 200 respondents are seeing right now. Some elements, like revenue sources, haven’t changed much over that time. Print advertising is still the dominant source of income, followed by paid subscriptions and online/emedia. Other aspects, like the outlook for the coming year, have shifted dramatically. Respondents didn’t paint a rosy portrait—more than half of the associations surveyed say they’re projecting revenue to stay the same—but it’s a significant improvement from 2009 when 49 percent forecasted declines.  Other changes, like the introduction of digital editions, have altered the association publishing market as well. Five years ago, no one was producing them. Now, two thirds of respondents’ organizations are.

From Twitter this week:

Follett Invests in Campus Quad Mobile Platform for College Campuses -- CHICAGO, Oct. 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- PressRelease
Courier Bringing Custom Textbook Production to Brazil StreetInsider
Netflix Flirts with a New Idea: “Big” Movies at Your House, the Same Day They're in Theatres : AllthingsD
In the New Economy, Everyone Is an Indentured TaskRabbit NYMag 

The Red Door Galway

In the early 1990s, I got to travel to Ireland frequently for work.   This is a house somewhere in Galway where I spent a few weekends exploring.

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