Jul

24

Royal Line Diluted Online

Filed Under B2B, Cengage, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Pearson, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

In a land where one cannot move for Royal baby hysteria, I seem to have found myself reading a great many “Death of the Textbook” stories in the past week. A good series from the Economist on the inexorable rise of educational technologies (29 June 2013), a weak and woolly piece from Reuters, and an endless supply of “MOOCs are good for you” announcements. As a textbook publisher and author (1967- 1979) I admit to a nostalgia for a market even then enthralled with the lore of its own heritage. In a swoop on Royal branding that would never be tolerated today, I have before me, as I write this, copies of the Nelson New Royal Primers and the Nelson Royal Readers, published by Thomas Nelson and Sons in Edinburgh, and carrying, without any authority that I can detect, the Royal coat of arms. These books were published to catch the popular enthusiasm derived from the 1870 Education Act. I was still, incredibly enough, reprinting them in the 1960s. I doubt that the new-born Prince of the House of Windsor will be brought up upon them, though they do describe a world closer to his than ours. As his father says to little Willie in Royal Readers 3 “I want you, my boy, to do your duty in the station, whatever it may be, to which it will please God to call you , and not to set your heart on any mere earthly success…”.

Now the longevity of the textbook – an invention really of the 1840s unless you see it as a lineal descendant of the chapbook – is seriously called into question. Reuters quote surveys that indicate student conservatism around change, and indicate that the real pressure is pricing (http://www.euronews.com/business-newswires). Other surveys seem to show a real fear of buying into the digital and then not having access to downloads after upgrading devices (sounds like a case for the Personal Cloud Library!). All seem agreed that print pricing has lost touch with student buying power, even in learning environments in Europe where the textbook is more peripheral to the whole learning experience. But particularly striking was a survey conducted for BISG by Bowker (Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education Vol 3, Part 2) (http://www.bisg.org/news-5-847-press-release-now-available-student-attitudes-toward-content-in-higher-education-volume-3.php). Here we learn that in the last two years students who admit to downloading course content from unauthorized websites has risen from 20% of students interviewed to 34%, and that those who admitted scanning or photocopying textbook materials rose from 21% to 31%. Two years, and these are only those who admit to this allegedly victimless crime. In another two years we shall be beyond 50% on both counts. And, despite valiant efforts like CourseSmart, few people seem to see this as a slow motion car crash. We will not fix the textbook, in print or digitally, so where do we go now?

Textbook publishers have been politely snooty about teaching resource exchange sites for years. Even when www.teacherspayteachers.com announced that a teacher member had earned a million dollars from lesson plan sales this was regarded as a strictly limited application, and certainly confined to k-12. When Nelson’s Royal Readers were youngsters so was the Times Educational Supplement, and in its re-incarnation as TES Connect (www.tesconnect.com) is showing every sign of providing the transformative power which will enable it to succeed while textbook publishers, migrating digitally, fail. The launch of TES Australia this week comes hard on the development of TES India, and the launch in the US of www.sharemylesson.com with the American Federation of Teachers. The service based from the UK has 2.5m registered users and claims to connect 52 m teachers from over 200 countries downloading 3.6 m resources a week from a store of material that now tops 636 thousand. Last month TPG bought this property from Charterhouse for £400m ($600m). Reflect that McGraw Hill sold this year to Apollo for $2.4 billion. Add in the fact that the last net profit figure anyone ever saw on TSL, the parent of TES Connect, was £45m, and you have a picture of the way in which textbook assets are being depreciated. Is TSL worth 25% of McGraw Hill Education? Almost certainly not, but at least TPG have an asset that they can exit to a distressed ex-textbook publisher in due course (though not Pearson, who have effectively made their own exit through diversification.

So why are there no real community networks in higher education? There seem to be a hundred reasons, but the one that interests me is the MOOC argument. Perhaps indeed Coursera will turn into the community resource, but at present the course competition is what drives the market. I note this week that I can now do a Masters in Computer Science from Georgia Tech for $6600, with all learning materials attached. The way for publishers to survive in this market is surely to move beyond personalized publishing (light adaptation of courseware for particular teachers or institutions) towards making all of their material available as downloadable learning objects, for inclusion in MOOCs and elsewhere. And concentrating on areas where they have subject/author brand strengths to build MOOC inclusive communities there. But nobody wants to do this for fear of disembowelling the existing business model. In fact, come to think of it, its only when we are truly desperate, like TES when its recruitment advertising markets fell over in the recession, that we have the courage to stop “migrating” and start “transforming”.

Jul

19

Hi! Here is Publishing!

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, internet, mobile content, Publishing, social media, STM, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment

Four minutes ago, Lauren was in the Netherlands on the way to the UK (https://sayhi.co/places/belgium/wetteren). And she is using a new publishing platform called Hi. It may not be the right service in the right vein, but here is as good a place as any to talk about the creative use of the network as a publishing medium. Hi is defined with an Italo Calvino quote: “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corner of the street, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities. It enables you to think in two modes, using your smartphone and device to create and extend records of what you have just noticed. The moment sketch is a record in three parts – 20 words, a geolocation and a photo. Then add a sketch (nice beta interface for those like me who think they cannot sketch). Polish it up as an Extended moment, then place it in your Profile. Now sit back and imagine what this tessellated mosaic of sketches and moments will look like when you search on a place, reveal the moments of others, catch a glimpse of realities never before revealed. Here then is a form of travel writing, and a form of poetry, and a form of network expression, and it could be elements of networked fiction. Above all, it is individual expression in a collaborative context. Is it finished? No, it has hardly started and will never finish. But it is art. Or, if you insist, Art.

So does it take us past Twitter? No, it is completely different. This is observation of the mundane as much as the unique. And it is a symptom as much as an answer. It reminds us that the future of entertainment in the network may not be about powerful intermediaries orchestrating things for us, but new tools and platforms allowing us to express ourselves in ways previously impossible. Behind me is a shelf of 32 scrapbooks, in which, for some forty years, I have pasted pictures of houses, paintings, cathedrals and archaeological sites encountered on travels. Apart from the fact that they were attacked by mice one hard winter a few years ago, they have served me well – but how much better if I could now savour them as moments, and easily share them with others. In a recent article on “Big Data” I found the horrifying confession from Netflix that they used advanced data analytics to chart their entry into the production marketplace. Using these technologies, they claimed, allowed them to hone their decision making and allowed them to pick House of Cards as their launch production, bringing 2 million new subscribers in its wake. This is the trouble with success – it brings failure in its wake. Applying data analysis in this way will only ever show what people liked yesterday, and demonstrate that what people say that will like can be in actuality very unstrung from what they eventually discover they do like. The key to data analysis is finding out what it all means. The story of art, on the other hand, is exploring the scope of human expression.

We all know that some things go down well. Narrative works on many different levels. So do images, and location (or do I mean locale?). Many of the services that we create already have precious elements of all of these things. Look at www.fancy.com, which raised over $50 million in second tier funding last week. For luxury goods shoppers, this is almost an art form. It lets them dream aloud, then tells them where its at and what it costs Then look at Relationship Science (wwww.relsci.com), which raised $30 million last month. By interconnecting financiers and managers and ideas users build and explore future business development and funding scenarios – or did I mean to say narratives? So we know that life is art and art is life? So why, if we are so prepared to pursue life in new forms in business or shopping, are we so dubious about moving away from the formats of the Gutenberg world when we engage with the world of publishing. Only a few weeks ago I sat calm and still (disguising inner torment) while the lady who heads a major book publisher here explained to me and the audience that I was addressing that she regarded my criticism of publishers as wrong-headed; her company was a very successful example of digital publishing, since 25% of her sales now came from eBooks.

Fortunately an astute chairman directed us away from confrontation. For me, format shifting is simply moving deckchairs on the digital Titanic. And since the roles of publishers in B2B or STM have changed radically as they encounter the workflow issues of end-users, move away from intermediaries, and become investors in tools and platforms, so it will predictably be for consumer publishers. They will seek to manage the platforms of creativity, like Hi, not the outputs. There will be less of them, and so there should be. What is the point of a world where everyone is his own publisher if someone is trying to own everything?

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