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
8
Over Niagara in an eBook
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment
The ineffable Shatzkin reports (www.idealog.com/blog) this week on an innocent story with dramatic implications. It seems from his calculations from Hachette UK releases that if eBook sales are indeed now 25% of total sales (and 30% for fiction), then over 50% of sales in all are “online” (print and eBook), and for “some genres and authors, close to two-thirds”. Given that 80% of online in any format in the UK is Amazon, the book trade have acquired an intermediary who can, at any point, tilt the table with offers to authors that no other player can match. In short, the rules of the game can now change radically, the inflection point has been reached, and the “over Niagara in a barrel” experience of the music industry is about to be repeated. So let me, amidst the angst and heartbreak, the invocations of Longman in the 1720s or Murray 1 in the 1820s, the competition law actions, the desire to retain territoriality in a global market and all the other things which will inevitably follow, issue a plea for one small concession? When we have thrown out baby, bathwater and all, can we please throw out the ancient, encrusted law of Copyright as well, and then start over?
Its not, of course, that I despise Intellectual Property. Far from it. Intellectual ownership is hugely important and should be respected at all costs. The ability of individuals to ensure that their creativity is recognized and acknowledged is of paramount importance in a society where intellectual creativity has to be honoured and represents the only we have of saving ourselves – from ourselves. Nor do I baulk for a moment at the thought that individual creators, and their licensed intermediaries, should be able to make investments in the processes by which ideas and entertainment and education are released into society, and seek a good return on those investments. In short, the activity of the book trade, and every other IP based industry, could go on as it is for ever and I would not turn a hair. True, Book publishers (I was one for 20 years) have mostly been rascals, untrained for anything but with a nose for the money. Byron had it about right when he asserted to Murray that Barabbas was the first publisher. His faith in this would have been confirmed when his publisher burnt his memoirs to protect the Byron brand. Allen Lane and Jonathan Cape were sublime marketeers and I suspect that the editors who added lustre to the trade, like Max Perkins or Dick Seaver, realised a lot less out of it in terms of capital accumulation. Today it is a business of Super Corporations, and they must come to terms with Amazon in their own and various ways. Small publishing, the work of individuals to culture and develop excellence in unlit places, will flourish as honestly in the low cost start-up environment of the web as it always has elsewhere.
I know that the leadership of the publishing industry globally fear that Copyright is being eroded at every point. Trade associations reach for the adjectives to tell governments how vital it is to protect the existing framework of law. Fair Use must be protected – or rejected – according to where you live in the world. Educational re-use is a string back of exceptions and deceptions which enable publishers, librarians and teachers to persuade themselves that they have got the best of the deal in subclause 3(e) and thereby assured the protection of life on Earth for another generation. Meanwhile, copyright breach is an unpunished, apparently victimless crime, as sinless as speeding, whose conscious abusers claim that they are “liberating knowledge” while 90% of their brethren do not even know or realise what they are doing when streaming a downloaded book. Apparently victimless, but actually the whole system must be lubricated with cash to make it work, and the victims threatened are of course users themselves.
So, why don’t we step back from “Copyright”, desert the word with all those archaic suggestions of unfairness to learners or the poor, cease to talk about “monopoly” rights and thus invite the enmity of every competition lawyer on the planet, and begin in an new place with a new approach matched by a new language. In my own years of lobbying the European Commission, as junior delegate and bag carrier to the great Charles Clark, my Leader produced the new line in argument “The answer to the Machine must lie in the Machine”. How true, but so far we have not produced an answer half worthy of the Machine. Surely, in a machine age, where every network connection of any sort is known to the network, and every one of us is known as a user (and the National Security Agency plus GCHQ know what we use) we cannot be very far away a universal licensing regime? One that existed at several levels, to accommodate one to one, one to many, many to many forms of licensing. The latter may even be a levy on broadband or a network licensing scheme. Then we could move to global licensing organizations with real clout collecting funds which really were worthwhile to those whose Outed content is so vital to the remashing of information and content and data into new service environments. Which is how the internet operates.
But inside the Internet we are still trying to operate the Book Trade as if the Internet did not exist. Something here has to give. At a guess, at this moment, it will not be Amazon.
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