Web Development

The Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture is held every year to raise funds for Adams' favorite causes, Save the Rhino and the Environmental Investigation Agency. Hopefully I don't have to tell you who Adams wasand what he wrote. But you may not know about one of his lesser works, and in my opinion, one of the best popular science books ever written, Last Chance to See. If you haven't yet read it, you'll learn much about endangered species and find your heart being broken even as you laugh out loud.

This week IMS Global released the 2014 Learning Impact Report which summarizes trends we are seeing in the ed tech sector based on the current year and historical winners of IMS's annual Learning Impact competition. Many thanks to those that participated in the competition from around the world and, of course, the evaluators and editorial panel! Ed tech researchers or leaders interested in helping with the Learning Impact work in the future please contact us!

Tools, technologies for publishers looking to enhance their readers’ experience; moving seamlessly between print, mobile, and online.

You don't have to walk very far to bump into someone offering an assessment of "the future of the book". Many of these assessments feel like an extension of the current situation, though a touch more "digital". Relatively few get at "what reading could be."

A think piece by New York Times reporter David Streitfeld provides an example of the "extension" school of thought. Streitfeld has written a number of articles about "Amazon's diminishing discounts", a focus that perhaps inevitably led him to explore "the future of the book".

The publishing value chain has been completely transformed by technology. Speakers discuss some of the biggest issues to consider.

Traditional publishing houses have been forced to catch up to a suddenly mainstream genre once considered purely niche. "Fan fiction has absolutely become part of the fiber of what we publish," Gallery Books publisher Jennifer Bergstrom told The Washington Post in October. "This is changing at a time when traditional publishing needs it most."

Twilight has proved in recent years to be one of the most fertile grounds for fan fiction, begetting not only Fifty Shades, but other trilogies such as The Beautiful Bastard and the Gabriel books, among others.

There are tremendous opportunities for using data to bring greater efficiency and more effective discovery to the research process. Publishing platforms, discovery services, and academic libraries are all in a position to make innovative uses of data that are the by-product of everyday research practices of scholars and students. The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, from anticipatory discovery services like Google Now to integrations of shared and personal collections through browser plugins. As in the consumer space, the implications of changing discovery

Writing is an iterative process. This article, for example, was revised 16 times before publishing. Writers, however, tend not to show their creative process-the final product usually stands on its own, free from markups, strikethroughs or tracked changes. Gregory Mazurek, a computer programmer from New York, has used the tools from his day job to show that the process of writing, in his case a novel, can be just as important as the final product. Mazurek, whose pen name is Gregory Gershwin, is a software engineer at the online retail site Gilt. Like many programmers, Mazurek uses GitHub

My magazine reading is almost exclusively limited to what's offered in my Next Issue subscription. If you're not familiar with Next Issue, it's an all-you-can-read e-zine service featuring more than 140 titles. Sports Illustrated, BusinessWeek and Wired are just a few of the magazines I read in my $14.99/month subscription.

While trade publishing is arguably still in the middle of its first digital disruption, the academic publishing landscape is in a much more mature stage of development. Indeed the biggest disruption to face academic publishing has been the rise of open access journals, which are now considered as part of the "new normal" of the sector. Last year we explored what the post-open access future for academic publishing might look like in two high profile panel