Web Development

Fifty years ago Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase “The Medium is the Message.” What he meant was that the medium on which you receive content significantly influences your perception of the message. This is a point that is often missed in commentary about the rise of the e-book. A tablet is a fundamentally different medium than a paper book and requires a different approach.

First, a little context. The popular electronic reader, the Kindle, was introduced less than six years ago. Yet adult e-book sales are already outpacing adult hardcover sales.

It's hard to believe it's already/only been three years since the iPad descended from the heavens Apple introduced it's category defining iPad. On the one hand, it seems like only yesterday. On the other hand, for those of us with tablet computers of one stripe or another, it's hard to imagine life before our new constant companions. 

There's a great piece on Ars Technica today in which its editors reflect on the device, their initial impressions and its impact on their lives since.

I recall my own pre-iPad days as ones of awkwardly balancing a MacBook on my knees or an ottoman while doing my couch computing, or lugging it to the kitchen—and exposing it to risk of spills, splatters and crashes to the floor—while cooking. I resisted forking over the big bucks for a long time until I had the opportunity to buy one, and I was hooked, springing for the then-New iPad (aka iPad 3). Now I ponder not only when I should upgrade, but whether one tablet is enough. With the new Nexus 7 on the way, I have a feeling I'll be dipping into the 7-inch form factor soon enough.

Farmington Hills, Mich., April 2, 2013 — Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced plans to unify, over the coming years, its extensive digital humanities collections on one state-of-the-art platform, creating the world’s largest online curated primary source and literary collection. The new research experience, Artemis, named for the Greek goddess who symbolizes new ideas, discovery, power and “the hunt,” will enable researchers to make connections and realize relationships among content that has never before been possible.

This webinar explores market transformation across book publishing segments and the benefits of leveraging the latest technologies.

Arrived in Austin late Saturday night in time for a beautiful, noisy thunderstorm—a sparkling deluge that soaked the parched earth and was welcomed joyously by the grateful natives. It left behind a clear blue sky and a cheerful sun blazing benignly over all these tens of thousands of folks who have flocked to town to grab and probe at the newest and coolest, to wait in line and dash from session to session, to be in the know and be able to say we heard it here first and then to go back to their respective somewheres enriched and inspired.

Truly it is too much to take in at once.

"I've been waiting my whole career to sell something like this," says Mitchell Davis of BiblioBoard, a platform that helps libraries and institutions create and sell elegant multimedia anthologies and "exhibits" from their catalogs and collections.

Davis is a veteran of Amazon: He sold his first company, Book Surge, an integrated publishing and print-on-demand platform, to the Seattle etailer in 2005 and then went to work for them. In 2007, says Davis, the original founders of Book Surge got back together in their hometown of Chareston, S.C., to start BiblioLabs with the focus of reducing the costs of making historical books available via POD.

"We didn't do much with digital in the early days," says Davis, "because most of the devices were E Ink and we just didn't think they would do justice to historical artifacts. The iPad changed all of that."

The internet changed reading. It was always possible, with enough work, to track down the names and places in a piece of text or to understand the cultural references being made. But easy access to information has lowered the bar dramatically. In a 2008 interview, author William Gibson referred to the "Google novel aura," in which authors expect their work to be looked up online: "It's sort of like there's this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but…"

As an educator, I bristle at the notion that everything has to be fun. I do try and make my classes as engaging and ‘fun’ as I can, but sometimes one does just have to knuckle down and do something less-fun but important. But then I came across a book—oriented to adults—that unwittingly employs the ‘gamification’ strategy, and now I’m wondering if there might be more to this idea than I thought.

If you're a college student, you're probably familiar with this kind of math question:

If a 16GB Wifi-only iPad costs $500, and a student spends $1,000 per year on printed textbooks while recouping 16 percent on the sellback, and an e-textbook costs 60 percent less than a printed textbook but lacks sellback, and only 32 percent of a college's textbooks are e-textbooks, how long before the iPad pays for itself?

Answer: It'll take you around three-and-a-half years to recoup the cost of the iPad solely from e-textbook savings.

Over the last two week, Book Business ran the proverbial gauntlet of publishing industry trade shows, starting withe the Book Industry Study Group's Making Information Pay For Higher Ed on Thu., Feb. 7, at the Yale Club, then hitting the Book^2 Camp "unconference" on Sun., Feb. 10, at Workman Publishing, and, on Wed., Feb. 13, catching a day of O'Reilly's Tools of Change at the Marriott Marquis.

We’ll be running through them one by one this week. First up: BISG: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing

The Book Industry Study Group’s annual Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing was a morning jam-packed with great information and expansive ideas on the state of higher ed publishing and what it might look like in the near to distant future.

The four terms of the day:
Shadow Library
Roll Your Own
MOOC
Autodidact