Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

A link to this got pushed to the blog automatically this morning through Stratepedia’s handy Delicious account, but it’s worth another mention: The Virginia Department of Education has begun augmenting traditional textbooks with online materials, giving teachers and students access to cutting edge materials in physics.

As noted in this article from the Washington Post, the traditional textbook publishing cycle is too slow for teachers who want to introduce learners to emerging concepts such as biophysics and nanotechnology. Instead, selected teachers are being asked to write chapters on these topics and put them online for other teachers in the state to use. This concept, called the “flexbook,” is also gaining traction in higher education.

This brings to mind Jim Knight’s current practice of making materials available to coaches in “beta format,” and makes me think about how SIM manuals are currently published. How might the flexbook idea be put to use in the work we do?

Stuck-in-the-Past Va. Physics Texts Getting Online Jolt (Washington Post, Nov. 30, 2008)

Now that I’ve got access to a Kindle, articles like this one are catching my eye: Starting next month, O’Reilly (publishers of technology-oriented books) will make select titles available in digital e-book bundles. While you may not care about picking up the latest edition of Perl in a Nutshell or Unix Power Tools in digital format, this is still worth mentioning because, rather than picking one format and then requiring customers to tether themselves to a device that supports that format, O’Reilly is providing readers a choice to go with PDF, a Kindle-compatible format, a Sony-compatible format, or all of the above. Or you can buy the good ol’ fashioned print edition, same as always.

O’Reilly’s doing a couple of other nice things, too: One, if you buy a PDF book now (the only format they currently support) they’ll give you the bundle when it’s available next month. Two, they’re trusting their customers and not placing digital rights management, or DRM, on the downloaded books. DRM is common with purchased music and video files and is designed to keep people from illegally sharing them, but more often than not causes undue headaches to honest customers.

Anyway, if there’s something for us all to take away from this it’s to think about ways to give consumers–whether they be programmers, teachers, or students–options as to how they may access and use your content.

Here’s another interesting example of publishing on demand: Offbeat Guides is a brand new service promising to deliver travel guides customized to your travel plans. The site asks five questions about your trip, then quickly generates a PDF with general destination information, specific weather and event information for the dates you’re visiting that destination, and other tips based on how you’ve answered the questionnaire. The PDF is available nearly immediately for $9; a printed version can also be had for about $25 plus shipping. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a full rundown of Offbeat Guides, including a video interview with founder Dave Sifry and an example guide for Paris.

Aside from the extreme personalization of the guide, a few things strike me as particularly interesting about this venture. First, the basic model of on-demand publishing, coupled with the methods in which Offbeat Guides acquire and use data, makes for publications that wouldn’t be feasible through traditional publishing. As Mr. Sifry notes, Offbeat Guides is probably offering the first robust travel guide for Carlsbad, California ever (with 30,000 locations available, I wonder if Lawrence made the cut?). Topics seen as unprofitable by traditional publishing houses can make money in this model.

Second, Offbeat Guides is taking advantage of freely available information to create the illustrated event guides, maps, weather forecasts, and other features of each guidebook. In return, they’re developing their own databases of travel-related information and making them freely available to others. Offbeat Guides is quite open in noting that the information in these books is available for free online–they are selling convenience, not information.

Finally, of course, I ask how this concept applies to how the CRL shares information. Could customized SIM manuals, for example, be in our future? Might a teacher or administrator complete a questionnaire and receive a PDF of Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement routines particular to the needs of a classroom or school? Could readers for Fusion or other reading programs be developed based on what a kid says he’s interested in? How else might this concept be used in what we do?

Offbeat Guides aren’t yet available to the public. I’ve registered for an invitation, though (you can, too), and hope to get access before my trip to Chicago in a few weeks. If it works out, I’ll share my experience with the service here.

A couple of months ago I told you about my love for PDF books, and talked a bit about the notion of “beta books,” or pre-release access to the book’s contents in exchange for reader feedback. That example used a PDF generator to send periodic updates to readers. Today I’ll share how one publisher is using a wiki to push transparent authoring even further.

O’Reilly is a publisher of technology-oriented books (they’re the ones who release books about programming languages with animals on the covers). They have their own PDF-based early adoption model for their library, but for the forthcoming iPhone Hacks: Tips & Tools for Unlocking the Power of Your iPhone & iPod Touch, the authors (David Jurick, Adam Stolarz, and Damien Stolarz) are taking a new approach: Direct editing of the book’s contents on a wiki. The result: The contents of iPhone Hacks are available online, as the authors add or edit material. Eventually, the wiki’s contents will become a printed book and available through the usual book-buying channels.

A few things are worth noting about this:

First, editing is closed off–only the authors (or people they allow) may edit pages in the wiki, unlike most traditional wikis. (For what it’s worth, this is the same model we use for the Stratepedia Guidebooks–only Amber and I may edit the pages there.) However, the authors are asking for reader feedback, and collect this feedback via a discussion board for each chapter.

Second, updates are not delivered in a batch, like in the PDF method. Rather, readers are notified of updates page by page, via RSS, so you can be sure you’re referring to the latest version of the material.

Finally, the contents are not free. Well, the first chapter is, but if you want to read beyond that it will cost you $5.99 a month for a subscription. Personally, I prefer the Pragmatic Programmers’ payment setup, in which the reader pays a one-time fee to access the PDF throughout all phases of development, including the final copy. If Jurick, Stolarz, and Stolarz take their time writing iPhone Hacks, this could become a pricey book for early readers.

It may or may not be worth noting that nobody’s contributed to the forums as of yet–whether that’s due to the fact that this wiki is brand new or the pricing model is anybody’s guess. At either rate, this is an interesting new model for transparent authoring and interaction with one’s readership. I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.

One social network I use more than any other, probably, is Flickr, an online service for photo (and, recently, video) sharing. Flickr has thousands, if not millions, of members sharing photos with friends, family, or even the world–for example, I took lots of photos of some of the various national championship-related celebrations this past week, and have made them viewable to anyone who wants to check them out. (Take it from someone who was 2,000 miles away for our previous two trips to the Final Four–Lawrence is an awfully fun place to be when Kansas is still playing basketball in April.)

Today I learned that the Library of Congress has an account on Flickr and is making its vast collection of photography available there. However, the LOC isn’t just putting these photos online to be nice–they need your help. As it states in their user profile, “many of [their] old photos came to [them] with very little description”–so they’re turning to the Flickr community for help, inviting other members to “tag” or keyword photos or offer additional information through Flickr’s comments function. Flickr members have responded–providing keywords, linking to other information about the subject, or just providing encouragement.

I’m sharing this for two reasons: First, I think it’s a really cool idea and an excellent example of crowdsourcing–opening up a problem to a large audience to assign more brains to the task of solving it. Second, the Library of Congress has harnessed the power of an existing tool and an existing network of people for this problem, rather than reinvent the wheel. I’ve done plenty of wheel reinventing in my day, and frankly, there are more fulfilling ways to spend one’s time.

Do you give up control? Probably–but from what I’ve observed in this project (and other, larger crowdsourcing initiatives like Wikipedia) is that altruism tends to outweigh graffiti. And the audience might even be smarter than they’re given credit for.

An interesting new model for publishing went public today. WEBook is an online writing and publishing tool geared toward collaborative authoring–”an online publishing platform that allows writers, editors, reviewers, illustrators and others to join forces to create great works of fiction and non-fiction, thrillers and essays, short stories, children’s books and more.” During its alpha phase of development, 34 writers, editors, and contributors collaborated to produce the thriller Pandora, which is now available for purchase from WEBook’s website. It’s a real, 225-page book complete with ISBN and royalties for contributors. Site members vote on which titles are formally published by WEBook.

Interested in writing a book of your own using WEBook? Join the site for free, then start writing. You can invite colleagues to help author, edit, or review. You can also join in on projects already in progress. This is a brand new service, and I don’t have all the answers on how it works, but it’s a compelling new model for collaborative publishing.

WEBook via Web Worker Daily.

I was preparing to sneak out of here a little early to begin girding myself for tomorrow’s big KU vs. Carolina matchup in the Final Four, but this article popped up in my RSS reader and I felt compelled to share. We’ve been talking over the last couple of weeks about how blogs might be used within CRL. This article describes a case study in which a weekly print newsletter made up of the best posts from a New Zealand-based blog is delivered to 6,500 mailboxes. Readership of the blog grew to about 6% of the total population (I’m not sure what that is in raw numbers) and blog participation, such as leaving comments online, increased as well.

I’ve long thought that a print (or e-mail) edition of a blog could be a useful way to rapidly collect news and allow those comfortable with the medium to read it as it’s posted, but distill and deliver it via media more appropriate for those who aren’t ready to make the jump. This could be a good gateway to the blog medium in general.

It’s also noted that “keeping it hyper-local makes it more manageable and may make people more comfortable in voicing their opinions”–although they’re talking about “local” in a physical sense, this could also apply to a highly-targeted audience like those we tend to communicate to.

What do you think? What keeps people from sharing their thoughts on this blog? Would a printed version convince you to give us more feedback?

Read Who says print is dead? Local blog finds success offlne, via ReadWriteWeb

As a little experiment I figured I’d create a slideshow version of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PDF Books and share it with you via SlideShare, which is kind of like YouTube for PowerPoint (or Keynote). SlideShare is a great way to share your slides with an audience–you can let them view slides, print them, or pass them along to colleagues. All you need to do is create a free account (it takes about two minutes) and upload your slides–SlideShare does the magic conversion part for you.

So, without further ado, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PDF Books:”

| View | Upload your own

P.S.: Want audio commentary? Come see me at one of our to-be-determined informal sessions at this summer’s SIM conference and I’ll give it to you live!

I buy a lot of books published by the Pragmatic Programmers. They specialize in technical manuals for software development, including the Ruby on Rails framework we use for things we develop in-house like Dossier and Depot. Like most computer books, these tend to weigh in at 300 pages or so. Try lugging around a couple of those along with a laptop.

Most publishers who cater to developers like me now offer their books in PDF format. Among the benefits are

• PDF versions tend to be a few bucks cheaper
• PDF versions can be purchased and put to use in a matter of minutes
• PDF versions weigh zero pounds, zero ounces
• PDF versions are keyword searchable!
• PDF versions are easily updatable

That last point is important, especially for books with code samples that must be typo-free to work properly. Typos happen, and they get missed when a book goes out the door. A publisher can quickly get an updated version out the door–great for customer relations. The Pragmatic Programmers take this a step further: They provide beta access to works-in-progress. Readers get early access to critical information (Ruby on Rails is a rapidly evolving platform) in return for providing feedback to authors. It’s a neat way to involve readers in the publishing process.

I’ve currently got a beta book on my virtual Pragmatic Programmers bookshelf, so I can show you how the process works.

To begin, an e-mail message arrives to let me know an updated version of my book is available (I can also get this information via RSS).

Looking at my virtual bookshelf, I see that one of my books (Advanced Rails Recipes) has an update available. All I need to do is regenerate the PDF, and the Pragmatic Programmers’ server gets to work.

In a few minutes, I receive another e-mail. This one contains a unique link to my copy of the updated PDF version of the book.

Here’s my updated PDF. At the bottom of each page of the PDF is my registration information–if this copy of the book winds up on a file sharing network, everybody’s going to know who leaked it. (Yes, this method of piracy protection relies heavily on he honors system, but really, so does the print version. It’s not hard to hire a student to scan every page of a book, if you really wanted to.)

Also at the bottom of each page is a link to “report erratum.” This takes me to the errata page for the book:

If I find a problem in the beta book, I can quickly submit it for consideration, or look up corrections submitted by others. Advanced Rails Recipes is pretty far along at this point–earlier additions had lots of reader-submitted fixes.

Is this practical for any book? Probably not–I have a weighty psychology textbook this semester, for example, that may be a bit too dense for reading on the screen. But if it were my only option I could make the PDF version work. And for all of the Pragmatic Programmers books, I can order the paper version just as easily (I can even order the paper and PDF versions as a combo for a few dollars more). I get access to cutting edge material, and I can even give feedback on the book itself if I want. Best of all, I have an entire reference library on my laptop–no trips to the chiropractor required.

What would you think of a PDF version of the SIM library?