BoSacks Speaks Out: Free Textbooks Coming Near You

BoSacks Speaks Out: This is an amazing little article. The portents are huge for text book publishers, but might just have some traction for other publishing styles as well. What if educators banded together and formed their own network (publishing house)? It is not so far fetched. I am skeptical about a full open source text book implementation, because someone, somewhere has to get paid. But there are ways of incorporating both open source and capitalism. It is a new business model and one worth thinking about. It's not for everybody, but in the "long tail" style of doing business it doesn't have to be.

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol


Free textbooks coming near you
Brittani Lusk - Daily Herald
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/275408/17/

Textbook options: fork out the cash and buy the shiny new book, forget the book altogether and rely on class notes, or read it online for free.

Fall semester begins at Brigham Young University and at Utah Valley University in a little more than a month. Students will be looking for the cheapest way to get their hands on class materials, and they may have a new option.

Textbooks with open licenses are complete, scholarly college texts written by the same type of people writing traditional books, but these books have a twist. They've been placed online with the author's permission under an open license that allows students and instructors to read, print and even customize the text for free or a small fee. Students, professors and other advocates nationwide, including students and professors in Utah County, are pleading with authors to participate in the open textbook movement. One UVU professor is even writing an open textbook simply on principle.

Fighting the system
"I'm so upset about the whole textbook issue that it's actually motivating for me on the basis of just my values," said UVU professor Ron Hammond. He said his book "will be an act of community service to the whole country."

The UVU sociology professor, who last year stopped using traditional textbooks, has written six chapters of a sociology textbook that will be available online when he and his students finish it at the end of the year.

"I just finally got fed up," Hammond said.

He periodically publishes scholarly work in academic journals and isn't worried about losing royalties on the new book.

Some book publishers have contended that the work he is doing isn't real scholarship and his online manuscript won't be a real book. Hammond disagrees with the textbook company representative that criticized his work.

"This book is going to be better than the book that's on the market in terms of currency, because it's got links," Hammond said.

In his book, Hammond plans to link to current data from the Census Bureau and other government agencies. That gives him a real-time edge because most traditional books, he said, are usually one to two years behind when it comes to numbers. Having the book online allows Hammond to update the research whenever it changes.

Behind the cause
Hammond is one of more than 1,200 college professors across the nation, including at least three from Utah County, who have signed a statement of intent pledging to use open textbooks when available. The Campaign to Make Textbooks Available posted the Faculty Statement of Intent on its Web site, maketextbooksaffordable.org, earlier this year.

"It really shows that textbooks don't have to be expensive," said Nicole Allen, director of the campaign.

She said the key to decreasing costs that have been rising at double the rate of inflation for at least the last two decades is changing the market by adding more competition. That's where open textbooks come in.

"Students have to buy whatever textbook they're assigned," Allen said. "So publishers can choose whatever price they want."

She said finding a textbook online and printing it themselves gives students the choices they need to fight back.

"You can get it on pink paper," Allen said. "The idea is that students have more options."

Students in Utah have been lobbying their professors to use more open-source, free material. Kelly Stowell, executive director of the Utah Student Association, called the effort a grass-roots movement aimed at recognizing professors willing to use free materials.

"We'd like to recognize and reward professors," Stowell said.

At UVU, student leaders have been meeting with their professors and school administrators pitching the idea. Student Body President Joseph Watkins said the reception has been good.

"Everybody that we've spoken to is more than happy to help out," Watkins said.

Watkins said the students might gather the information and put professors using open-source materials into some sort of database so students can pick and choose which professors to take knowing who uses books and who doesn't.

In addition to Hammond, UVU information systems and technology professor Jeff Cold signed the statement of intent, as did BYU professor David Wiley.

"If I have an opportunity to get them a textbook for free, I will do so," Cold said.

Wiley has been using open source material in his classes for years.

"I made a commitment to myself a number of years ago that I wold only use free or openly licensed materials in my courses, and have stuck to that commitment since," Wiley wrote in an e-mail.

He's even written an open book and makes all his course materials public.

A new way of thinking
Cold said he'll use open textbooks when they're available, but he doesn't have a vendetta against book publishers.

"I think that at times, textbooks can be expensive. I don't think the publishers are gouging students," Cold said.

His interest in open textbooks is their timeliness. In information systems, technology changes before the books can be updated. Cold doesn't like teaching students to use operating systems from a book that is sometimes two versions old.

Hammond said the Internet model will help solve the lag that paper books face as well as serve his Google-generation students better.

"They want to know what they have to know and then they go find it," Hammond said.

He said the textbook learning model that worked in the past is fading.

"The point is that we can't say to them, 'Do it the way we did.' "

Hammond said he was once worried that material found on the Internet wasn't the same caliber as written material and that perhaps students wouldn't gain the skills they needed if they only surfed the net.

"I used to [think that], but I don't anymore because our society is computers-based and Internet-enriched," Hammond said.

He said students need the computer skills and should develop them.

"We don't know, but it looks like the paper version of knowledge is on its way out," Hammond said. "The Internet version of knowledge seems to be much more powerful, much more efficient."

Wiley said an open license doesn't automatically make a book better, but open texts have more potential because they can be added to and customized.

"You have made it possible, now, for others to make the changes they need to make in order for the text to really speak to their students. So open textbooks aren't automatically of higher quality than traditional texts, but they have the opportunity to become better over time," Wiley wrote.

Making it work
One pair of former publishing company employees is attempting to make open textbooks into a business model that serves the students and the book authors better than the publishing companies.

Eric Frank and Jeff Shelstad both left publishing companies to start Flat World Knowledge, an open textbook publishing company.

"Basically we're, as far as I know, the first commercial open textbook publisher," Frank said. Frank is the chief marketing officer for the company he founded and plans to offer open textbooks in the spring of 2009. Right now the company is testing and researching its products.

Wiley has been working with Flat World Knowledge as its chief openness officer, helping them with licensing issues and developing strategy.

Frank said when the system is up and running, students will be able to view books online, print them for about $30 or download an audio book for about $25. Students could also purchase PDF versions to print themselves.

"Our model here is, you decide," Frank said.

Flat World also plans to offer a smattering of study aids in an a-la-carte format similar to iTunes. Students can purchase one study aid such as a podcast or set of flash cards for 99 cents each. Instructors will also be able to customize a textbook by rearranging chapters or only giving students certain pieces of the text.

Frank said book authors will be as compensated or more compensated than they are by publishing companies because authors will continue to receive royalties on their book several semesters after it is released.

Frank said the traditional model, where students buy a new version of the book and then re-sell it, causing used books and pirated works to circulate, only allows authors to receive royalties on new books sold. That results in a steep drop-off in royalties after the first semester. Frank said that drop shouldn't happen in the Flat World model.

The year advertising turned digital

The year advertising turned digital
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/analysis_and_features/article2530809.ece

Traditional media groups are finding it hard to claim a share of increasing advertising budgets as online services grow at breakneck speed. By Nic Fildes
Published: 11 May 2007
Commercial media companies that have struggled amid tough market conditions over the past few years will have to navigate further choppy waters in 2007 with the latest data in the radio and newspaper publishing sectors suggesting that the threat from online competitors will continue to bite hard.

Despite steady increases in the amount of money that companies have spent on advertising, the proportion allotted to television and radio marketing has stayed flat and, in the case of newspapers, has fallen.

The UK radio sector has been one of the worst hit by the surge in interest in online advertising. Alongside outdoor and cinema advertising, radio companies have struggled to fill the gap left by advertisers attracted to online advertising, a form of marketing that can be targeted specifically at individual groups based on demographic data.

With advertising industry heavyweights such as Sir Martin Sorrell predicting that online advertising will continue to grow at breakneck speed in the UK, newspaper publishers, television broadcasters and radio companies face the prospect of further revenue declines in the coming year.

Online advertising has taken off particularly quickly in the UK due to the equally rapid uptake in broadband services among consumers. Traditional forms of advertising like billboards and radio jingles are fairly unsophisticated compared to flashy new video advertisements that can be used on webpages. While traditional advertising relies on attracting the attention of random passers-by or unknown radio listeners, online marketing can be targeted at specific individuals, increasing the relevance of the advertising. Advertisers can also tell whether the user looked at the marketing, important data in gauging the effectiveness of the campaign.

Radio companies' struggle to attract more advertising revenue is not helped by volatile audience figures. The latest data from Rajar, the radio industry's ratings body, yesterday showed that commercial radio companies have continued to lose market share to the BBC, which took a record 56 per cent of the radio audience during the first three months of the year. Despite the ongoing progress of digital radio, commercial broadcasters slipped to 42 per cent from over 43 per cent last quarter.

Commercial broadcasters like Emap, Chrysalis and GCap took some heart from increases in the number of young people listening to stations like Magic and Galaxy. However there is still much work to do to challenge the BBC and win back advertisers that have moved online.

Some commercial radio companies are coping better with the tough market conditions. UTV's TalkSport station reported record listening figures whilst Emap's Magic station won back its top spot in London status during the quarter.

However analysts were disappointed with the performance of Chrysalis, whose Heart station lost out to Magic, and GCap's flagship station Capital which reported a record low audience share of 4.6 per cent. Paul Richards, an analyst at Numis Securities, said that SMG's performance was the most disappointing with Virgin FM recording its worst ratings performance since 2003.

Analysts said the data suggests that radio companies face an uphill struggle in 2007. Howard Bareham, an investment director at Mindshare, said: "It's a Catch-22. Radio companies need to invest in product but to do that, they need the advertising revenue."

Newspaper publishers have also struggled as advertising budgets have increasingly moved online. Trinity Mirror yesterday warned that advertising conditions remain "challenging and volatile" with advertising revenue falling 2.4 per cent in the first four months of the year. The drop represented an improvement on the 6 per cent fall that Trinity Mirror reported in the last quarter of 2006, but analysts attributed the slowing rate of decline to easier comparative figures, rather than an improvement in the underlying advertising market. Advertising revenue at the company's national newspapers such as Daily Mirror fell 4 per cent while circulation revenue dropped 0.7 per cent.

Companies such as GCap, run by long-serving chief executive Ralph Bernard, and Trinity Mirror, which has Sly Bailey at its helm, face tough challenges over the coming year as the structural shift in the industry gains pace. Mr Bernard has said that he doesn't expect recent investments in improving its radio stations to show up in Rajar figures until August but remains confident that the company can be turned around after a disastrous performance since the merger of GWR and Capital in 2005. Meanwhile Ms Bailey has overseen the acquisition of a number of websites in areas like online recruitment and real estate to offset the collapse in newspaper advertising revenue. However, digital revenue still only accounts for 5 per cent of Trinity Mirror's revenue.

Publishers, terrestrial television broadcasters and radio companies also face significant threats from emerging online competitors aiming to take advantage of changing consumer behaviour to take a large chunk of advertising budgets. In the radio sector, Rajar reported that 24 per cent of people in the UK now listen to the radio via the internet while 11 per cent listen to the radio on mobile phones. With computers becoming an increasingly popular way to consume media, a new form of radio station has emerged where consumers have control over the sort of songs that are played. Pandora and LastFM, two of the most high profile user-controlled radio stations, have proved very popular among young radio listeners.

In the television sector, Joost has created headlines as the first broadcast-quality internet TV platform that offers users free access to an increasingly large amount of content. Similarly advertising-funded services have been launched in the music and mobile-phone space as new media companies look to offer consumers free services if they agree to listen to advertisements.

Patrick Yau, an analyst with Bridgewell Securities, said that radio companies have been slow to invest in the internet despite attracting large audiences to basic internet radio websites due to a "fear of the unknown". "Radio and the internet are very complementary media - we can consume both at the same time. Why aren't we seeing a more integrated online strategy from radio companies?" he said. He noted that Virgin Radio argues it has the most popular internet radio site in the world but has not taken advantage of that traffic, perhaps by offering community-based information.

Richard Menzies-Gow, an analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort, said that overall radio-listening figures will continue to rise as more people listen to radio on mobile phones or at work but that radio companies need to figure out how to ramp up revenue as a result of higher listening figures. He expects that over time, there will be an interweaving of old and new media with a relaxation of cross-media ownership laws "inevitable" as advertisers look to run integrated campaigns.

Mr Bareham said: "In some respects, technology is against radio at the moment but the strengths of radio are as relevant today as a decade ago when the young and sexy radio industry outflanked the traditional media sector. Now it's online that is in vogue." He said radio companies needed to focus on taking advantage of the interactive elements of online radio and personal devices such as mobile phones over the coming year to stimulate growth in 2008 and 2009.

BT unveils vision to compete with Sky and Virgin

The media sector is getting increasingly crowded, with BT upping the ante in the television space.

Sky and Virgin Media have torn strips off each other to win new customers over the past few months while BT has slowly added customers to its BT Vision service. Customers will receive a set-top box that connects to BT's broadband network and offers customers video-on-demand services, Freeview television and an in-built video recorder.

BT will kick off a multi-million pound national marketing campaign tomorrow to promote the service and compete more aggressively with Sky and Virgin. BT is expected to spend at least £10m promoting the service.

BT Vision is designed to be more flexible than its cable and satellite-based rivals as it does not charge customers a minimum monthly subscription. There will be a set-up fee of around £90 although BT expects to launch a self-installation version later in the year at which point, analysts expect customer numbers to soar. The company has invested in building a large library of content for the on-demand service, including sports and hit movies.

BT expects to have up to 3 million customers in the medium term as it continues to invest in offering services outside its legacy residential telecoms business.

The threat to advertising revenue

* Personalised internet radio stations such as Pandora and Last.fm have built large customer bases by giving listeners control over playlists and dispensing with DJ chatter. Such stations ask the listener to list bands they like and then play songs by similar artists based on those preferences. Listeners can reject songs they don't like and buy ones they do. However the companies have hit licensing problems and Pandora has stopped allowing access to the site outside the US.

* Following on from the success of YouTube, new companies that offer free broadcast-quality television over the internet have started to emerge. Joost, set up by the founders of Skype, has made headlines and built a large library of content, and the company has just secured financial backing from a series of investors, including eBay backers Sequoia Capital, to strengthen the offering. However analysts expect it to be a niche service in the medium term.

* Another possible threat to advertising revenue comes from new companies which aim to offer free content and services to consumers who accept advertising. Blyk, a mobile phone company that uses Orange's network in the UK, will offer free calls and texts to people looking to save money by pumping ads down their handset. Meanwhile, We7, backed by Peter Gabriel, left, offers free digital music tracks to customers happy to accept advertising.

Newspaper Sites Growing Faster Than Web Overall

Newspaper Sites Growing Faster Than Web Overall
by Erik Sass, Tuesday, May 8, 2007 6:00 AM ET

THE AUDIENCE FOR NEWSPAPER WEB sites is growing faster percentage-wise than the Internet audience at large, according to a study commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America and released on Monday.

The study, done by Nielsen//NetRatings, found a monthly average of 59 million people visiting Web sites in the first quarter of 2007--representing 5.3% growth over the same period of 2006. Meanwhile, the pool of total Internet users in the United States grew about 2.7%.
These numbers "validate the industry's investment in digital innovation, and the ongoing attraction consumers have to newspapers online," said NAA president and CEO John F. Sturm in a statement. "Newspaper publishers have aggressively transformed their business models, continually providing ground-breaking content to consumers with their expanding digital portfolios."

What's more, the NAA data paints an appealing portrait of newspaper's Web audiences from an advertiser perspective, with the average user having a higher household income than the norm, according to Nielsen//NetRatings: 11.9% of Web users who visited a newspaper Web site have an income of $150,000 or more, compared to 9.3% of the overall Web population. Users of newspaper Web sites show a greater propensity to shop online, with 88.1% making an online purchase in the last six months versus 78.9% on average. They are more likely to hold a professional or managerial-level job, with 41% falling into this category versus 32.7% of the general Web population. In terms of Web behavior patterns, 73% are daily Web users versus 57.8% overall, while 42% have viewed streaming video on the Web in the last 20 days, versus just 27.4% for the average Web user.

All that is good news for newspapers, according to Shawn Riegsecker, chief executive officer of Centro, a leading ad network for online newspaper sites: "As newspapers continue to invest in their digital properties and produce world-class content, I predict they will capture a much larger percentage of the overall online pie."

Although their online audiences are still growing at impressive rates, newspaper companies are having a hard time monetizing those audiences at levels high enough to offset losses from print advertising declines. Worse, the rate of revenue and income growth at many newspaper Web sites appears to have slowed in the first quarter. Internet revenue rose 21.6% at the New York Times Company, down from 39% average growth in 2006. At the Tribune Company, interactive revenues rose 17% to $60 million--down from a 29% growth increase in 2006. And the Washington Post saw revenues rise just 10%, compared to 34% for the first quarter of 2006, on a year-over-year basis.

Publishers Hear Digital Fingerprinting Pitch

Publishers Hear Digital Fingerprinting Pitch
by Karlene Lukovitz
http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=59820&Nid=30069&p=204904

WATCHING GOOGLE AND VIACOM DUKE it out in court is interesting, but in the real world, publishers and other site owners are more interested in finding a practical way to monitor who's using their content and either get some reimbursement or get it off the Web.


As the business world read about Google/YouTube filing for a dismissal of Viacom's $1 billion copyright infringement suit earlier this week, a group of publishing executives gathered at a Magazine Publishers of America "Meet the Innovators" session to hear a pitch for one potential answer.

Attributor Corp., a privately held Redwood City, CA company started by Silicon Valley executives, is testing technology that scans and captures digital "fingerprints"--or identifying characteristics--of text, images and audiovisual content and then continuously scans its index of the Web to pick up matches.

The company claims that the system can spot content reuse within just about any Web area/format, including RSS feeds, self-published sites, social networks, advertising networks, search engines and aggregators, based on a few text sentences, bits of an image, or seconds of an audio/video clip.

Attributor doesn't claim to know exactly what is and is not "fair use" under the evolving legal precedents surrounding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; rather, the system employs a site owner's own specified criteria to generate automatic responses to identified instances of reuse, explained CEO Jim Brock, a former Yahoo copyright counsel who co-founded Attributor in 2005 with Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Pitkow.

Depending on the scenario (the percentage of content used, whether it's being used for commercial purposes, etc.), a content reuser might, for instance, receive a request to remove content, or a proposal to allow continuing reuse of the content in return for giving the originator a portion of advertising revenue or licensing fees. A single console provides the site owner with ongoing monitoring of each issue's status until there is some kind of resolution.

Site owners can also employ a searchable public registry that allows anyone wishing to republish content to identify the owner and seek a licensing agreement.

In short, Attributor may present a more streamlined and wide-ranging solution than existing content monitoring systems like Indigo Stream Technologies' Copyscape, which relies on Google's search engine to seek out unauthorized uses.

Attributor is now in beta with several "large, international publishers," and is taking requests to generate free trial reports for interested publishers while the development phase continues, Brock said. Between 40 and 45 million Web pages per day are being added to the system through RSS feeds and periodic content scanning/conversions, he added.

In December, the company announced that it had received $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Draper Richards LP, First Round Capital, Amicus and Selby Venture Partners.

Where does Brock think digital fair use definitions are headed? "At this point, nobody can say that a certain percentage of an article equates or does not equate to fair use," he says. "It's still subjective under the law. But once we have the systems in place for transparency, we believe those standards will evolve."

Meanwhile, he says, "if from a business standpoint, it's not fair use by your standards, you can address that, negotiate, respond as you see fit." For example, if no attribution is provided, a significant portion of a given piece of content is being used, and it's being used for commercial purposes, "then you've got three indicators that might set off a 'ding, ding, ding,'" Brock notes.