The above Infographic is by OnlineColleges.net.
Above Infographic (click to enlarge) is by TeachingDegree.org.
But for a contrasting viewpoint, read Futurebook's (@TheFutureBook) "Print and Ebooks Cannot Co-Exist After All" by Adam Juniper.
Also see our previous blogposts, "Infographic: How Ebooks are Reshaping Publishing," "BISG Report: More Ebook Buyers Buying Print Books," and "Books vs Ebooks."
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your ebooks and pbooks.
Learn about online marketing with SomersaultSocial.
Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android.
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Every November, the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) (@AARWeb) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) (@SBLsite) (#sblaar & #aarsbl12) are held, affectionately known as the “alphabet” AAR/SBL convention. This year it’s taking place at McCormick Place (@McCormick_Place) in Chicago. Somersault (@smrsault) was there over the weekend, meeting with friends and making new ones among the vast number of publishers exhibiting their considerable frontlist and backlist academic, textbook, and reference titles.
Religion scholar and author Martin Marty writes about AAR/SBL in his column, Sightings:
The Program Book for the gatherings is 496 pages long. You read that right. When I mention that “a number of thousand scholars of religion” are meeting, my friends of secular ethos orientation gasp: they can picture restaurateurs, gun-sellers, and auto-dealers convening in such numbers. But “religion” scholars in abundance? Can this be true?
It is. It takes the cavernous, soul-less halls of McCormick Place and eighteen hotels to accommodate these North American religionists, while graduate students, “old friends,” and others bunk with acquaintances around the city. What these do tends to be invisible to off-campus populations and much is even ignorable on the campuses in which they thrive. The word is out that religious practice is declining in North America, that attendance at and support for religious ventures has been having harder times. But you wouldn’t know that from observing the conventioneers or opening the Program Book. They do not draw notice as do medics in the American Medical Association, and their religion and sacred rites are not experienced as intense as are those of the acolytes of the American Rifle Association or the National Football League, but there they are.
One sights astonishing variety here. The SBL “Sections” include “Cognitive Linguistics in Biblical Interpretation,” “Disputed Paulines,” “Asian and Asian-American Hermeneutics,” etc. and the AAR fosters groups on “Animals and Religion,” “Evangelical Studies,” “Queer Studies in Religion,” “Quran,” and scores upon scores more. Related Scholarly Organizations cluster alongside AAR and SBL, among them “Colloquium on Violence and Religion,” “International Bonhoeffer Society,” “Karl Barth” and “Reinhold Niebuhr” societies alongside “La Communidad of Hispanic Scholars,” and, again, many, many more. There are stars and shapers as well as promising graduate students and tenure-track newcomers to the fields.
Publishers Weekly's (@PublishersWkly) article, "The Digital Revolution in Religion Publishing Brings Business, Technical Issues," highlights the difficulties facing publishers serving the academic market:
Maintaining sanity in this arena can be challenging at times. Example: books rich in maps, art, and ancient language characters need formatting across various platforms and require new digital permissions for every image. On the reader side, it can be maddening in class when one person's page 50 is someone else's page 47 or 53. And note taking on a screen is still in primitive stages.
Contact Somersault to help you publish and market your print and digital resources to the academic market.
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
ZondervanAcademic / Koinonia Blog (@ZonderAcademic), along with 49 other publishers/exhibitors, is at the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society this week in Milwaukee, WI. While there, it’s live streaming all plenary speakers, including Calvin Beisner, Russell Moore, Richard Bauckham, and Douglas Moo, and a panel discussion on Friday at 11:10 am EST.
And beginning this weekend in Chicago, IL, the annual gatherings are taking place of the Institute for Biblical Research, the Society of Biblical Literature (@SBLsite), and the American Academy of Religion (@AARWeb) — Somersault will be there.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your print and digital resources to the academic market.
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
US Dept. of Education (@usedgov) Secretary Arne Duncan is calling for America to move as fast as possible away from printed textbooks and toward digital ones. “Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete,” he declared last week at the National Press Club (@PressClubDC).
Referring primarily to grades K-12, but having implications on the college level as well, Duncan says he’s concerned about competing with other countries whose students are academically leaving behind their US counterparts.
South Korea, which consistently outperforms the US in educational outcomes, is moving far faster than the US in adopting digital learning environments. One of the most wired countries in the world, South Korea has set a goal to go fully digital with its textbooks by 2015....
The transition to digital involves much more than scanning books and uploading them to computers, tablet devices or e-readers. Proponents describe a comprehensive shift to immersive, online learning experiences that engage students in a way a textbook never could.
The Secretary has made the call before, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle in September.
Read Hack College’s coverage, “Education Secretary Calls for Print Textbooks to Become Obsolete.”
Also see our previous blogpost, “USA Goal: A Digital Textbook for Every US Student.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your textbook publishing and marketing strategy.
Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Above Infographic created by: HackCollege (@hackcollege)
Floatingsheep.org (@floating_sheep), a website that maps the geographies of user-generated online content, has created the pdf booklet “Geographies of the World’s Knowledge,” a joint venture between Convoco and the Oxford Internet Institute (@oiioxford). Through creative maps, it visualizes the distribution of the world’s knowledge through 10 categories
1. Literacy and Gender
2. Internet Penetration
3. The World’s Newspapers
4. The Location of Academic Knowledge
5. Academic Knowledge and Language
6. Academic Knowledge and Publishers
7. Mapping Flickr
8. The Distribution of all Wikipedia Articles
9. Time-series of the Distribution of Biographies on Wikipedia over the Last Five Centuries
10. User-generated Content in Google
Data, evaluated in an unprecedented way, shows the current distribution of knowledge in the different parts of the globe. Some of the implications of this are surprising, others are worrying. The maps visualize where the foci of knowledge — and, thus, the forces of innovation and economic growth — are located. Thanks to this scientific visualization the most important factors involved can be grasped at a glance.
The booklet is also available in interactive format for iPads.
Consider how this information should influence your publishing strategy.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan, execute, and analyze market research for your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.
Erin Griffith (@eringriffith) writes on PandoDaily (@PandoDaily) about Macmillan Publishing’s resolve to embrace the disruption happening in the world of education publishing and to intentionally change its structure, business model, and processes to succeed in this Internet age.
Macmillan Publishing has taken an entirely different route altogether. It’s one that, until now, has remained relatively under the radar. The company hired Troy Williams, former CEO of early ebook company Questia Media, which sold to Cengage. Macmillan gave him a chunk of money and incredibly unusual mandate: “Build a business that will undermine our own.”
The publishing giant has given Williams a sum greater than $100 million (he won’t say exactly how much) to acquire ed-tech startups that will eventually be the future of Macmillan. The plan is to let them exist autonomously like startups within the organization, as Macmillan transitions out of the content business and into educational software and services. Through the entity, called Macmillan New Ventures, Williams plans to do five deals this year and 10 to 15 over the course of the next five years.
He’s buying companies that will help Macmillan survive as a business once textbooks go away completely.
This includes PrepU (@PrepUQuiz), a quizzing engine for classrooms, i>Clicker (@iclicker), a mobile classroom polling company, and most recently EBI (@EBIandMAPWorks), a data and evaluation startup.
Troy Williams speaks about his objectives in this video (beginning at the 5:00 mark).
Look to Somersault (@smrsault) to help you scout the future of publishing and the continued convergence of technology and writing.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Future tab.
Above Infographic (enlarge it) is by Course Hero (@CourseHero).
At the 21st Annual Minitex ILL Conference in Minnesota, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project (@pewinternet), Lee Rainie (@lrainie), gave the keynote presentation on "Learning in the Digital Age: Where Libraries Fit In."
He discussed the way people use ebook readers and tablet computers, and how those devices are fitting into users' digital lives. His presentation below describes how 3 revolutions in digital technology – in broadband, mobile connectivity, and social media – have created a new social operating system that he calls "networked individualism." And he used the Project's latest findings to help describe how librarians can serve the new educational needs of networked individuals.
How does this new way of learning among your consumers impact your publishing agenda? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you sort it all out.
And be sure to bookmark, use daily, and tell others about the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.