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Notwithstanding the fact that professors financing $20 million dollar homes from textbook royalties must be vanishingly rare, Seth Godin makes a series of great points about textbooks which culminate in a simple conclusion: change is coming.

Seth states that textbooks are expensive and impractical, to which few would disagree. But let me add that the expectation that generic textbook content can be transmitted from author to student (via publisher and professor) — in an increasingly interactive and participatory world — is simply setting oneself up for trouble. From prof to student, increasingly the demand is for uniqueness, specificity and engagement. I suspect that professors who author textbooks would agree with this statement, too. (more…)

Arnold Schwarzenegger takes the whole time traveling business seriously. As the Terminator, Arnie transported from the future to the current day to deal with pesky humans. As the Governor, he’s taken a page from the future — digital educational content — and appears intent on making it a current day reality by dealing with an expensive and dated medium: paper.

From The Guardian (more…)

I took a break from the grind of startup world to spend Saturday on “a conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age”, held in the Faculty of Information Studies at University of Toronto, by BookCampTO. Structured as an unconference and organized by the BookOven folks, the day attracted some smart, interesting people from across the book business spectrum.

The sessions, “What Are Publishers For?” and “The Quagmire of International Copyright” appear at first unrelated. But copyright processes and management are in the publisher toolkit alongside sales and marketing as ways to generate maximum exposure and revenue for their authors’ works. With demand for e-books and e-content beginning to explode, two questions unify the sessions: how do current publishing tactics support or hinder the development of sales and, looking forward, what tactics should publishers adopt or modify?

With that in mind, I thought these functions most relevant: (more…)