Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

…if you have a university degree AND a publishing certificate, speak English and French and know XML.

This is but one of the challenges of book publishing today: The technical skills required are exploding, but the economics still suck.

I don’t wish to heap ridicule on this particular company: it’s happening everywhere.

Publishing Assistant
Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc./Women’s Press
(Toronto, ON)
Deadline: October 1, 2010

Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc./Women’s Press, one of Canada’s leading independent academic publishing companies, requires a Publishing Assistant for a 20-week contract beginning November 1st. Reporting to the Marketing and Editorial Associate, the Publishing Assistant is responsible for:

• Promoting sales through targeted email campaigns
• Assisting in the dissemination of book data to Indigo, Amazon, and other vendors
• Managing Google Books claims
• Coordinating desk and examination copy mailings
• Assisting in the creation of marketing materials such as press releases, catalogues, and newsletters
• Assisting with the maintenance of the CSPI website
• Promoting CSPI’s social media profile
• Assisting the editorial, production, and permissions departments as required
• Some internal administrative duties

Required skills and experience:

• Recent completion of a post-secondary degree specializing in literature, communications, or a related field
• Proficiency in Microsoft Office software
• Enrolment in and/or completion of a professional publishing certificate is a strong asset
• French language proficiency is an asset
• Experience with XML coding and/or ONIX for books is an asset
• Keen interest in the book publishing industry
• Excellent communication and time management skills
• Related work experience in a field such as publishing, bookselling, communications, or marketing will distinguish a potential candidate, but is not required

This is a paid position with an hourly rate of $17. To apply, please submit a resume and cover letter to jessica.hale@cspi.org no later than Friday, October 1st. We thank all applicants for their interest, but only those selected for an interview will be contacted. CSPI is an equal opportunity employer.

According to Payscale.com you can earn the same amount as an administrative assistant, and $2.40 more per hour as a retail manager.

So much for the value of a university education.

…I’ll believe that the printed book is dead. When they stop printing a thousand dollar 20-volume dictionary, wisdom prevails.

If you’re a cheapskate, you can buy the miniature version for five cents less than $400, and they’ll toss in the magnifying glass!

Making the rounds of the blogosphere, Twittersphere and ignoramosphere today is the inaccurate but inflammatory headline originally from the U.K.’s Telegraph: “Oxford English Dictionary ‘will not be printed again’.”

Note that “will not be printed again” appears in quotation marks. Isn’t that supposed to mean that the article features someone in authority stating that the Oxford English Dictionary will not be printed again? But no one says that in the article. Nigel Portwood, the chief executive of OUP, asked if he thought the third edition would be printed, he said: “I don’t think so.”

Later in the article “A spokesman for the OUP said a print version of OED3 could not be ruled out ‘if there is sufficient demand at the time’ but that its completion was ‘likely to be more than a decade’ away.

More than a decade away. If anyone at Oxford University Press can make accurate predictions of what will be happening 10 years+ from now, they should be in the prognostication business, and forget lexicography.

I’ve got to run to the eye doctor now, and will finish this posting later…

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

In Washington “Tens of thousands of people rallied at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Saturday at an event organized by the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck, who called for a religious rebirth in America at the site of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech 47 years ago to the day.”

Here, via YouTube, is the full speech.

Courtesy of History and Politics Out Loud the audio and the transcript online.

You’ve gagged on Gaga and barfed on Bieber. Now, and for the first time, the real purpose of YouTube is presented for your viewing amazement!

Remarkable. If you can’t watch the whole thing, make sure you see the kid starting just after the 3 minute mark. Otherworldly. The Master Vittal Gole of Wai Maharashtra India points out “Each player has different nature and talent. Just enjoy it!”

More videos and the story of the Indian sport of Mallkhamb are available online, not surprisingly quite a bit more interesting than the lifes of #1 and #2 on YouTube.

As “Seaoftea” so deftly notes in YouTube’s comments: “WTF is this? Why isn’t this in the Olympics?” The Master responds: “That’s why I’m promoting it!”

YouTube: all is forgiven. I would never have discovered this on broadcast TV’s America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Actual screen shots, guaranteed (a few elements compressed to reduce image size):

With cookies from Google:

After I deleted cookies:

How novel to imagine that youngsters aren’t novel.

The title of this entry is an English translation of the name of a German article appearing on August 6 in Spiegel Online. I don’t read Der Spiegel, the largest German newsweekly, in German or in English. Fortunately my friend Bob McArthur does, and brought this to my attention.

The article could be read quickly as merely another superficial piece on young people and the Internet. But this one is decidedly different. Rather than treating youth as a mysterious cult, the digital natives that we explorers can’t quite grok, the article focuses on establishing a simple singular point. “New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend,” states the lede. Instead they are “more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook.”

Could this be possible? You mean they don’t have secret decoder rings? The article is based mainly on some new research out of the Hans Bredow Institute entitled Growing Up With the Social Web. The presentation is available online, but only in German. Spiegel offers a single chart in English.

I do recommend reading the original, but the key point appears best in these two paragraphs:

A small group of writers, consultants and therapists thrives on repeating the same old mantra, namely that our youth is shaped through and through by the online medium in which it grew up. They claim that our schools must, therefore, offer young people completely new avenues — surely traditional education cannot reach this generation any longer, they argue.

There is little evidence to back such theories up, however. Rather than conducting surveys, these would-be visionaries base their arguments on impressive individual cases of young Internet virtuosos. As other, more serious researchers have since discovered, such exceptions say very little about the generation as a whole, and they are now avidly trying to correct the mistakes of the past.

My restatement of the piece would be “Digital non-natives make the same error made by explorers throughout history: both ennobling the savage and at the same time demonizing him.” Turns out the native is human, just like you and me. And s/he doesn’t think that foraging, hunting and “native” dances are remarkable.

Of course consultants like Don Tapscott and Marc Prensky feed us the charismatic guru’s diet of what we want to believe: that digital natives(quite a good term: the secret to success for gurus is coining terms like this and making them sticky) are a superspecies, i.e. able to find technology to be somehow commonplace in a world full of frightening marvels.

They (and we) did not consider that for the natives the marvels are completely taken for granted, thereby losing all mystical powers. What remains are the day-to-day social concerns of all teens, made somewhat simpler to navigate with texting, Facebook, etc. And as always, there is the challenge of learning to use educational tools — whether textbooks or computers & wikis — as effectively as possible. Just because kids grew up with technology doesn’t mean they know how to use it well. And their elders were previously in no position to offer credible advice.

A breakthrough!

I’ll be interested to see how long it takes for this notion to penetrate the U.S. media. I think that the big media that dominate the dialog and the vendors they serve have a vested interest in clinging to Tapscott & Prensky’s anthropological myth-making. People and companies spend big bucks on the extraordinary. Everyday utensils don’t command a price premium.

Let’s start with the fun stuff. Then the dry commentary. Check out two visual cornua copiae (or, as you might have it [and as I had it until I looked it up], “cornucopias“):

1. http://christophniemann.com/   (take some time in his galleries…A LOL experience guaranteed, or your time cheerfully refunded.)

Source: Christoph Niemann

 2. http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=579
(That’s just one example of a softer world’s comix. More to choose from in the archive.)

I put it to you that Christopher Niemann’s delightful and brilliant illustrations are unique to the digital age, in style, content and often in form. A Softer World meanwhile represents a new format for comics for the digital age, combining photography, illustration, and an edgy contemporary wit.

Amidst all of the debate about rethinking books, newspapers and magazines for the web here are two related media that have quietly reinvented themselves while everyone stared blankly into their repsective screens.

Wikipedia won’t define “comix” per se. The editors insist that there are three different kinds of comic(x)s:

1. Comics: i.e. “mainstream comics”
2. Underground Comix: “depict content forbidden to mainstream publications by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit drug use, sexuality and violence”
3. Alternative Comics: “a range of American comics that have appeared since the 1980s, following the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s”

The wiki differentiates between “underground comix” and “alternative comics” (with a “c”, with a “c”!) strictly by method of distribution: “The distribution of underground comix changed through the emergence of specialty stores,” i.e. once comiX found commercial acceptance they were no longer underground. Now they were “Alternative” and had their “X” replaced with a “C”.

Can you think of another publishing example where the product had to be reclassified when only the distribution method changed (while the content remained the same)?

A banner headline above the alternative comics’ article notes:  “This article does not cite any references or sources.” Well I guess we can rely on it then. (Please see the New York Times: “a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge”.)

By coincidence I heard today that Digital Book World will be offering a free webinar next Tuesday that’s right on topic: Digital Strategies, Learning from Comics Publishers. More info and registration link here.

My favorite moment with Google Gmail is when I go to my Spam folder for a quick glance before deleting, to make sure the coast is clear. Often I’ll find a message or two that does not belong there. I wonder how many I miss. But it’s worth the effort if only to revisit one of my favorite dialog boxes. When I click “delete all spam messages now” I’m asked:

So spam is in fact a “conversation”? I know who’s speaking. Who’s replying?

Yes, I’m sure I want to continue.

And then I see:

Ah, the conversation is with Google. At least I’m not alone.

I’ve known about the excellent Project Gutenberg for a long time now. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart and is the oldest digital library. I hadn’t been back to the site for several years because in my mind it was still the place where all you could download was ASCII text versions of books, which must be the worst possible way to read them. Sure, you could change the font to something easier on the eyes, but by definition and by design ASS-KEY lacks all formatting information — forget about line, paragraph or type styles, including bold and italic.

When I did stop by for a visit last month I was pleased to see that Project Gutenberg now offers “over 33,000 free e-books to read on your PC, iPad, Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, Android or other portable device.” Yes, the days of ASCII are a footnote today. What a difference a little formatting can make. (Another footnote is “Our books are free in the United States because their copyright has expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries.”)

Tonight I see that the 5th Annual  World eBook Fair is underway. From July 4th to August 4th you can select from 3,500,000+ free PDF -books. I just downloaded a very good scan of the 1866 edition of Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (with the marvellous illustrations from John Tenniel). I previously download an ePub versionfrom Project Gutenberg with the same illustrations. Very nice!

Meanwhile, the timely and trenchant blog TeleRead (”News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics”) brings word today that the Marc D’Hooghe has updated his Free Literature Site. I don’t know what it was like before, but it’s certainly a treasure now. Under “General” it offers over 400 sources of free digital books. There are 100+ sites for free poetry as well as sites for art books, music (books, scores and audio), and Classical Greek & Latin - Medieval.

Beyond that there is also a fine selection of links to:

• Working on e-text: tools and information
• Research, education and scientific publications
• Books and literature in general

The site is frequently updated with new discoveries (RSS feed available). Some of the latest unique finds include Hinduism e-books as well as the Dutch version of Jules Verne’s De Kinderen van Kapitein Grant.

As Paul Biba notes on TeleRead, “I love browsing in a second-hand bookstore.”