TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics » university

Meet Waterstones Academy, a college for booksellers

Dan Eldridge — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:30:40 +0000

The Bookseller recently published what appears to be a very interesting article about a sort of bookseller’s university that Waterstones—the UK-based bookstore chain—plans to open at some point in the near-to-distant future. And I use the term “appears,” by the way, because the article in question in available only to subscribers of the website’s premium [...]

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10 Universities with Amazing Online Collections

a TeleRead Contributor — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 04:00:28 +0000

It’s common knowledge that universities often hold amazing pieces in their library collections, from rare books to priceless works of art. Many are available for viewing simply by visiting the university, but many others are not available for public access, or visitors simply don’t have the time or resources to visit in person. That’s why [...]

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The World’s 20 Most Impressive University Special Collections

Aggregated Content — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:08:43 +0000

Easily one of the neatest perks of campus life for the particularly inquisitive, studious, or proudly nerdy involves perusing the school’s special collections. Most tend to involve some combination of rare books and manuscripts as well as information about the school itself, local history, and maybe state history. Even smaller collections tend to harbor some [...]

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Short-Form Digital Grows at University Presses

a TeleRead Contributor — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 15:03:41 +0000

Back in March, the Digital Digest profiled Princeton Shorts, a new short-form e-book program launched last fall by Princeton University Press. At least two more AAUP presses have launched short e-book programs this spring: Stanford, with Stanford Briefs, and North Carolina, with UNC Press E-Book Shorts. The basic idea of short-form digital is not original to university presses. Anticipating [...]

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Should Universities Force E-Textbooks on Students?

a TeleRead Contributor — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:02:49 +0000

By Stephanie Brooks Last month, USA Today reported that a few colleges and universities in the U.S. now require students to purchase e-textbooks instead of traditional textbooks. The USA Today article noted that many of the students attending these colleges are opposed to being obligated to buy e-textbooks. Many of them prefer print textbooks, even [...]

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The E-Reader’s Impact on College Kids and Campuses

a TeleRead Contributor — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 14:09:09 +0000

By Elena Morgan The e-reader market has spent more than a decade undergoing a fitful and sporadic development into something of major scope, and this process didn’t really start to take off until the end of the first decade of the 2000′s. Today, however, e-readers have finally become practical, easy to use, and also finally [...]

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Turning personal electronics into classroom participation devices

Chris Meadows — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 01:15:00 +0000

In classrooms, e-books are sort of top-down, one-way communication tools. You buy the book, you read what it says. But what if the same device you use for e-books could also be used to respond to the professor in your classroom? Ki Mae Heussner has an interesting piece at GigaOm on Top Hat Monocle, a [...]

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Ryerson U closes 1 of 2 bookstores; feelings are mixed

Steven Lyle Jordan — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:26:58 +0000

That’s the take from this Toronto Star article: Mixed feelings about the loss of a bookstore at Ryerson University and the sequestering of its books, by the students… though not by the article’s author. “Poor books. Snubbed yet again, this time by a university, an institution of learning.” The article describes the closure of one [...]

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Academics announce boycott of journal publisher Elsevier

Chris Meadows — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:54:08 +0000

In a related note to my piece the other day on high-priced academic indexes, Ars Technica and Techdirt are reporting on a movement by some academics to boycott Elsevier, an expensive (and big-profit earning) scientific journal publishing company which supported recent restrictive legislation: SOPA and PIPA, which were defeated, and the Research Works Act, which [...]

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Can costly academic indexes be fixed?

Chris Meadows — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:45:00 +0000

I ran across an interesting pair of articles concerning academic journal indexes—a complaint about the journals’ expense and inaccessibility by Laura McKenna in The Atlantic, and a rebuttal pointing out a number of errors and misconceptions in McKenna’s article by Nancy Sims of the University of Minnesota Libraries on her blog. At the heart of [...]

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My Espresso Book Machine encounter

Chris Meadows — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 20:49:13 +0000

I got to the Missouri State University Bookstore in Columbia, Missouri in the early afternoon, and went downstairs to where they kept their Espresso machine. As I had a book made, I spoke with Heather Tearney, the manager of the Mizzou Media section where the machine was kept, and Nic Maglio, one of the operators. [...]

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‘Princeton Shorts’ Tries to Lure Readers With Digital Excerpts From Full Books

Steven Lyle Jordan — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 13:09:24 +0000

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Attention spans are short. E-readers are plentiful. Digital delivery is fast and convenient. How can university presses turn those facts to their advantage and attract readers who want bite-sized morsels of content? Princeton University Press is about to test one approach with a new, e-only series. Called Princeton Shorts, [...]

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Ruling in favor of UCLA right to rip DVDs may have implications for HathiTrust

Chris Meadows — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 16:01:40 +0000

Did I just hear the DMCA’s anti-circumvention precisions creak a little? Ars Technica reports that a judge has ruled educational institutions are legally entitled to rip and stream DVDs that they have legally purchased. The case involves UCLA ripping and streaming some educational DVDs from Ambrose Video Publishing. Ambrose sued over the anti-circumvention provision violation, [...]

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Opposing viewpoints on HathiTrust orphaned works issue

Chris Meadows — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:17:51 +0000

I’ve found a couple of more points of view on the HathiTrust lawsuit over the last couple of days, and given that they are diametrically opposed it seems like a good idea to present them together for contrast. First, SF and fantasy novelist Elizabeth Moon strongly opposes the use that the universities and HathiTrust are [...]

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Authors Guild sues Google Books’s university partners

Chris Meadows — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 08:15:00 +0000

Lest we think that the lawsuit against Google that has been spinning its wheels for six years and gone precisely nowhere was the extent of the Authors Guilds efforts to fight the Google Books scanning projects, the Guild has struck again with a lawsuit against the universities that partnered with Google in the project, and [...]

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