Comments on: The Coming E-Publishing Revolution in Higher Education

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 02:52:33 +0000

@Mark,

That’s great to hear. I’m at work on the next version which will be a free update.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 23:39:14 +0000

Frank I finally got it in my Library great work.

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:58:23 +0000

Hi Sanford. Thanks for reading my book. Obviously, we see things differently and that’s OK. There are many interests vested in the old order and most will hang on till the bitter end. It will be a bitter end for those in academic publishing who think that they can avoid re-thinking everything they do. The tragedy is that university presses and college stores could very well be an important part of the solution to overly expensive textbooks, scholarly books and journal subscriptions. Those that see this opportunity and seize it will prosper.
The assertion that textbooks and journal articles are unrelated is demonstrably false. College textbooks are very often a simple concatenation of journal articles or summaries thereof. You build a textbook by writing your own journal articles, reviewing articles by others and so on. These things are inextricably intertwined and the glue is the promotion and tenure process. Some very smart people spend a lot of time and effort writing these articles and get no compensation from journal publishers. Are they crazy? No, they hope someday to convert those accomplishments into promotion and tenure which has significant monetary value. That investment can be parlayed with textbook. Examine a few college textbooks, Look at the footnotes. What you should see is a list composed primarily of journal articles.
As a tenured full professor with 40 years experience in higher education, I’ve seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. It worked very well as long as the medium was print but print is not long for this world. We all know that. It is the implications of the death of print that are still confounding.

By: Sandy Thatcher

Sandy Thatcher — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:12:58 +0000

There is a basic confusion in this article between two quite distinct parts of the academic publishing enterprise, the scholarly publishing sector and the textbook publishing sector, which were kept separate and analyzed differently by Jon Thompson in his now classic Books in the Digital Age (Polity, 2005). Textbook publishing has almost nothing to do with the academic system of promotion and tenure, since writing textbooks carries very little weight for such purposes. Publishing of scholarly monographs and journal articles is the focus of P&T, and it is not done just by commercial academic publishers but by society publishers and by university presses, which of course are owned and operated by universities themselves. These two sectors function in quite different ways, and it does no good at all to treat them as though they do. Pricing is done very differently in the two sectors, and the textbook sector, unlike the scholarly sector, is highly concentrated in the hands of just seven giant publishing conglomerates. Solutions to the problems of high textbook prices are not necessarily applicable at all or in the same way to the problems of monograph and journal publishing. I’m sorry to say, but I don’t think Prof. Lowney is a very reliable guide to what is going on in ther world of e-publishing. —Sandy Thatcher, Director Emeritus, Penn State University Press, and past president, Association of American University Presses

By: Tim Bulkeley

Tim Bulkeley — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 12:55:35 +0000

If the medium is the message or some realistic approximation, what does publishing in a closed commercial format not available to many people, perhaps most people in emerging “markets” say?

I like the words and the argument of this article, but cannot read the book, nor can many people around me. In the Indian Sub-continent, like in China Apple’s iPad does not rule as it does in the USA.

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 21:46:45 +0000

@Mark, you do have an iPad running iOS 5.1 or later and iBooks 3, right? If so, what stopped you from viewing the book? Any error messages or other symptoms? You’ll find a link to my email on my web site, look for the resume.

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:24:05 +0000

Yes I spent my $99 cents here in Australia and the store took the cash but I cannot view your book.

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 16:42:54 +0000

Indeed it was my fault. My wife and I set our publishing venture up before the New Zealand iTunes Store was available I suppose. The updated contract now includes New Zealand and my agreeing to it has made the book available there. I apologize for the inconvenience.

By: Frank Lowney

Frank Lowney — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 16:02:48 +0000

@Mike, what happened to you is actually my fault or at least I think it is my fault. When the book was first submitted to the iBookstore, I made it available in many countries, including New Zealand. Later on, I checked in to iTunes Connect to discover that it’s available in 21 stores (countries) and unavailable in one store, New Zealand. Clicking on the link, I get this message:

No Contract. You do not have a contract in effect for this territory. Please work with your iBookstore representative to enter into a new contract if you wish to sell your books in the territory in question.

So I’m in the process of contacting my iBookstore representative to find out why my contract includes 21 (perhaps more) countries but not New Zealand. I’ll report back when I have more information.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 08:19:46 +0000

Having read the article and been suitably impressed by Dr Lowney’s advocacy I went to his blog and clicked on the iBookstore badge to spend my 99c. I was greeted by this message: “Your request could not be completed. The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the New Zealand store, but it is available in the US Store. Click Change Store to view this item”.
Now, I’m aware that it’s possible to circumvent these absurd restrictions but if Dr Lowney is genuine about his desire to make educational materials readily available I think he should stop supporting a system where the distribution channel rather than the author decides who should have unencumbered access to his book.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that I have encountered this problem.

By: Binko Barnes

Binko Barnes — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 04:02:11 +0000

Joanna, it may be true that there are more available jobs in skilled trades than there are for people just out of the university. But, sadly, most of those jobs now pay next to nothing.

I was recently reading an article but the owner of a machine shop who claimed he would hire any properly skilled worker who applied. But his standards are so high that he only deemed 2 out of 500 applicants “skilled” and, to top it off, he pays $10 an hour to new hires.

The unfortunate truth is that there are very few paths available to young people today that lead to what we used to think of as a basic middle-class American lifestyle.

By: Joanna

Joanna — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 01:55:09 +0000

I think the other issue is that a number of factors are making a university education seem less like the golden ticket it used to be. With the cost being so high and the job prospects increasingly limited, people are seriously reconsidering the worth and a whole bunch of alternatives are gaining ground. My co-worker’s daughter is taking a combined degree/diploma program where the diploma credits count as the electives needed for her degree, so she can finish both in the same timeframe and come out with a marketable skill. That’s just one example. And meanwhile, all those people buying into the ‘university is a golden ticket’ mentality has led to a huge skills shortage in the skilled trades, to the point where the pendulum is shifting and governments here are actively trying to market skilled trades to high school kids as solid, well-paying careers. Good luck getting kids to pay $100 a pop for psychology textbooks when all the good jobs are in the trades…