Save On College Expenses by Downloading Free Textbooks
September 7, 2013
After paying tuition, dorm fees, moving expenses, and for a meal plan, college students can expect to pay an extra six hundred or more on textbooks. Purchasing college textbooks has always had the feel of a racketeering group, where only the book publisher, bookstore, and occasionally the professor who assigns his book to make a couple extra dollars profit. The student is always left out in the cold with barely a few bucks for reselling their books back at a quarter of the price.
Textbooks are also a bother in their physical format, but thankfully there are alternatives in the digital age. Students can buy cheaper digital versions through Amazon and other textbook Web sites, but the savvy student is aware of free resources out there. Lifehacker tells us about, “Download Free, Open Source Textbooks From OpenStax College.” Rice University’s OpenStax College is where many students will be able to find their textbooks:
“This nonprofit initiative is supported by philanthropic foundations and the peer-reviewed textbooks are provided to over 200 universities and colleges, as well as individual students. Currently about a dozen textbooks are available, covering mostly the sciences, but history, economics, and other subjects are coming soon.”
The books are downloadable in EPUB or PDF formats and available to read on mobile devices. The selections are small at the moment, but expect it to grow. The article also points to other free textbook Web resources.
Whitney Grace, September 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
Inkling to Underpin Prominent Academic Publishers in the Digital Realm
August 20, 2013
Well, this is an interesting move. PaidContent reports, “iPad Publisher Inkling Nabs $16M and Partners with Pearson and Elsevier.” The series C funding places Inkling’s Habitat platform at the heart of Pearson‘s and Elsevier‘s digital operations. The article informs us:
“Pearson — along with McGraw Hill — has already invested in Inkling a couple times, but now Inkling’s cloud-based publishing platform, Habitat, will serve as both Pearson and Elsevier’s primary digital content development platform, with all of their new digital content being constructed through it. Elsevier will also bring 650 existing medical textbooks to the platform. Right now, Inkling has around 550 titles available for iPhone, iPad and web.
“The $16 million funding round was led by Sequoia Capital. Inkling raised $17 million in August 2011 and an unspecified amount from McGraw-Hill and Pearson earlier that year. CEO Matt MacInnis told me the funding will be used to help large publishers integrate Habitat into their product workflows, as well as to ‘address the next tier of large publishers who will be using Habitat’ by hiring more people.”
Hiring is good, and a few new VPs have already been put in place. Founded in 2009, Inkling strives to reimagine learning materials by breaking down the assumptions that remain from our history with paper-based books. We are reminded of another Elsevier smart-content business, the engineering-focused Knovel, and are happy to see that site is still going strong. We hope Inkling fares as well with this new deal.
Cynthia Murrell, August 20, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Dead Trees Still Have Fans
August 19, 2013
Print is dead, right? Nope. According to a recent survey conducted by Rasmussen Reports three out every four adults prefer to read a traditional paper book when asked the question: Would you rather read a book in a traditional printed format or on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle? The results are discussed in the article, “75% Prefer Traditional Book To Electronic Reading Device.” In a phone survey, 1,000 adults were polled about their book reading habits on July 11-12, 2013. The respondents were asked the following questions:
“1. When was the last time you bought a book of any kind – within the last month, within the last three months, within the last six months, within the last year or more than one year ago?
2.When you buy a book, are you most likely to go to an actual bookstore, go to some other retail store, order it over the Internet or download it to your e-reader?
3. Would you rather read a book in a traditional printed format or on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle?
4. Regardless of what you prefer, do you usually read a book in the traditional printed format or on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle?
5. Have you ever seen a book title in a traditional bookstore and then, instead of buying it in the store, downloaded it to your computer or electronic reader?
6. How important is the price of books in your decision whether to get an electronic book-reading device?”
Fifteen percent enjoy using electronic devices, while ten percent are left undecided. A 95% confidence level and a 3% margin of error make this an accurate survey, except for a few factors. What was the age group of the respondents? Baby Boomers and older are most likely traditional book fans, because it what they have been conditioned too. Generation X is probably divided in favor and against, while the Millennials are more of a digital generation. The results may be accurate, but the demographics are skewed. Traditional books will be around for a while longer; a niche group will always prefer them like music on vinyl.
Whitney Grace, August 19, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
The Price of News: The Post Deal
August 7, 2013
I have been following the flood of information about Jeff Bezos’ apparent purchase of the The Washington Post. I use the word “apparent” because it is not clear if Mr. Bezos or Nash Holdings LLC bought the newspaper. For the purpose of this Beyond Search item, let’s assume that a Bezos-controlled entity has the keys to the Lego kit with millions of blocks that the Washington Post represents. Building a profitable newspapers may be like taking the brightly colored blocks and assembling them in just the right way to build a cash machine.
Can Jeff Bezos build a money machine from the many Lego blocks that make up the Washington Post? Image from Lego Corp. at http://goo.gl/QG0xU2.
The obvious point is that Mr. Bezos, an Internet business superstar, sees riches where others see union hassles, declining advertising revenues, and “real” journalism about the most exciting place in the swampy area bordering on the Potomac.
Reuters’ take on the deal was interesting. The story “Amazon’s Bezos Pays Hefty Price for Washington Post.” Thomson Reuters rarely overpays for its acquisitions, so I interpreted the headline as a suggestion that Mr. Bezos’ financial skills are not up to Thomson Reuters’ standards. Both Thomson Reuters and Amazon have cost control challenges, and it is not clear which organization is better positioned for the economic storms which are forming on the horizon.
The Reuters’ story states:
The multibillionaire founder of online retailer Amazon.com Inc may have paid more than four times the price that the financial results of the Washington Post suggests it is worth.
Before the Reuters’ era, Thomson Corp. sold most of its newspaper properties. I wonder if some of the Thomson Corp. era executives are asking, “Why didn’t we meet with this fellow?” Too late now I suppose.
The other interesting angle on the Washington Post deal appeared in “Bezos Brings Promise of Innovation to Washington Post.” (Note: this link may go dead due to the pay wall stuff at the venerable newspaper.) The headline uses an interesting word “promise”. There is no guarantee that Amazon’s WalMart approach will work with “real” journalism. The write up says:
Penguin and Random House Converge
August 7, 2013
Penguindom House is here, we decided after reading “World Blockbuster in Penguin and Random Merger” at the U.K.’s Express. After the deal, said to create the world’s biggest consumer publishing company, the new entity will employ over 10,000 workers. Regarding the combined talent and titles, the write-up tells us:
“[The merger] brings together Penguin authors including Dawn French and Zadie Smith and Random House writers such as Andy McNab and Dan Brown, while the enlarged business has a back catalogue that takes in the likes of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen.”
John Fallon, head of the education-focused Pearson, Penguin‘s parent company, is optimistic. (For the record, media firm Bertelsmann owns Random House. The two larger companies share ownership of the new entity almost equally.) Fallon states:
“This combination creates a clear world leader with a strong platform for continued creative and commercial success in a rapidly changing consumer publishing industry.”
Rapidly changing, indeed. Will this noteworthy development change the way writers must go about getting their work published, even through traditional, wood-pulp based channels? Will it stimulate interest in the self-publishing platforms available from Amazon, Apple, and others? Stay tuned.
Cynthia Murrell, August 07, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Big Law Gets Small: Trimming at LexisNexis?
July 31, 2013
A reader alerted me to “LexixNexis Laying Off 500 Employees.” The key point of the story is that 500 employees are now free to become search engine optimization experts, azure chip consultants, or life coaches. Here’s the passage which I noted:
“LexisNexis continuously reviews its needs, operations and other factors to identify what resources and services are necessary to optimally support our customers and improve business operations. As a result of this ongoing process, we regularly build teams in certain areas of the business and reduce in others to be able to deliver next-generation solutions to customers. On balance, the total number of employees across the LexisNexis business remains consistent with prior years.”
On the bright side, LexisNexis had 122 job openings in June 2013. Presumably these new hires will work on Flavio Villanustre’s Big Data and HPCC systems. I know about this initiative because a LexisNexis PR agency, obviously not terminated, wrote me, asserting:
Fraud is rampant in the issuance of government subsidies and Big Data is shedding light on the losses and inefficiencies. Whether it is outrage that the OMB pays millions, almost $25M, in agriculture subsidies to farmers who have been dead for years or that the state of Florida’s DCF system distributed more than $27B in public assistance to Floridians with estimates that 3-5% of those dollars are lost to fraud.
Yep, fraud.
Rampant. Lawyers who must purchase for-fee online research are indeed available to work on these projects. Lots and lots of lawyers, including those dissatisfied with the promises of some law school recruitment professionals.
Free spending lawyers seem to be almost as rare as a literate high school graduates. The for-fee legal services may face more revenue pressures in the future.
However, I like the fraud thing. LexisNexis’ competitors are doing some fancy dancing tool Thomson Reuters sold some units recently. Ebsco is pushing money from one pocket to another with reorganization and bookkeeping. At least, LexisNexis is trying to go in a new direction. However, the Big Data and fraud path is well traveled. Outfits like Altegrity and IBM are also offering fraud services.
Will the traditional professional publishing companies make their various strategies work? Employees certainly hope so. Who wants to be one of the “500” at the digital battle of Thermopylae facing lawyers who will not pay a premium for online legal information?
Stephen E Arnold, July 31, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Law Firms and For Fee Legal Information
July 22, 2013
I know a couple of attorneys. In most cases, I recall the line from Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” I think Dick the butcher may have been over-reacting. Those with legal training may wish to consider the flip side of over-reacting.
I read “The Last Days of Big Law: You Can’t Imagine the Terror When the Money Dries Up.” Maybe the story, like some azure chip consultants, are making bologna? Maybe the story has a grain of truth?
The main point is that the good old days of lawyering seem to be drifting into the hazy past. Quaint notions like a nuclear family and near-universal literacy for a high school graduate, the legal profession is undergoing some dramatic changes. The write up asserts:
“Stable” is not the way anyone would describe a legal career today. In the past decade, twelve major firms with more than 1,000 partners between them have collapsed entirely. The surviving lawyers live in fear of suffering a similar fate, driving them to ever-more humiliating lengths to edge out rivals for business. “They were cold-calling,” says the lawyer whose firm once turned down no-name clients. And the competition isn’t just external. Partners routinely make pitches behind the backs of colleagues with ties to a client. They hoard work for themselves even when it requires the expertise of a fellow partner. They seize credit for business that younger colleagues bring in.
The paragraph could be applied to MBAs at some consulting firms or to managers at a search or content processing company.
I am not concerned about lawyers. I will leave their fate to Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher.
The real impact of this story on me was that it underscores the financial challenges ahead for firms dependent on lawyers for online revenue. There are only a handful of commercial online services which deliver the information lawyers need to help their clients prevail. The free information is usually spotty and somewhat inconsistent. When I was a callow youth, I assumed that the various governmental entities would make certain types of legal information available to the public. So far the best bet to track down certain types of information is to use a for fee online service from a company like Thomson Reuters (WestLaw), Reed Elsevier (Lexis), Wolters Kluwer (many information services), and some generalist for fee services like ProQuest or Ebsco.
If the New Republic story is accurate, the market for often costly, commercial databases containing legal information is getting smaller. The firms which are left may be shrinking as well. There will be exceptions such as the US and other governments’ appetite for one-click access to laws, regulations, and more mundane information like procurement data. But when the market seems to be shrinking, what are the options available to the commercial publishers, value-adders, and aggregators of legal information? I thought of three:
First, the firms will just sell out. If this scenario plays out, there will be a Google or Amazon of for-fee legal information. Depending on what MBA course you completed, this is [a] great, [b] inevitable, or [c] two of the above.
Second, prices will rise. The cost of creating commercial databases is high. Despite the chatter about smart software, crafting a commercial database which is accurate, current, and reasonably easy to use takes a lot of money. The database publishers have, in many cases, already chopped costs to the bone. The result will be rising prices and probably some drop off in quality. I don’t see the excellence funded by the glory days of “get everything” profligacy returning.
Third, some of the commercial outfits will go out of business. I have watched a number of commercial databases spiral into debt. One trajectory is that the database back file gets snagged by a bottom feeder (a term of endearment for companies which buy failing proprietary databases but do not maintain them at their former level of quality). In some cases, a service goes away.
I can envision some other options, but I think that the New Republic article makes a good case for watching what happens in the legal sector of the professional publishing information business. Will reality influence the news releases and marketing of the for fee legal products and services? Not too much. I find the disconnect between the marketing and the reality of an eroding market quite interesting.
Stephen E Arnold, July 22, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Thomson Reuters and NASDAQ: Shedding Weight
July 17, 2013
A year or so ago, a client asked the ArnoldIT team to take a look at Thomson Reuters. The results were not particularly surprising. The company continued to undergo management shake ups, product proliferation via XML-powered slicing and dicing of content, and various MBA maneuvers to make the numbers look as good as possible. In short, nothing surprising.
What emerged from our analysis was a series of observations about the future of Thomson Reuters. One of the points was, “Thomson Reuters will either have to sell part of itself or some of its crown jewels.”
“Nasdaq Closes Thomson Reuters Deal” suggests that our observation was mostly correct. According to Zacks:
Announced in Dec 2012, the deal was inked for $390 million, whereby the company had agreed to obtain the Public Relations, Investor Relations and Multimedia Solutions businesses of Thomson Reuters. These three businesses will now be amalgamated with Nasdaq’s Global Technology Solutions operations.
Thomson Reuters still has some work to do to get back on the fast-growth track. However, the job is not likely to be quick or easy. The company has markets which are shrinking. The demand for some of the firm’s reference products continues to soften. Competitors face essentially the same problems so traditional professional publishing companies are growing more vulnerable to what MBAs once called “discontinuities.”
What we will be looking for includes:
- More divestitures. Thomson has been a fan of acquisitions, but what the company sheds is often far more important to Thomson Reuters’ watchers
- More cost cutting. Thomson Reuters has made all of the easy cost cuts. The ones which may come in the future will draw blood and may harm the company’s long-term prospects
- More competition. With traditional professional publishing products and services holding the line on pricing, some upstarts will be angling for a share of the once-endlessly lucrative markets companies like Thomson Reuters once called their back yard.
Exciting times ahead for professional publishing companies.
Stephen E Arnold, July 17, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Cornered in a Nook in Book and Toy Store
July 9, 2013
Yesterday evening I stopped at the local Barnes & Noble store. I wanted to ask a couple of the workers about the resignation of the Barnes & Noble CEO. I learned about this development in the story “Barnes & Noble CEO Resigns.” The main point of the story is that Barnes & Noble has not been able to make headway in a tough market. The article focused more specifically on the Nook eReader, pointing out:
Barnes & Noble has largely failed to adapt to the growing tablet and e-reader market. And although its Android-based Nook tablets have received decent reviews, they haven’t been selling very well.
When the Nook hit my radar, I wrote “The Nook Hook: Not Knowing What You Do Not Know.” I based my observation on my experience with manager from one business assuming that their expertise applies to another business. Technology often throws curve balls at folks who see nothing special about creating a high-tech gizmo or a software program.
Now back to my on site data collection. I asked the Nook sales person who was standing in the New York Times best seller section (not at the Nook counter), what do you think about the management shake up? The response, “What management shake up?” I moved to the check out lane to pay for a watch magazine I snagged. I asked, “What do you think of the management shake up?” The person responded, “What? Hey, are you a member of the discount club?” I replied, “Nope, I don’t need a toy store discount.” The young clerk looked confused. “Toy store?” he queried. I paid and left.
I concluded from this quite shallow research:
- News of the shake up did not reach the workers at my Barnes & Noble store
- I did not purchase a Barnes & Noble discount card because my local stores are more like card and knick knack shops than book stores I recall from my youth
- I was the only customer buying reading matter. There were several people in the snack shop looking at books and magazines.
Here in Louisville, Kentucky, the Nook has not sparked much interest in me. I fear for the future of my local Barnes & Noble. I am not sure an expanded book light section and a dwindling stock of actual books will kindle sales. Oops. Kindle is not a pun. No, really.
After the failure of the publisher of my New Landscape of Search, I have decided to make my monographs available directly from Xenky.com under the Beyond Search “brand.” Too bad that book stores and publishers assume that the old content world is easy to manage. MBAs are so darned confident. Perhaps a listen to the Harvard Business Review podcast will bolster the management acumen.
Stephen E Arnold, July 9, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
Judge The Work By Its Quality
July 8, 2013
Let us stroll down the laurelled lanes of academia for a moment and gaze at the mountains of published articles in academic journals. If you have ever stepped into a university library or searched through an academic database, you will realize that most of these articles probably do not get read. The purpose of being published is being read, correct? The technical answer is yes, but really the answer is no. William M. Briggs takes a jab at academic publishing in his blog post, “Scientists Discover Way To Increase Publication.” Being published is a means as survival for many academics, but there is an overwhelming (and alarming) status quo: only good news hits the ink.
This methodology causes false facts to be considered truth. Briggs brings up the “Trust In Science Would Be Improved By Study Pre-Registration” signed by more than eighty signatories and for the scientific community to require pre-registration for publishing before results are in. The idea is that journals would publish whatever the results and reduce the amount of “making a piece publishable” thought processes.
Briggs does not think that is the solution:
“There will be a minor flood of papers pre-registering sketchy theories, and these will be all that is remembered. Some authors will publish their negative results, but many will forget them and move on to more fertile grounds. The bulk of these maybe-so works will be taken as positive evidence even if positive effects are never found or if negative effects are published.”
More papers will be published, but the rate of them being read is even lower because there will be too many. Briggs wants people to judge a paper by its quality and not the quantity. How often have we heard this before? An idealist hope, but not impossible—almost though. What questions can we draw about integrity? Just remember to always question and do research on your own.
Whitney Grace, July 08, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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