Angela Maiers Tests the Waters of Digital Publishing

Posted on | March 29, 2009 | 4 Comments

Back in the summer of last year, I wrote a couple of longish posts (first post; second post) about what I termed the ‘persistent fetish’ of the book. My basic point, over the two pieces, was that the book as we know it is undoubtedly about to be caught up in the same digital whirlwind that has already played havoc with the music market and is in the process of doing the same for the newspaper, TV and movie industries. The debate that has arisen around the arrival of Amazon’s Kindle 2, a debate that encompasses critical questions of copyright and ‘tethering’ as well as the fast-developing medium itself, is just the leading edge of a storm that will blow cold and hard through the dusty corridors of book publishing over the next few years. Disintermediation beckons for books!

Some brave souls are already, of course, jumping into digital publishing, and one who is leading the way in the sphere of education, not surprisingly, is Angela Maiers, with a book published on lulu.com called Classroom Habitudes: How to Teach 21st Century Learning Habits and Attitudes.

Angela is, first and foremost, a teacher, and her book is precisely the kind of publication that digital publishing can serve up effectively: a niche subject with a niche readership, and one that traditional publishing will often shy away from because its potential readership is just too difficult to predict with certainty. It is the kind of book – a rich and practical resource written by a professional for professionals – that might find an audience of a few hundred, but which could easily go on to appeal to many thousands. By publishing in digital form, Angela’s readers have the choice of downloading a digital version in PDF form or ordering a hard-copy, professionally printed and bound. I ordered the bound copy out of sheer nosiness and, in my opinion, the final perfect-bound product matches up closely to what I see from traditional publishers on the shelves of bookshops.

So, while the theoretical and philosophical discourse about the future of education in the digital age rages around us, a debate to which Angela Maiers is herself a contributor on a number of fronts, there will always be a place and a need for some grounded, practical advice and support for the classroom teacher looking to offer relevant and up-to-the-minute lessons. Angela furnishes her readers with the outcome of years of hands-on classroom experience within the pages of this book. With a foreword from Dr Scott Mcleod, the book provides lesson plans, references, resources, and planning tools, and it takes teachers through the six key ‘habitudes’ identified by Angela: imagination, curiosity, perseverance, self-awareness, courage and adaptability. The portmanteau word might grate on some ears, but the ideas that the word encompasses should not.

And, finally, anyone who dismisses this kind of venture as mere vanity publishing really and simply does not appreciate the barrier to useful and worthwhile books that has been kept in place for so long by the traditional publishing industry. Digital publishing will bring us one very significant step closer to the reality of David Weinberger’s notion of filtering on the way out rather than on the way in. Intermediates, such as traditional publishers, have decided for us for too long what we can buy in the bookshops or find in our libraries (and these are both institutions that I hope and believe have lives beyond the disintermediation of the book). From here on in, and with rapidly increasing volume in the next few years, we will more and more be able to filter what we want to publish, and what we want to read, for ourselves. That is a good thing in my (digital) book!

Postscript: I’ve just noticed that Ted Nelson has also published a book on Lulu – Geeks Bearing Gifts. A little surprisingly, perhaps, for a man who has been in the digital avant garde for so long, he offers it only in bound paperback form – what a shame…….

Technorati Tags: book publishing, disintermediation, angela maiers, habitudes

Category: books, change, content, copyright, economics, education, teaching

Comments

4 Responses to “Angela Maiers Tests the Waters of Digital Publishing”

Joe Nutt
March 29th, 2009 @ 7:16 pm

This is a really interesting one John. Sony’s e-book sold quite well at Christmas, it’s thought mainly because they bundled 100 classic novels in with it. But what they subsequently found was that purchasers bought on average less than 2 e-books. That seems to suggest people are still not quite ready to read ‘books’ on screen. The research done at UCL recently, where millions of users’ website use was analysed, found that on average people spend less than 50secs on each web site. Their conclusion was that people channel hop the web just as Americans channel hop TV. I think both things suggest that the perhaps the technology is actually undermining the quality of the reading act itself.

I actually published a novel online, way back in about 1998 with the first online publisher, Online originals. I won’t embarrass myself by disclosing the size of the cheque I earned on that one.
John Connell
March 29th, 2009 @ 8:17 pm

I think you’re right, Joe – the key phrase you use, I believe, is ‘not quite ready’. Inevitably, it will be ‘ready’ one day, and possibly sooner rather than later. It could be a Kindle-like development, or it might utilize some form of e-paper that folds away in your pocket – who knows? But it will come.

When the technology is ready, my guess is that the effect, over time, will be even more disruptive in many ways than is proving to be the case in the music industry. I think there are many more ‘writers’ out there than ‘musicians’, so we are likely to see an explosion in vanity publishing, despite what I say above. My point though is that in amongst the vain dross (wasn’t he a soul singer?), there will be gems, worthwhile books that would never otherwise have seen the light of day, many (most) with readerships that will struggle to reach even 2 or 3 figures (but an audience of 8 or 15 genuine readers is better than an audience of zero).

Musicians are realizing that they have to go back to gigging to make money, since the money to be made from sales of their disc-based recordings is plummeting. The concept of the album is disappearing under the weight of an infinite selection of individual tracks. What will be the equivalent effect in book publishing? It might, for instance, mean that the market for books in the future will be harder to manipulate in the way that certainly happens at the moment, where a tiny number of not very good writers capture huge chunks of both the fiction and non-fiction markets either because of their celebrity status or because the distribution channels and marketing efforts are so tightly controlled on their behalfs. Might it be possible that a market for books built from the bottom up rather than from the top down will be a more genuinely utilititarian and democratic market, one that meets real needs of real readers rather than ‘needs’ manufactured amongst those, for instance, who choose to watch artfully-designed reality-TV programmes on a Saturday evening? Might we even return to the 21st century equivalent of the Victorian penny dreadful, in which novel-length tales were dispatched to the readers one chapter at a time?

The possible scenarios are fascinating to ponder and difficult to predict. What happens to the notion of a library, the kind with a relatively fixed stock of books that are freely lent, in a situation where any book might be printed on demand for a small fee? Is the book ‘fetish’ (which I try to define, unsatisfactorily, in those earlier posts mentioned above) strong enough that the bookshop with shelves full of pre-printed paper books can continue to exist in that same scenario of cheap POD books? What happens to the second-hand book trade in a world where no book is any longer, in effect, out-of-print? And can that specialized corner of the second-hand book trade that deals in antiquarian books survive on the strength of that strange fetish many of us have for the original musty tattered ‘real’ object?

I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do hope that the book ‘trade’, in its widest sense (writer, publisher, distributor, seller, etc), is doing a better job of working out its possible futures, and doing so more intelligently, than has been the case with the pathetic and moronic dinosaurs who appear to be in charge of the recorded music industry.
Neil Winton
March 29th, 2009 @ 9:20 pm

Picking up on Joe’s point about the number of e-books subsequently bought, and your own analogy with the music industry, I think it is worth considering that sales are not really a true indicator of the impact of a particular technology.

Apple are notoriously secretive, and only let on what they want the public to know, but a quick bit of investigation and arithmetic does make me wonder if we are missing something…

By Feb 2006, the iPod had sold roughly 43 million units. This was also the month that the iTMS sold the billionth(?) song/download. A simple division sum tells us that the average iPod has only got 24 legal songs on it… yet I don’t know of anyone with only 24 songs on their iPod.

OK, many people will have ripped their own CDs (illegally!), but the numbers still don’t stack up. In essence, we are looking at a large number of songs on iPods whose provenance is unaccounted for. Yet they are part of the (perhaps only) reason that iPods have been such a success. So, where am I going with this?

I think there is a need to recognise that it is not the technology that will aid or hinder the adoption of the e-book as such, it is simply that there is not really the market for them that there is for music. Historically, we have adapted to being able to carry our music around with us where and when we want. The Sony Walkman made sure of that, and the iPod is simply the natural result of this, but music fails as an analogy because we don’t just listen to a song once. We listen to it time and time again. That’s why, when we borrowed an album from a friend (on 12″ vinyl), we would make a recording so that we could keep a copy. This has lead to a culture where we think nothing of borrowing/recording/stealing music as we see fit. There is no equivalent approach to books… In general, we read a book once. Then we horde it on our shelves. Some of us lend books to friends… but we know that the friend is not photocopying the entire book for later consumption. In short, we value the artefact that is the book as much as we value the content of the book, but that doesn’t mean we want to carry it with us all the time, or indeed, own a copy of it.

I fear that the e-book readers (like Kindle) are doomed because there isn’t the market for books that there is for music. The torrent sites are filled with music and software, not e-books (though I acknowledge that there are quite a few there)…

Online publishing sites like lulu mean that we can download content, but as Joe points out, we are not yet ready to commit to reading a whole book unless we try and pretend it is a book by putting it into a pseudo-book like the Kindle or Sony.

As a final thought, I’m interested in Angela Maier’s book, but if I do buy it, I’m going to be getting the printed version, even if it does cost twice as much!
Angela Maiers
March 30th, 2009 @ 12:05 pm

John-
What a fantastic conversation you have started here. Thank you for sharing my publishing journey, but more importantly bringing this “disruption” to the publishing industry to the forefront.

You are spot on with the comparison to the music industry. No longer do individuals have to rely on an agent, expensive “demos”, and a publicist to make their mark in the world. This did not interfere with sales of “established” artists, but opened the door to new talent that might not otherwise have been heard.

What an exciting time we live in as artists, researchers, writers, and poets. I am proud to lead educators down the path to sharing their own stories, experiences, and talents. Thank you for supporting the journey!