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reconciling new forms of scholarly activity with old standards continues to be difficult, creating tension and raising questions as to where faculty energy is best directed.

Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university

There is a greater need than ever for effective tools and filters for finding, interpreting, organizing, and retrieving the data that is important to us.

Results suggest that there is no significant difference in the Amazon rankings. This suggests that releasing academic books on open access does not lessen printed book sales online in comparison with traditional university presses using Amazon.com and Amazon.ca rankings. On the other hand, AUPress, because it is open access and publicly available at no cost, can boast of having a significantly larger readership for its books. The traditional university presses, because of their cost, print-only format, and other proprietary limitations are not readily available and therefore not accessible to many potential readers.

if you’re publishing, think beyond the financial impact of a book. Consider peripheral factors such as extending the reach of your work and non-monetary reward factors such as connecting with colleagues in emerging economies, speaking invitations, collaboration opportunities, etc.

While used textbooks are obviously less costly, they often carry another benefit new textbooks don't: highlights, underscores and other annotations by their previous owners. Even though the author of, and rationale for, the annotations may be unknown, the fact that somebody found particular sections of the book important enough to emphasize tends to make the eye linger. Ideally, annotations can make learning and knowledge discovery feel less like a solitary pursuit and more like a collaborative effort.

At first glance, it would seem that the trustworthiness of an unknown individual who has interpreted or appended an author's work would be questionable, but several reasonable assumptions can be made that contribute to the perceived authority of an unknown annotator. At the very least, they read the work and took the time to make the annotations, which may question or clarify certain statements in the text, and create links to other works, authors or ideas. The subsequent reader of an annotated work then has one or more additional perspectives from which to evaluate the usefulness of the text and annotations, and more implied permission to add his or her own interpretations than in an unannotated text. Published scholarly works are objects for discussion in an ongoing conversation among a community of knowledge seekers, and whether via formal citation in later publications or annotations in existing ones, all are designed to advance the generation and exchange of ideas.

Most critically, knowledge discovery and transfer is no longer restricted to a model of one expert creator to many consumers. In Web 2.0, consumers are creators, who can add their voices to both expert and non-expert claims. Users get the benefit of multiple perspectives and can evaluate claims in the best tradition of participative, critical inquiry.