Group items tagged

University presses are rethinking how they approach the publishing industry's biggest shindig. Scott McLemee reports.

A Report of the AAUP Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing

The Authors Guild filed suit against five universities and the digital tower, called HathiTrust, that those universities created to preserve and make available to students and faculty scans of books from their collections.

This week, California took a big step forward in open-source education. Governor Jerry Brown signed into law a proposal to create a website that will allow students to download popular textbooks for free. The legislation contains two bills: One, a proposal for the state to fund 50 open-source digital textbooks, targeted to lower-division courses, which will be produced by California's universities. The other bill is a proposal to establish a California Digital Open Source Library to host those books.

Is Dennis Johnson their EIC? Sound Like a good gig for him.

Several universities have recently tried a new model for delivering textbooks in hopes of saving students money: requiring purchase of e-textbooks and charging students a materials fee to cover the costs. A recent report on some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks "clumsy" and prefer print.

While several colleges across the country are pushing electronic textbooks, touting them as more efficient and less cumbersome than regular textbooks, students are reluctant. E-textbooks still account for only 9% of textbook purchases, says Student Monitor, which researches college student behavior.

Cohort 7: a new book on Watergate written by a GW professor. "Professor Thomas Mallon's new book on Watergate focuses on seven figures who played a key part in President Nixon's life and downfall."

This is a bit dated, but the topic is right on point given our recent discussions on small, independent presses and business model innovation.

Code of best practices for interpreting fair use in education.

I thought that this was worth reading because it is a back-up plan for the Google scanning project.

There is an event at the GW main campus tonight about careers in publishing. I just found out about it, and thought I would pass it along in case anyone is interested in attending.