Media Week (V7, N52): Looking forward to 2014. Round-up of predictions.

On UK newspapers, the apocalypse has been averted (Guardian)

It's exactly four years since – at a heavyweight conference in eastern Europe – I heard an expert on the communications apocalypse predict that, only five years hence, printed newspapers would be dead and digitally buried. The trends, he said, were clear. Umm… not exactly. There's an awful lot of perishing left to cram into the next 12 months, and it shows no sign of happening any time soon. Indeed, rather the reverse. Bring on Ken Doctor, a great American guru, offering us five, 10 or more 15 years to choose from. Nemesis indefinitely delayed.
And the most fascinating thing about the ABC-sanctified print circulation results (for November) involve two politically polar opposites on the newsstand: the Telegraph and the Guardian. Both belong to the national quality market. Both, over the years, have cleared out bulk sales and other devices that prop up or confuse their sales figures. Both have solid and growing online statistics to boast about: the Telegraph with 13,855,000 unique visitors and the Guardian with 12,301,000 on the latest UKOM results. They leave everything but the inevitable Mail online far behind. But what does this mean for print, for copies pushed across the newsagent's counter or dropped through a letterbox?

In Hollywood everyone knows the same nothing (Economist)

Since everybody still knows that nobody knows, studios continue to show early cuts of films to focus groups, to determine how to tweak and market them. But even after a film’s release it remains unclear why it boomed or bombed. Why was “Gravity”, starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in a tale about stranded astronauts, one of this year’s hits despite the misgivings of its studio, Warner Bros, whereas “The Lone Ranger” was such a flop, despite Disney’s high hopes for a film starring Johnny Depp?
“Hollywood is always in crisis,” jokes an unusually publicity-shy talent agent. Indeed, his office is in Century City, a district full of high-rises in Los Angeles that was once the backlot of 20th Century-Fox until it had to sell up because of the crippling cost of its 1963 epic, “Cleopatra”. Faced with bankruptcy 50 years ago, Fox might have been better off keeping the property and junking the film-making. The industry’s return on capital has been chronically anaemic. The media conglomerates that own the major studios grouse about the lousy economics of the business, particularly since DVD sales peaked in 2004 and then waned, with consumers shifting to lower-cost rentals and subscription services like Netflix. Technology should have helped Hollywood, by lowering the cost of distributing films, but it has also cost the industry dearly, as film-makers doll up their movies with expensive special effects, and negative social-media buzz kills films before they even open.

Will 2014 be the year of the eBook subscription model (Publishing Technology):

It’s quite likely that we’ll look back at 2013 as the year when publishing stopped talking about the ‘Netflix’ or ‘Spotify for Books’ and actually did something about it. eBook subscription services went from being something talked about in op-ed articles and conference platforms to real-life services, some of which launched with tens of thousands of titles and support from major publishers.
Most debate has focused on the fortunes of Oyster, the NYC-based start-up that launched earlier this year and Scribd, a service that has pivoted away from document sharing and publishing towards eBook subscription. Yet these are far from the only eBook subscription services in town. Another US-based service eReatah also launched earlier this year. Amazon has entered the market on its own terms, using eBook lending rather than subscription as a way of boosting membership of the Amazon Prime program. Meanwhile Europe’s fragmented ereading market is at risk of further fragmentation as country-specific subscription services emerge. 24Symbols continued to do well in its Spanish speaking home market and two Dutch publishers WPG Uitgevers B.V. and Lannoo Meulenhoff B.V. have teamed up to create a Netherlands-specific equivalent Riddo. In Denmark Riidr One addresses the relatively small domestic market with its own subscription service and in Germany the recently launched Skoobe boasts a 23,500 strong catalogue.

Ad agency Millward Brown's media predictions for 2014.

Digital BookWorld's list of 10 things to look for in 2014:

It’s been another exciting year for the publishing industry – perhaps the most dynamic in the history of the business. In 2013, all ebooks by publishers became subject to retailer price controls and ebook prices plummeted. At the same time, ebook revenue growth has tapered off even as many of the largest publishers still reported digital gains. A handful of ebook subscription businesses were launched and libraries won some key victories in their fight to bring ebooks from all publishers to their patrons.

From Book Business Magazine the future looks bright for 2014

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Image: So goes the Holden

GM announced this week that they were ending Australian production of the Holden.  Off into the dust...

Hard to categorize that color.  Other than very ugly.  Both images from 1973.

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MediaWeek (Vol 7, N 50): Boundless reprieve, Tablet reading, Blackrock, IT Departments, Digital Film.

Boundless an innovative textbook start-up announced yesterday that they have settled a law suit brought against them by several large pubishing companies which accused the company of copyright violations.  (Chronicle)

The publishers’ suit alleged that Boundless had boasted that “they copy the precise selection, structure, organization, and depth of coverage of plaintiffs’ textbooks and then map in substitute text, right down to duplicating plaintiffs’ pagination.” Boundless argued, however, that the publishers were suing over beta-version material that was subsequently withdrawn and replaced by offerings built on open educational resources.
Ariel Diaz, the Boundless founder and chief executive, said in a blog post on Wednesday that the company “now has a clear path for building and marketing its OER-driven textbook alternatives without treading upon the plaintiffs’ rights, and it is confident that it is in compliance and will not have further legal issues with the plaintiff publishers.” The publishing companies, he added, “look forward to Boundless operating its business within the agreed-upon framework,” though he did not say what that was.

Are tablets really good in encouraging children to get immersed in reading? (Atlantic):

Best-selling children’s author Julia Donaldson, whose picture books dominate top 10 lists, explains why she vetoed an e-book version of her most famous title, The Gruffalo, in a 2011 article in the Guardian. “The publishers showed me an e-book ofAlice in Wonderland,” Donaldson said. “They said, ‘Look, you can press buttons and do this and that,’ and they showed me the page where Alice’s neck gets longer,” said Donaldson. “There’s a button the child can press to make the neck stretch, and I thought, well, if the child’s doing that, they are not going to be listening or reading.”

The typical argument for interactive stories goes like this: Soon enough, children will only read on screens, and where readers are going, publishers must follow. Kate Wilson, the founder of children’s publisher Nosy Crow argues that publishers must create reading experiences for touch-screen devices so that children will continue to read. “We shouldn’t go a little way down the digital path or do it half-heartedly and with reluctance,” she writes. “We should, I think, go to where our readers are going, and make sure that they read along the way.”

From The Economist, I found this article on Blackrock very interesting.  What you can do with data on a mega basis:

But “Aladdin”, the risk-management platform that occupies all those computers in the orchards, is not just used to look after BlackRock’s $4 trillion. The firm makes its facilities available in whole or in part to managers looking after $11 trillion more, a tally that has recently been growing by about $1 trillion a year. All told, Aladdin keeps its eyes on almost 7% of the world’s $225 trillion of financial assets. This is unprecedented—and it means flaws in the system could matter to more than just BlackRock, its investors and its customers. If that much money is being managed by people who all think with the same tools, it may be managed by people all predisposed to the same mistakes.
...
The system is based on a large and, its creators say, particularly well quality-controlled trove of historical data. On the basis of that information it uses “Monte Carlo” methods, which produce a large, randomly generated sample of the huge range of possible futures, to build up a statistical picture of what could happen to all sorts of stocks and bonds under a range of future conditions. These risk assessments cover both likely futures that matter day-to-day, and less probable but highly salient ones. A portfolio can, say, be stress-tested by being put through market turmoil modelled on that which followed Lehman Brothers’ collapse, to see what happens. Users can see their portfolio’s predicted response to a “tapering” of the Federal Reserve’s asset-buying programme or to the onset of a global flu pandemic.
The aim is not just to figure out how each stock, bond and derivative in a portfolio would move. It is also to check how correlated those movements are, and how that correlation could amplify a shock. For example: combining shares in an Indonesian bank, a bond issued by a European power company and a basket of mortgages secured on Canadian shopping malls might seem like a sensibly diversified portfolio. But some changes in credit availability might set them all tumbling. That is the sort of thing that Aladdin, having tracked such assets through previous crises, is meant to spot. Armed with insights from these simulations, traders managing large, complex portfolios can tweak their holdings accordingly.

And from the same Economist issue on IT departments and their struggles to keep up.

In theory, this is a fine opportunity for the IT department to place itself right at the centre of corporate strategy. In practice, the rest of the company is not always sure that the IT guys are up to the job—and they are often prepared to buy their own IT from outsiders if need be. Worse, it seems that a lot of IT guys doubt their own ability to keep up with the pace of the digital age. According to Dave Aron of Gartner, a research firm, in a recent survey of chief information officers around the world just over half agreed that both their businesses and their IT organisations were “in real danger” from a “digital tsunami”. “Some feel excited, some feel threatened,” says Mr Aron, “but nobody feels like it’s boring and business as usual.”
One reason for worry is that IT bosses are conservative by habit and with good reason. Above all they must keep essential systems running—and safe. Those systems are under continual attack. If they are breached, the head of IT carries the can. More broadly, IT departments like to know who is up to what. Many of them gave up one battle long ago, by letting staff choose their own smartphones (a trend known as “bring your own device”). When the chief executive insists on an iPhone rather than a fogeyish BlackBerry, it is hard to refuse.

Many years ago in one of my annual predictions, I suggested great things would come from digital distribution of movie films obviating the need to physical film distribution.  We may finally be there.  Economist

This new breed of programming is made possible by the spread of digital technology. Cinemas no longer rely on the delivery of 35mm reels, now that pictures can be delivered over satellite or broadband connections. Cinema-owners can make fuller use of their screens, and audiences see delights they would otherwise miss. “We have a presence in 78 Mexican cities,” says Alejandro Ramirez, the boss of Cinépolis, which runs plush cinemas in the Americas and India. “In the vast majority of these cities, there is no opera,” he notes. So far this year nearly 300,000 people worldwide have gone to see opera and other “alternative programming”, such as “Cirque du Soleil 3D”, a circus performance, at Cinépolis’s theatres.
Cinema-owners want to do more than beam in events. For instance, Tim Richards, the founder of Vue Cinemas, which operates chains in Europe and Taiwan, predicts that theatres will be rented during off-peak hours to video-game players to display contests on the big screen. “We are not trying to displace Hollywood films,” he says. “All we are trying to do is make better use of the assets we have.”

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PND Mansions

PND Mansions sold.  In a few days it will be leveled and a triple sized McMansion will begin to take its' place.  No regrets on our end and a small dividend for all the employees.

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Publishing Platforms Evolve

Interview in Research Information Magazine recently:

When the first big scholarly e-book programmes launched six or seven years ago there was plenty of excitement about putting e-books and e-journals on the same platform so that they could be searched together and this trend has continued.
As Michael Cairns, chief operating officer  online at Publishing Technology, observed: ‘Over the course of the last few years there has been a recognition that there is benefit to integrate not just books and journals but also conference proceedings.’ 

...

Publishing Technology, which also creates and hosts platforms for a range of publishers, has observed similar things. ‘On the journals side we always have issues with format for ingest and always anticipate some back and forth to get things how the customer wants,’ said Cairns. ‘Typically, we specify to publishers that we require XML but there are always exceptions and problems – especially with converting archives.’

And he said that the challenges are greater with e-books. ‘Books haven’t been online as long, so the issues are more basic. Often we will get a full book PDF that we need to break down into chapters – and metadata is often provided at the book level rather than at the chapter level.’
In addition, he noted that many things such as indexing, endnotes and footnotes work well in print book navigation – but in the online world, especially in content ingestion, these are problematic. ‘Even within publishing houses, processes are not consistent,’ he observed.

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MediaWeek (V7, N49): The pdf, French Publishing, Web News Traffic, MOOC Myths, Aftrica Reading

Can Scholarly Publishing Evolve Beyond the PDF? From John Wiley.


French authors can't get a break (BBC):

"I often joke that the only way to get published in Britain if you're French is to pretend you're Spanish. If you've been a best-seller in France, it's a sure-fire recipe for not getting a deal in the UK.  "As for US publishers, they're so convinced that with 350 million potential readers and a big stable of American writers, they've got everything covered - every genre, every style. So why bother?"  The costs and difficulty of literary translation are clearly part of the problem. So too is the fact that the Anglophone book market is thriving - so the demand for foreign works is limited.  Some French authors are critical of Anglo-Saxon "complacency". 
...
"Personally I am fed up with all the stereotypes," says Darieussecq. "We're not intellectual. We're not obsessed with words. We write detective stories. We write suspense. We write romance.
"And it's about time you started noticing."

How does news web traffic work?  The Atlantic goes looking.

About the middle of October, a number of news organization websites started to see huge numbers of visitors flowing from Facebook. Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel reported that Buzzfeed and its partner sites had seen traffic from Facebook surge 69 percent between August and October.
The change wasn’t out of nowhere. In August, a Facebook corporate blog post hinted that the algorithm that controlled the site’s News Feed was changing slightly, such that “stories that people did not scroll down far enough to see can reappear near the top […] if the stories are still getting lots of likes and comments.”
It sounds like a little change, but it’s hard to overstate the importance of the News Feed. The feed is what you see when you log into Facebook.com; it’s essentially the homepage of the site, and it changes for every user. What dictates how it looks is the elusive News Feed algorithm, a program that decides not only which statuses, photos, and news stories should display, but how many of each there will be. And a traffic jump of the size Warzel reported could only come with a change in the News Feed algorithm.
...
Enter Upworthy. Simultaneous to this traffic upheaval, an entire vocabulary and syntax for headlines that people click and share—and oh, boy, do they click and share—had presented itself on the social web. For publishers trying to grab more traffic from Facebook, the path became clear. Borrow, adapt, employ the Upworthy style post haste. Assure readers your content was nothing but wondtacular. And so began the wondtacularization.

Confirming the MOOC Myth: IHeD

The research presented on Thursday was perhaps best summarized by research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, which analyzed the study habits of 1 million students across 16 Coursera courses between June of 2012 and 2013.  “Emerging data ... show that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, that user ‘engagement’ falls off dramatically especially after the first 1-2 weeks of a course, and that few users persist to the course end,” a summary of the study reads.  For anyone who has paid even the slightest bit of attention to the MOOC space over the past year, those conclusions hardly qualify as revelations. Yet some presenters said they felt the first day of the conference served as an opportunity to confirm some of those commonly held beliefs about MOOCs.

BBC looks at the culture for reading in Africa (BBC)

Publishers have long bemoaned Africa's lack of a "book culture" but some hope that the advent of smartphones and the internet could help change this, writes journalist Chris Matthews. The 566% increase in worldwide internet usage since the start of the millennium might appear staggering but not when compared with Africa, where online activity has grown by an astonishing 3,606%.  More than 160 million people are now connected throughout the continent, mostly on mobile phones.  With internet access surging and connectivity increasing, the doors are being thrown open to digital publishing.  All of which suggests a new chapter has been started since Kenyan publisher Henry Chakava's withering attack on Africa's book culture back in 1997.

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Information Today Post on Trends for 2014

Information Today magazine asked me and some other pundits to think about what we may see in 2014:

There were plenty of newsworthy events in 2013, from acquisitions (Elsevier acquired Knovel, Swets acquired JSTOR ebooks), to ebooks (Ingram added an ebook lending model to MyiLibrary, Apple was tried for ebook price fixing), to MOOCs (institutions such as edX and Coursera offered topics including 21st Century American Foreign Policy, Introduction to Computer Science, and Embedded Systems: Shape the World). Tablet computers and apps gained in popularity, while previously favored devices such as BlackBerry found their customer bases declining.
So what’s likely to make headlines in 2014? Industry professionals John Blossom, Michael Cairns, Roy Kaufman, and Pat Sabosik offer their insights about the cloud, massive open online courses (MOOCs), Big Data, open access (OA), and the Internet of Things:

• Blossom predicts that Microsoft’s 2013 missteps will offer opportunities for Google and Apple.
• MOOCs may lead to the end of the traditional school year calendar, according to Cairns.
• Kaufman sees more OA group efforts such as CHORUS and SHARE in the coming year.
• Sabosik cites Business Insider’s prediction that 100 million wearable devices will be available in 2014.

Here is a sample from my submission:

The evolution of MOOCs will also become entwined with some broader issues of higher education effectiveness, cost, and access. More universities will see MOOCs as a means of managing some or all of these issues at a local level, whether they’re looking to reduce tuition (and/or operating expenses), provide more course offerings, or expand beyond their traditional market or catchment area. Experimentation will also include local testing of MOOCs used in combination with small in-class/in-person structures: This will provide more immediate social interactions and communication with colleagues while, at the same time, capitalizing on the “star professor” and the wide exposure to other student backgrounds that MOOCs can provide. 

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MediaWeek (V7 N48): Amazon Drones, Digital Afterlife, PW Person of the Year + More

Lots and hype and hyperbole about Amazon.com this week.   At least Scott Pelley at 60mins went right to the top and managed to keep his hands clean.  As you probably know by now,  Amazon is going to deliver your toys to you with a toy helicopter.

Amazon is the world's largest online retailer, serving 225M customers worldwide. What's next for the company that prides itself on disrupting tradition? Charlie Rose interviews Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.

Other reporters tried out the drudgery of working in a warehouse to see how they were treated.  Guardian.

For a week, I was an Amazon elf: a temporary worker who got a job through a Swansea employment agency – though it turned out I wasn't the only journalist who happened upon this idea. Last Monday, BBC's Panorama aired a programme that featured secret filming from inside the same warehouse. I wonder for a moment if we have committed the ultimate media absurdity and the show's undercover reporter, Adam Littler, has secretly filmed me while I was secretly interviewing him. He didn't, but it's not a coincidence that the heat is on the world's most successful online business. Because Amazon is the future of shopping; being an Amazon "associate" in an Amazon "fulfilment centre" – take that for doublespeak, Mr Orwell – is the future of work; and Amazon's payment of minimal tax in any jurisdiction is the future of global business. A future in which multinational corporations wield more power than governments.

And The Economist on the same story.

Kevin Roose in NY Mag believes something more sinister(ish):

Instead, I think Bezos is up to something much more practical. By unveiling a huge drone program in progress, he's sending a message to the FAA regulators and Senate committees who are currently considering how unmanned aircraft can be used commercially. And that message is: Don't even think about getting in our way. By floating a teaser about the drone program, and allowing the public to freak out about it, he's showing regulators how popular such a scheme would be, and how much backlash they'd face if they outlawed it.

Also, NYMag will now go to bi-monthly printing rather than weekly.  There's an iPad version.

"New York has evolved dramatically since its founding in 1968, with its intelligence, humor, playfulness, and visual punch remaining constants," editor-in-chief Adam Moss said in a statement. "Readers will continue to find what they love in the magazine, and we're undertaking these new changes to meet their changing media habits on all platforms."  The company did not address any financial reasons for its print publishing cuts in the statement.  Nymag.com will have a new science blog, and more photography and political and cultural coverage, according to New York Media.

Questions about the digital afterlife from the FT:

The elderly who die today still leave behind an attic full of relics for children and grandchildren to rifle through: boxes of love letters and photos documenting the family history. But increasingly, such memorabilia is password-protected and stored online. Many wedding albums exist only on Flickr. The history of courtship and falling in love among today’s young newlyweds is documented on Facebook and in text messages.

“Look how awful people are when they fight over the couch or dad’s graduation ring,” says Josh Slocum, president of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, an advocacy group. “I can only imagine what the fight will look like over dad’s computer files.”
In the US, such questions fall into the messy intersection of state property laws, federal privacy laws and corporate policies of the companies housing online accounts.

A handful of US states have passed laws addressing the treatment of digital remains. In Oklahoma and Idaho, digital data are treated like tangible property. The executor of a will can take control of social networking or email accounts the same as bank accounts and houses, and decide to continue operating them or shut them down. In Indiana, a law allows access to those accounts but not control. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, only access to email accounts is covered.

The Atlantic notes the awarding to Oren Teicher as PW Person of the Year:

This year's selection for PW's Person of the Year represents a wholly different approach to the honor. It is Oren Teicher, CEO of the American Booksellers Association, and the ABA's board of directors, the organization that represents the country's independent book stores. The fact that these traditional brick-and-mortar, mainly locally owned bookstores are being recognized as outstanding contributors to publishing is not merely a sympathetic gesture to old-fashioned commerce in a generally downward trajectory. The accolade is justified by results defying the odds that so heavily favor the Amazon juggernaut and the chain stores, still led by (the struggling) Barnes & Noble.

From Twitter;
Yahoo’s Flickr Resurgence Continues With Handsome Photo Books, But Reliance On Sets Could Stumble Techcrunch
Prompt.ly Raises $1.5M Seed To Become The OpenTable For Time And Services Techcrunch 
Becksistentialism: because man is a goal-seeking animal TheConversation 

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MediaWeek (V7, N47): Pearson CEO Fallon, Amazon Storage Underground, Rough Trade, Maigret, USB, EdX & MIT + More

John Fallon, CEO of Pearson plc was interviewed in London's Evening Standard last week.

The new buzzword is efficacy: not just selling study programmes to schools or parents who want their children to get ahead but setting targets and measuring how they improve performance and help learners advance their careers, from Pearson’s South African university students to the millions being taught English online.

“It changes what we invest in, what acquisitions we make, how we recruit people and how we incentivise them,” explains Fallon, 51, with close-cropped hair and northern vowels. Where once Pearson hired editors and publishers, the new boss wants more software engineers and data analysts. By 2018, the company aims to report on the performance of its education programmes as reliably as it reports on its finances.
“What makes this much more doable now than it has ever been before is the application of technology has the capacity to transform the productivity of education around the world,” he says.

Fallon’s fast-moving agenda, including wholesale changes to his executive team, has spooked some investors, though Pearson shares are still up 10% this year. The shake-up has been accompanied by weakness in the US college textbooks market, its largest and most profitable division. College enrollments fall when the economy recovers, but it is a setback even the group’s former communications director can’t spin his way out of.

Such is the size and ubiquity of Amazon that even in an article about the Tube adding 24hr service and laying off 700 workers, the company is mentioned as a savior of sorts.  The FT reported that London Underground may be considering a proposal for Amazon to rent space heretofore used by transport staff to place their Amazon Lockers.  No other papers picked up this story.

In a sign of the sweeping changes under way at the world’s oldest metro system, Transport for London also said it was talking to Amazon, the online retailer, about converting its ticket offices – which will be closed in favour of automatic ticket machines – to “drop-off” points for its goods.

London's Rough Trade record store is opening in New York (today) and interesting to note the original store had its genesis in a visit to City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. (Guardian)

Godfroy admits: "It's been a testing process." The shop has been four years in the making and would have been launched much earlier if not for various setbacks, including Hurricane Sandy. Rough Trade NYC, housed in a former film prop warehouse at 64 N 9th Street, is three times bigger than Rough Trade East. Opening on Monday, it contains a café, bar, exhibition space and 250-capacity live performance room as well as a vast array of records and books. (Disclaimer: the Guardian will be curating its own space within the store.)

"We've learned how what is ostensibly a store can be so much more," says Godfroy. "Visiting us is like visiting a cultural hub; it's not simply a place for purchasing. There's a relative lack of places [in New York] that allow people to hang out in an environment that celebrates the art, not the commodity."

The idea of the record shop as cultural hub echoes Rough Trade's modest beginnings in 1976. Two years earlier, founder Geoff Travis abandoned a career in teaching to hitchhike around America and became a regular customer at San Francisco's beatnik hangout City Lights. "I loved the fact it was an environment you could sit in," he says. "You could stay all day as long as you didn't spill coffee on the books. It was so different to anything in London, which was like a Wimpy bar: the lights were too bright and the seats were too uncomfortable."

The New Scientist looks at the history of the fictional French detective Maigret (NS):

Simenon had perhaps enjoyed more than a couple glasses of schnapps and bitters that morning, for his memory is certainly at fault. There was no sudden puff of smoke by the side of a Dutch canal. Rather, Maigret seems to have emerged from the mists of Simenon’s imagination slowly, pensively, ploddingly and over time.
In 1929, Simenon was already a successful author. He had started work at the age of 15 as a junior reporter on his local newspaper, the Gazette de Liège, and in his twenties he had published more than 100 of what he called his romans alimentaires, pulp romantic and adventure novels, which he wrote under various pseudonyms and at incredible speed. (At his peak of pulp productivity, in 1928, he produced no fewer than 44 novels, many of them written in a matter of days.)
In the 1930s, he started writing what he called his romans durs, his literary novels, the most distinguished of which – L’Assassin (1937), L’Homme qui regardait passer les trains (1938), La Veuve Couderc (1942) – were masterpieces of psychological intrigue. The Maigret books bridge the two extremes of his career but have eclipsed all else in reputation and renown. When he died in 1989, France Soir announced on its front page, “Le père de Maigret est mort”.

The Economist looks at a 1000 page history of The Beatles:

After publishing important books about Beatles concerts and recordings in the 1980s, Mr Lewisohn took on the full-time job of Beatles biographer in 2004. But he insists that "All These Years" is not authorised.
"It wasn't an issue," Mr Lewisohn. "The Beatles had done their book, the 'Anthology' [published in 2000], which I helped edit. They weren't going to authorise another."
For "Tune In" he has found old fans in Liverpool, examined ghostly footage and listened to as many pre-EMI recordings as have survived. By piecing together EMI documents and those of Brian Epstein, the band's manager, Mr Lewisohn has proven that George Martin—the producer who was instrumental in shaping almost every Beatles album—was pushed to sign the group before meeting them (owing to corporate pressure after he was found having an affair with his secretary; they got married and are still together today). This "goes against every known account," he says.

Also from The Economist, how the USB could be our ubiquitous power source:

The big change next year will be a new USB PD (Power Delivery) standard, which brings much more flexibility and ten times as much oomph: up to 100 watts. In his London office Simon Daniel, founder of Moixa, a technology company, charges his laptop from a prototype souped-up USB socket. The office lighting, which uses low-voltage LED (light-emitting diode) lamps, runs from the same circuit. So do the monitors, printers and (with some fiddling) desktops. Mains power is only for power-thirsty microwaves, kettles and the like.
That could presage a much bigger shift, reviving the cause of direct current (DC) as the preferred way to power the growing number of low-voltage devices in homes and offices. DC has been something of a poor relation in the electrical world since it lost out to alternating current (AC) in a long-ago battle in which its champion Nikola Tesla (pictured, left) trounced Thomas Edison (right). Tesla won, among other reasons, because it was (in those days) easier to shift AC power between different voltages. It was therefore a better system for transmitting and distributing electricity.

From Inside Higher Ed, MIT is using EdX to re-think their strategy:

That’s where edX comes in. Half of MIT’s undergraduates use edX content in their residential courses, and as more faculty members break their courses into modules, Agarwal said he expects MIT will move away from the traditional four-year on-campus experience.

An education from MIT may soon involve a freshman year spent completing online courses, two years on campus and a fourth “year” of continuous education. While students pursue their careers, they could access a growing library of online courses to refresh their knowledge, Agarwal said.

“As we blend the courses, universities will take the next step,” Agarwal said. “We would be woven into the fabric of universities. And as long as we’re adding value, we have no qualms about that.”

MIT has already taken what Agarwal called “a bold step” toward such a model, even though the institution only describes it as an experiment. In September, the university’s arm of edX, MITx, announced the creation of two “XSeries” -- edX courses bundled into sequences. Partner universities are weeks away from announcing their own XSeries, he said.

From the twitter feed.

Guardian profile: David Tennant, our favourite Doctor … his time has come Guardian
Oven chip sales slump: is the end nigh for frozen frites? Guardian
Bruce Springsteen Bible seminars start in American university FW A full time job is not guaranteed. Run away Am dream.
David Suchet: Poirot and me Guardian  
Ron Burgundy on wild eagles, hair myths and jazz flute Guardian
BBC's loss-making Lonely Planet deal under fire Guardian

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Photo Paris Eiffel Tower

In Paris this week (for less than 24hrs) but he's a strange view of the Eiffel Tower taken in 1996.  Safe to say, the tower is still there.

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Judge Chin Decides and Everybody Wins

About eight years ago I was one of the group at the Association of American Publishers that voted to file suit against Google for the unauthorized copying of upwards of 10million books (and other bound stuff) from the collection of five large academic libraries.  It wasn't long after the vote that I wished I had missed the meeting.

If nothing else, the passage of time since that suit was filed has proven that Google's activities were not the real enemy.  Google wanted to expose content locked away on shelves (off the network) to the same readers, researchers and other content users that the very same publishers were interested in selling to.  The risk publishers anticipated - that all content would be devalued and royalties due publishers would be circumvented - looks with hindsight to have been a red hearing.  The real problem for publishers with respect to the value of intellectual property quickly became apparent from the more obvious culprit: Amazon.com, which has successfully fought off the publishers, Apple, Google and everyone else and has won the battle over value.  After eight years, the (maybe) final end to the Google Books legal wrangle is a side show to the very real problems publishers have regarding their business models.

In ruling that the scanning program at Google was indeed fair use (and so emphatically that you have to wonder what took the guy so long) we may see some new products come out of this content library.  For example, I wrote of a subscription database product that Google could launch, others have spoken about the analysis of language, semiotics and culture that could be facilitated by this database and there will no doubt be other products.  What should be clear, is that access this ruling enables will enhance our knowledge and understanding about the content itself and the evolution of the printed word.  The next eight years might actually result in something useful.

There are four tests for fair use and Judge Chin as ruled as follows on these:

On purpose and character of use:

Google's use of the copyrighted works is highly transformative. Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books. Google Books has become an important tool for libraries and librarians and cite-checkers as it helps to identify and find books. The use of book text to facilitate search through the display of snippets is transformative.

On the 'nature of the copyrighted work':

While works of fiction are entitled to greater copyright protection, Stewart v. Abend, 495 U.S. 207, 237 (1990), here the vast majority of the books in Google Books are non-fiction. Further, the books at issue are published and available to the public. These considerations favor a finding of fair use.

On the "amount and substantiality of the portion used":

Google limits the amount of text it displays in response to a search.

Lastly, on the "effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work":

...a reasonable factfinder could only find that Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders. An important factor in the success of an individual title is whether it is discovered -- whether potential readers learn of its existence. (Harris Decl. ¶ 7 (Doc. No. 1039)). Google Books provides a way for authors' works to become noticed, much like traditional in-store book displays.

In his concluding comments the Judge states:

In my view, Google Books provides significant public benefits. It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders. It has become an invaluable research tool that permits students, teachers, librarians, and others to more efficiently identify and locate books. It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life. It facilitates access to books for print-disabled and remote or underserved populations. It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits.

The wider relevancy of this opinion on fair use may well extend the law and could result in implications for other media and content businesses.

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MediaWeek (V7, N45): End of Music Compilations? How Students Perform, Intel buys Kno, 60mins Debacle + more

Now that's what I call pure proft.  There's still life in compliations: in a word curation.  (NewStatesman)

The brand has also taken the digital landscape head on and embraced the new realms of digital music platforms with a Now Spotify Channel, Now You Tube Channel and a Now iPhone app. In a new era where people have switched from CD to MP3 and digital downloads, where purchasing single tunes from albums is commonplace and economically sensible, you would think that there is no place for a compilation CD anymore? But no!  Just when you thought that this wounded animal was in its death throes it just plain refuses to die! It turns out that sales of compilation albums are on the increase as they’re cheaper than buying tracks individually. According to Jeff Moskow, Head of A&R for Now, only 15 per cent of Now’ssales are digital which means 85 per cent still come from traditional CD sales. Soundscan, which is one of the most widely used music sales tracking systems, show that digital sales in 2011 were larger than physical sales for the first time, however CDs still sell well in large chain stores and supermarkets – perhaps where Now’s target audiences regularly congregate. In its early days Now’s target audience was predominantly female until hip-hop started entering the compilations mix and now the gender split is pretty equal. What the Now brand has done is recognise the popularity of particular genres or trends in popular music (culture) amongst audiences and featured those songs and artists on their compilations. As Moskow says “electronic dance music is one of the biggest genres, and it’s growing, so that sound is reflected in our brand and songs.” “We’re not critiquing music, just curating it,” says Moskow, who has personally selected the songs on every album since Now 3. “We really don’t care what it sounds like.”

Using actual student performance data to learn what represents effective education.  What a concept (IHed):

The Science of Learning Center, known as LearnLab, has already collected more than 500,000 hours’ worth of student data since it initially received funding from the National Science Foundation about nine years ago, its director Ken Koedinger said. That number translates to about 200 million times when students of a variety of age groups and subject areas have clicked on a graph, typed an equation or solved a puzzle.  The center collects studies conducted on data gathered from technology-enhanced courses in algebra, chemistry, Chinese, English as a second language, French, geometry and physics in an open wiki.  One such study showed that students performed better in algebra if asked to explain what they learned in their own words, for example. In another study, physics students who took time answering reflection questions performed better on tests than their peers.

Intel has purchased software and (once, for a while) hardware manufacturer Kno (Intel) and Techcrunch:

Today, I’m excited to announce the newest resource in the Intel Education offering. Intel has acquired Kno, a leading education-software company whose guiding mission is to change the way students learn. Much like Intel, Kno believes engagement is key to student success.  The acquisition of Kno boosts Intel’s global digital content library to more than 225,000 higher education and K-12 titles through existing partnerships with 75 educational publishers. Even more, the Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments.  We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success. Check out the Intel Education newsroom for ongoing updates from Intel.

In a deal that puts that one in context, Intel announced the release of an education market focused tablet computer (History repeating itself?):

Intel introduced an education-focused tablet reference design, featuring an Intel® Atom™ processor and the Android* operating system code-named Ice Cream Sandwich*. The Intel Education tablet is specifically for education, featuring student-friendly designs that empower students to create compelling content. Features including front- and rear-facing cameras, a stylus, integrated speakers and microphones bring interactive, multimedia content into learning.

The tablet is fully equipped with Intel Education Software, a comprehensive suite of applications including an e-Reader, science exploration and data analysis  application and painting tools. It also has management software that provides teachers and administrators with tools to protect students and manage technology.

The [10inch] tablets are designed to enable interactive, collaborative learning to prepare students for success in school and beyond. These reference designs align with the Intel Education platform, which assists teachers and students in technology-enhanced learning.

Two weeks ago 60mins broadcast a riveting story on the Benghazi terror attack that resulted in the death of a US Ambassador.  Turns out it was untrue and the apology as a flacid and their fact checking. (NewYorker)

“Correction,” the word “60 Minutes” used, is a tricky one in this context. The program did not correct its report, in the sense of putting out an accurate version. The entire segment was pulled from its Web site. If the mistake was putting Davies on air, one might, in theory, imagine a correct version in which his interview is simply excised; that’s impossible here, though. There is no report without Davies. He is either speaking or providing the point of view for more than eight of its fifteen and a half minutes; we rely on him not only for the sight of Ambassador Chris Stevens’s body but for a phone conversation the two supposedly had a few hours before Stevens died—a particularly low form of fabrication, if that’s what it is—as well as calls he says he had with Sean Smith, another diplomat who was killed; Libyan guards; and another unnamed American at the compound. (“I said, ‘Well, just keep fighting. I’m on my way.’ ”) And he provides Logan with her guiding logic: “The events of that night have been overshadowed by misinformation, confusion, and intense partisanship,” Logan says.

And as others have noted, 60mins never mentioned in the initial broadcast that the fantasist's book was being published by CBS's Simon & Schuster.  The book is being pulped.  (Politico)

From twitter this week:
David Suchet: Poirot and me Guardian
BBC's loss-making Lonely Planet deal under fire Guardian 
Number of publishers forced out of business shows sharp increase - FTOnline

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Photo: Lausanne Switzerland

Public art in Ouchy Switzerland where I spent many weeks in the early 1990s.  Pretty place.  Never been back.

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Books, What are they good for?

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Responsive Web Design Session - CONTEC Frankfurt Bookfair

Slide 1: Good Morning and welcome to this session on Responsive Web Design at Contec Frankfurt. I am Michael Cairns from Publishing Technology and I am joined by Michael Kowalski from web consulting firm Contentment. We are going to speak to you today about Responsive Web design (RWD) – what it is, how it works and why you should consider RWD as your method of dealing with an ever changing and growing set of screen sizes and devices. Essentially, as a content owner and distributor you will want to provide your customers and clients with a consistent and optimized view of the material you put in front of them. You don’t want to make compromises and we will show you how having a RWD strategy can help you meet your client expectations and enhance the user experience.

(Click on the cover to see the entire presentation on slideshare)

By way of introduction, I am COO of the Online division of Publishing Technology. PT is a software and services provider for publishing and information businesses around the world. We are a public company and we work with a who’s who of publishing and content owners all of whom I am sure you would recognize. The Online division, which I run, comprises two main products: IngentaConnect which is a content hosting provider for small and medium sized journal publishers (although not exclusively) and pub2web which is a content platform that enables publishers to manage their content and manage all interaction with their clients. For example, if you subscribe to content from the American Institute of Physics you would be using the pub2web platform to access your subscription. We provide a very powerful platform that enables publishers to manage their content, access, membership (in some cases) and even their publishing schedules. Our clients are in the scholarly and academic publishing sector although PT’s client base in more broad than that.

Slide 2: These are contact details for each of us and Michael K will introduce himself in a few minutes.

Michael Cairns, Chief Operating Officer – Online, Publishing Technology
michael.cairns@publishingtechnology.com
Michael Kowalski (Contentment) - Founder at Contentment
michael@getcontentment.com

I am going to provide an overview of RWD and Michael K will then give some real life and practical suggestions that come from his experience in working with a variety of clients on a consultative basis

Slide 3: Over the past five years (and possibly longer) there has been a constant flow of articles and blog posts about RWD but, it is really only in the past two years or so that RWD has come into the mainstream where, for example, we are seeing panel discussions at scholarly publishing conferences discussing RWD. Incidentally, most of this presentation was given at the SSP winter conference in San Francisco back in May by my colleague Toby Plewak who deserves credit.

For anyone in the audience who wants more information about RWD simply Google the term and you will find yards of material. It is quite likely that the first item returned will be something by Ethan Marcotte and his stuff on RWD is really worth reading. I read this article he wrote in 2010 again last night as a refresher and his article covers much of what we are discussing today.

For those who have some idea what RWD is all about, you will also know that the concept isn’t really a new idea, but it has gained steam recently due to the proliferation of these newer technologies and solutions such as HTML 5, CSS 3 and media queries. Michael K will speak to these in a few minutes.

Slide 4: As I noted, the proliferation of devices is probably driving your design staff crazy since they fight every day to make your content look perfect on every conceivable new device. There is a diminishing return to this effort; moreover it is unlikely to be sustainable. So here is a quote from Jeffrey Veen at Adobe who believes that RWD is the way of the future – at least for the next ten years.

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows.

Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.”

- Jeffrey VeenVice President, Products at Adobe

Slide 5: So what are we comparing when we speak of content delivered using the concepts of RWD versus the older traditional, fixed-width websites. These sites are rigid, inflexible and render legibly only when viewed at full-size on a desktop browser. They are designed to work in a single context and once we begin to interact with them outside of the context they were built for – namely sitting at a PC or full-screen laptop, they start to give us trouble.

We suggest that they represent old thinking: That the desk-top was going to be the primary – perhaps the only – way we would be consuming content. This assumption is obviously not the case.

Traditional websites will satisfy a designer’s impulse for control, predictability and order in a design however, from a usability perspective they fail on many levels for today’s typical content consumer.

Slide 6: Content access issues abound and we’ve all been there. Perhaps we find ourselves using a mobile device to access content we normally interact with on the desk top. This is a changing use pattern we are seeing more and more frequently. Your experience will instantly become confusing, annoying and frustrating when you find you can’t access the content as you would expect. You will be left to wonder why that should be the case. Why should my device or point of access matter?

Once we squish a website like this it into a small-screen device finding content becomes a needle-in-a-haystack sort of exercise: we are forced to zoom, pinch, scroll up, down, left and right to find or view what we are looking for. Navigation is nearly impossible and a finger sometimes needs to be as pointy as a sewing needle to tap a link or a button. The best/worst examples of this can be wifi access points where you are left to find the “Get on Line” button on your iPhone when it is so small it looks like a single solid line.

In short, a fixed-width website becomes virtually unusable as screens get smaller and our content becomes harder to access, navigate and interact with.

We could even end up having a Hugh Grant moment if we become too stressed out about this inconvenient experience. For those who remember his frequent refrain during that movie will know what I am talking about.

We will talk a little today about “context” and your user because it is important to understand where and how your target users interact most with your content. A nurse on station will have an entirely different requirement for access and use than perhaps a paramedic. The content they require may be the same but the ‘context’ the user finds themselves could be vastly different. A paramedic under stress is not going to want to zoom and pinch to determine what type of diagnosis to make.
Understanding how your customers access and use your content is an important first step in defining your RWD strategy.

Knowing whether they are at a funeral a wedding or some other event could prevent a melt down.

Slide 7: So this is where RWD comes in.

The Web is by nature a dynamic, flexible medium, and many people have suggested that RWD is the next natural phase of its evolution. In the past, designers and their clients spent huge amounts of effort trying to attain print-like pixel-perfection in their designs, like print projects, they attempted to make their websites look the same across the then-limited amount of available devices, resolutions, browsers and screen-sizes. But those days are over and that type of activity will begin to look anachronistic. Responsive design is a digression from this type of thinking. It forces us to think bigger, to put our USERS, our CONTENT and the Way(s) users access that content – that is CONTEXT at the CENTER of the design process.

RWD forces us to design SYSTEMS rather than just static INTERFACES - systems that can maintain the best possible access to, and presentation of, our content regardless of the device or screen-size.

Even the screen you are viewing this presentation on could legitimately be considered a ‘device’ screen and that is certainly true of television screens not just computers and mobile devices.

Slide 8: By now you should have a sense of what RWD is, but here is a specific example. The Boston Globe has been one of the pioneers in RWD and we can see how this works by viewing the Globe site using a traditional web browser. If you slowly reduce the browser window by pulling it slowly from the right edge to the center you can see at a certain point the content and design moves and changes. Content is stacked, menus are consolidated and made compact, images are resized, etc.

This process uses media queries to ‘sniff’ your browser and render the Globe content to match the device you are using. Media Queries are little bits of code that measure the width of the given screen and tell the browser how to adjust the size, placement and hierarchy of a given page’s elements. Using the principals of RWD, content is optimized based on the device you are using. RWD is a flexible, grid-based layout that expands and contracts based on the size of a given device’s screen and it uses flexible images, scalable typography and media that changes size when a different screen size is used. For example, going from an iPad to an iPhone.

Slide 9: Other examples of RWD sites are these here but I am sure you will find more on your own.

· www.ft.com
· Bostonglobe.com
· Qz.com
· Mashable.com

Slide 10: If providing a consistent optimized experience for our content users isn’t sufficient reason then consider that Google favors this approach. Google likes to access one url for site content rather than multiple urls that can exist when publishers create mobile specific versions of their content. Google doesn’t like that approach because they believe it doesn’t create a useful experience for their search customers.

On the Google web site you can also find this definition of RWD:

“Responsive web design is a setup where the server always sends the same HTML code to all devices and CSS is used to alter the rendering of the page on the device using media queries.”

One other aspect of RWD is cost and typically (in the absence of doing nothing) the alternative to RWD is often to build apps for the predominant operating systems such as iOS, Andoid, etc. Yet with as many device types as we are currently beginning to see – and we at IngentaConnect see a similar number of devices hitting our site - the ability to keep ahead of this from a development stand point has the potential to become very expensive. RWD may cost more upfront in development but over the long term it will be cheaper than the App approach as the number of device types and the need to tune your apps for every device continues to explode.

Slide 11: I almost omitted this slide, because in 2013 I don’t think I need to convince anyone here at Contac that mobile is important. It just emphasizes our point.

So why is RDW important?

Because more of our users are either going mobile or accessing our content from a variety of devices and they expect the same experience from one device to the other. All of us are consumers of content and we expect the same thing so why would we think our customers are different?

Here are some other stats:

· 2015 – 7.4 Billion wireless devices sold
· 1.2Billion smart phones devices enter the market over the next 5 years
· Enterprise table adoption grows by 50% year

Just this morning I saw this stat from Forrester - 35% of US mobile phone owners have used their device while shopping in a store in the past 6 months – which stat suggests whoever is delivering content to users in retail stores need to increasingly think about “context” as I mentioned earlier.

In this area, you don’t have to look far for some good stats.

Slide 12: So it won’t come as a surprise to anyone that mobile access is on track to outpace desktop access. This chart is reflecting internet usage in general, but we’re all seeing similar trends on our websites at PT. We’ve all known this, and for several years now we’ve all been working frantically to make our content accessible to mobile users.

Slide 13: As an indicator of how complex the delivery of content on mobile devices is becoming this page from the Cornell library website spends and inordinate amount of time and space explaining how to access the myriad offerings from a wide variety of content providers. This section reads like a rogues gallery of mobile publishers’ experiments in mobile strategy – apps for iPhone, apps for tablets, apps for Android, mobile optimized websites. Different hoops to jump through for access – paid apps, free apps that require subscriptions, mobile device pairing, etc. I don’t mean to call anyone out – there are some great apps listed on these pages: But looking at these pages got me thinking about the various problems and limitations in the mobile solutions we’ve tried so far.

Slide 14: Creating an optimized experience for your users could leave you feeling a little confused but for our users the experience is even more disorienting. We’re asking our users to access the same content in very different ways depending on what device they are using to access the internet. This can’t be a sustainable environment for content producers or users.

We suggest that without a RWD solution the typical mobile development process will not support your long term objectives as users change the way they interact with your content but naturally expect a consistent experience.

Slide 15: Without a RWD strategy our only option is to make assumptions and decisions about how to reach (and market to) our readers based on what device they have in their pocket. And as a result we are investing in mobile solutions one platform at a time. This is especially true when we are talking about native apps, but it also applies to many of the mobile sites we’ve built, optimized for one device over another. As I mentioned it becomes an expensive proposition to support all of these different solutions, especially if you’re only doing it to serve your existing subscriber base which means new costs but no new revenue

Slide 16: What typically happens is someone says we need a mobile web site or presence.

So we try mobile websites, and we strip them down and optimize them for the “mobile use case”.

But guess what this is all in vain as a recent survey from IBM suggests. Users want mobile to be *AT LEAST* as good as the desktop website. What a surprise! This is supported by the “View Full Site” button, a recommended best practice for those stripped down mobile websites. We’ve all seen that button, and importantly, most of us have had occasion to click it. At the very least that is a cop out and we can do better.

Think about that paramedic under intense circumstances having to click on that button.

Que the Hugh Grant explosion.

Slide 17: So when you begin to think about how you are going to start a RWD project these are some of the things you should consider versus the app approach.

App Approach:

· Do I want or need to be in the App store?
· Do I rely on or make use of device specific functionality like the camera?
· Do I have a specific functional focus?

RWD:
· Do I have a content focused approach?
· So I need broad device support
· I may have frequent content changes
· I need better discoverability via a 3rd party like Google

Slide 18: It is generally better to be able to start from the smallest access point outwards however most content producers already have a web presence where content access has been thought about in terms of the desktop browser. That said each of these five considerations should be thought about by your team as they think about rolling out a RWD program.

Audience
· Assumptions about your audience: what they do, how they work, what content they use and why, etc.
· The audience “contexts”: where are they using the content, are there constraints?
· Always consider the typical devices, the environmental, user, psychology.

Content & Functionality
· Do you have a content strategy in place?
· Determine whether your internal processes need to change?
· Do your users need interactive content? Multimedia or other content formats?

Capabilities
· How will you support HTML5.0/CSS3/JS expertise
· UI/User design expertise will be required
· Don’t short change testing and user acceptance

Cost – potential to lower cost over time if one code base
· RWD expenses can be up front due to increased complexity and scope but less over time versus
App development

Process
· A mobile first or the smallest screen upwards produces the best overall results: work from smallest out

Slide 19: As I mentioned earlier ‘context’ is really important and you will need to understand how your primary users interact with your content. Some things you will consider:

· How important are specific devices?
· Where are they likely to be using the devices – or do locations define the device.
· What are they doing when the use your content – that is what are their circumstances at the time? For example, are they typically under stress when using your content and is ‘time’ a serious consideration? In some cases potentially a life of death occurrence for a medical information provider.

It is important to understand how your users are using your content in a variety of situations and circumstances. That understanding can help you define your RWD approach.

Slide 20: Which brings us to the other big challenge we’re facing - the pace of change in the device space. It seems to be ever accelerating. There was even word recently that Apple may bring out a larger format iPad next year.

Slide 21 HTC has more than 20 screen sizes. Giving 30% to Apple

Slide 22: We can’t forget Samsung.

Slide 23: It is also important to understand that the lines between devices are blurring. The largest Samsung smartphone is not much smaller than the new iPad Mini. iPad + a keyboard is no smaller than my laptop. This Microsoft Surface tablet ships with a keyboard. This new Asus laptop has a touchscreen interface on the lid.

Slide 24: Publishers don’t need a “mobile” strategy. We need to completely rethink our ONLINE strategy.

Slide 25: A successful RWD project entails many if not most of the same considerations as a more traditional design implementation, and then some.

· Since we are designing for any number of devices, screens and contexts, we need to invest more time and effort up-front, gain a better understanding of our users, the way they access and use our content: what is important to them, and what is less so and use this as our foundation for planning.

· We need to prioritize how accessible our online offerings are based upon this understanding. We need to build flexible navigation structures, accommodating grid patterns, and a user experience that enables the largest amount of people on the broadest possible range of devices to find, explore and consume our content.

· We need to design for fat thumbs, for people standing on a crowded train or lying in bed, for a researcher trying to look up the name of an influential colleague whose name he forgot, who he’s about to meet with in 15 minutes.

· Lastly, we need to test our designs across devices, browsers and screen sizes. Get your site or prototypes into the hands of users and learn from them. Revise, test, repeat. It is an ongoing process.

It is a way to get your content out there, to take it beyond the bounds of the office or university walls.

Slide 26: So what is RDW in summary. It enables content owners to,

· Maintain one website that serves all devices and screen sizes
· Provide complete support for (almost) all website pages and features, regardless of device or screen size.
· Implement changes across all device

Slide 27: Lastly no presentation is complete without a quote from Bruce Lee and this one perfectly describes the RWD concept:

“When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle.”

Think about that.

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