Lake Taupo, North Island 1973

We used to go here during holiday breaks in the early 70s when the PND family lived there.  Lake Taupo is almost in the center of the north island of New Zealand and the area is still volcanic.  A little north of here is Rotorua which I remember as smelling like bad eggs.  The white peak in the...

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MediaWeek (V7, N22) BookExpo Week

What a story - a surprise at every page!  You'll laugh and cry - sometimes at the same time!A panel on ethics in book reviewing.  Was it ever thus?  (Time Magazine)It was a topic that, because of one obvious reason, provoked lots of spirited debate, As of now, book reviewers have no set of guiding principles. Sure, publications and individual writers have vague ideas about what’s...

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The Baked Beans Are Off - Ideas on What Scale Means

One of the themes at BookExpo 2013 is about scale in publishing and how this concept has and is changing within our industry.  I was reminded of this post from July 2010 on that topic:When I joined Macmillan, Inc in 1989 the company was rounding out the decade nicely having gone from losing over $1mm per week and a share price less than $2 in 1980 to one sold to Robert Maxwell for 19x earnings...

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Pearson Reorganizes their Business Operations: Will Ethridge to Leave

Pearson announced a significant change in the way their business is organized and perhaps the most interesting aspect of this reorganization is that the FT Group will be subsumed into their new "Professional"business unit together with English Language learning and their electronic testing business.  The conclusion could be this is a catch-all for units the new executive management no longer...

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Ingram VitalSource and Blackboard announce Platform and Content Deal

Last year Blackboard announced several high profile content deals with publishers however this deal with Ingram Vitalsource could be more significant if it encourages faculty to really engage with content creation and aggregation on the Blackboard site.   Question is: Is this an exclusive deal for Ingram?Ingram and Blackboard announced an integration of the Ingram Vital Source platform onto...

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MediaWeek (V7, N21) Online College?, Society Publishing, Georgia Tech Online, Copyright Revision + More

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: Is College moving Online?When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague,...

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Flagstaff Arizona 1992

At a sales conference in January 1992 I got to see some of the scenery around Sedona and Flagstaff Arizona.  I've always wanted to go back there.  It's some amazing landscap...

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Skip Prichard Named to Succeed Jay Jordan at OCLC

From their press release:Mr. Prichard has led multi-national organizations that serve libraries across the full spectrum of library services and content needs. Most recently, he was President and CEO of Ingram Content Group Inc., which provides a broad range of physical and digital services to the book industry. Prior to his service at Ingram, he was President and CEO of ProQuest Information...

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NetGalley's Wellness Project

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Cengage On the Verge of Chapter 11 Filing?

Third quarter revenues at Cengage improved to 5% better than last year and adjusted EBITDA was up a healthy 30% but YTD numbers remain off due to a bad first quarter and the real story behind Cengage's numbers is when, rather than if, the company will go into a pre-arranged bankruptcy so to re-negotiate their outstanding loan obligations.  Here is CEO Michael Hansen's prepared comments on the...

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MediaWeek (V7, N20) Dan Brown's Inferno, a Parody, Coursera, + More

The Telegraph reviews the new Dan Brown book (in a way):The Inspector reluctantly passed a laptop to Langdon who could now sit up in bed. Dr d’Angelou smiled. “I will leave you two gentlemen,” she said, because that was the sort of thing people said in novels. Langdon pressed a few keys and on the laptop screen was a grey filtrated image of himself walking along a street he did not recognise. Across...

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Snake Farming Bangkok

I think this is gruesome personally but it was a stop on the tourist path in 1969 when we were living there.  I believe these farms are still there and, as you can see, the snakes live in a structure that looks like a pool without any water.  When Bangkok had some major flooding a number of years ago...

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DigEdCon 2013 - Infrastructure and Innovation with Dr. Kenneth C. Green

Also the associated slides are located on the Saylor site here.   Casey blogs on the influential Inside Higher Ed blog Digital Tweed  via the EdSurge Newslett...

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MediaWeek (V7, N18): Performance Reading; eBook Lending and Retail; eBooks and Libraries; Scholarly Publishing and Truth + more

Interesting experiment reported in the NYTimes about a performance art project undertaken at NYU:Regular patrons hardly seemed to notice when the readers turned their books upside down, or ran their fingers in unison under passages in the identical piles of novels in front of them (by José Saramago, Kazuo Ishiguro and Agota Kristof), or flipped through a book of depopulated cityscapes by the photographer...

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