The November, 2011 issue of Against the Grain focuses on the e-everything future.  Edited by Audrey Powers from the University of South Florida, the issue discusses e-content procurement, access models and technology, content integration, first sale doctrine, and much more. It’s a great line-up of contributors and topics.  The table of contents should be posted [...]

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ebrary is announcing the availability of  the 2011 Global Student E-book Survey.  Full results (downloadable) will be available in January.  Those of you attending the Charleston Conference next week can get a sneak peek at the results during a session on Friday (details below).  Here is more from the press release: ebrary Surveys Suggest Students’ [...]

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I attended this fabulous and informative session during the Charleston Conference on building an eReader collection by Aisha Harvey, Nancy Gibbs, and Natalie Sommerville of Duke University Libraries.  I wanted to run my notes past the presenters first, to ensure accuracy, thus the tardiness of this post. First and foremost, according to the librarians, the [...]

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Last week, while at the Charleston Conference, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, CEO and President of IGI Global.  We discussed the history of IGI Global, current eBook offerings, and future plans for eBooks.  The discussion always seemed to come back to the basic philosophy of IGI Global – to disseminate [...]

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Great article on The Scholarly Kitchen blog by Kent Anderson, who is questioning a recent survey on student preference of print textbooks.  A clip from the blog post: Anderson says, “The survey is drawing the wrong conclusion by framing the question in terms of media choice. It’s not about print versus electronic. It’s about economics [...]

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Yesterday, I joined a panel of publishers, aggregators, and archiving agencies to discuss the issue of eBook archiving.  I had to set the stage for libraries, which was quite easy – we are in fear of losing our content to which we no longer have control of since it is housed on someone else’s server [...]

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Dr. Frances Pinter, Publisher, Bloomsbury Academic presented a new business model for the efficient and effective funding of open access “books.” (Frances presented this at the TOC conference and had an interview with me about the topic earlier in 2010 if you’d like more details.) Dr. Pinter described her background in publishing and the focus [...]

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Jeff Shelstad, Founder and CEO of FlatWorld Knowledge spoke first. Jeff provided some stats on higher education: 19.1 million students in 2010 in college $850 avg spent on textbook so, it’s about a 10billion industry Cengage, Pearson, McGraw-Hill are the big 3 publishers along with many other small ones Problem is that the industry has outworn [...]

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Darrell Gunter, CEO of Gunter Media Group, Adam Marshall of Portland Press and Thane Kerner of Silver Chair presented on semantic technology and getting up to speed to better serve your user community. Each of the speakers posed 5 Questions with 5 Answers What prompted you to engage semantic technology into your products/applications? Darrell Gunter [...]

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Casper Grathwohl from Oxford University Press and Kassidy Lackey from Handmark spoke about mobile applications for reference tools.  Casper provided examples of several vendor-based apps like Gale’s AccessMyLibrary, university library mobile apps, and some apps designed for OUP.  OUP has 85 apps, which cover a variety of reference subjects.  These are marketed mostly to the [...]

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