On Tuesday, May 3rd I recorded a 15 minute segment for the Southwestern Ohio Council for Higher Education on Think TV, the local public television station in Dayton, Ohio.  My topic was the rise of digital textbooks and options available for students and faculty to access and produce textbooks and learning materials.  Below is a [...]

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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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Today I attended the webinar sponsored by the Ohio Board of Regents regarding Ohio’s digital textbook project.   Speakers included: Darlene McCoy, Associate Vice Chancellor, Division of Affordability and Efficiency, University System of Ohio; Dr. Steve Acker, Research Director, eTextOhio Project; Dr. Shu Z. Schiller, Assistant Professor of Information Systems at Wright State University; and Eric [...]

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A new Off The Shelf Column in Reference Books Bulletin (Booklist) explores open access e-textbooks.  The CK12 Foundation, Connexions, Flatworld Knowledge, and Merlot are discussed.  Other Off The Shelf pieces are on the articles page.

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Earlier this week I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference for the first time.  Over 1250 attendees gathered in New York City to discuss and network   about issues and trends in publishing, in particular, digital publishing.  While much of the information presented was for the publishing industry, I did manage to find several [...]

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