Impress Your Professor: Bookbinding 101

How do you treat your textbooks? Penciled notes in the margins, easily erased? Dog-eared pages, highlighting, and inkblotted underlining? Crumpled corners from daily transport to campus or a pristine cover (likely from lack of use)?

Or do you download it? PDF it? eRead it? Could you if you wanted to?

The state of California has given its colleges and universities until 2020 to make their textbooks available electronically "to the extent practicable." Some of the rationalization given is that it will put more technology in the classroom and teach students valuable technological skills.

This is, of course, doable for bloated freshman and 100-level textbooks constantly in publication, but what about smaller texts with smaller print runs for upper level and graduate courses? What if the book isn't even in print anymore?

This is reasoning behind the "extent practicable" clause, which has led some to question the usefulness of such a law that doesn't seem to mandate anything. Still others question the idea that textbook vendors will encourage or require students to rent their textbooks, not buy them. Again, this may be fine for required courses outside a student's major, but the theory behind a text is that it should serve as a reference throughout a student's career. Many will want to keep their texts, and some observe that students still buy hard copies more often than electronic when given the choice.

I guess they like to highlight!

In my experience, professors have already been assigning electronic texts. Prior graduate courses required downloading digitized primary source texts that were several hundred years old and several hundred pages long from digital libraries. A great use of technology, but I spent as long printing and assembling my "book" as I did reading it.

Will such laws give students the technological skills promised, or will it just give them a lesson in printing and bookmaking?

YouTube Tuesday: Books?

Not Kindling
An introduction to the Amazon Kindle.



Close Enough
I can't embed this video. Boo. The clip is not that relevant, but it's good know that books are more than just books. They're medieval shields!

Impress Your Professor: Future of alternative book formats

Hi everyone! My name is Sarah and I'm the new Vice Chair of ASIST. Have you heard the buzz this week about the future of alternative book formats (i.e. non print books)? Two big stories caught my ear...

1. Amazon announced its purchase of Audible.com two weeks ago. Audible.com is the largest provider of ‘audio entertainment’, a term that encompasses audio books as well as radio programs and audio editions of newspapers and magazines. The combination of this acquisition and the recent launch of Kindle (a handheld device for reading electronic books) indicates that Amazon is, if not anticipating a new direction for books, at least hedging its bets.

I’ve gotta say that, as a reader, I’m totally old school—give me paper any day. My dad uses audible.com and loves it, but I have a tendency to tune out and miss whole chapters. Check out ALA Techsource, as they muse a bit on our collective history as listeners. I’ve never used Kindle myself, but I have used Mobipocket (also owned by Amazon), a platform for ebooks that is compatible with almost any handheld device (or even just your computer). The books are cheap, which is nice, but oy! Eyestrain! Reading 500 pages on a computer screen is rough, despite upping the font size. Kindle’s ‘electronic paper’ display is supposed to eliminate that problem—has anyone tried it? Let me know!

2. Harper Collins, as part of some new marketing experiment, is offering free access to a few digital books. I’d love to see the results of this campaign. Does free online access increase sales? Decrease sales? I’d imagine it would depend on the type of book—fiction, non-fiction, reference, etc.

You don’t even have to register for this service, and the complete book is right there online! Downloading and printing are verboten, but you can search the full text and submit reader reviews. Each book is only available for one month. I can't wait for the Neil Gaiman book to be posted! Check it out!