Slashdot Mirror
Nature Publishes a "Post-Gutenberg" Electronic Text
lpress writes "Most of today's electronic textbooks are re-purposed versions of print books. Nature has published an e-text that departs from the traditional book format and business model. Their Introduction to Biology e-text was created from the ground up and consists of 196 modules rather than a sequential book and the student gets a lifetime subscription for $49. Nature will continuously update the e-text as the science and pedagogy evolve."
So far eBooks have not varied much from the formatting of printing books. I like the idea of taking advantage of the technology available for eBooks and perhaps making books more interesting or with more content, etc. I teach psychology at two colleges and I have noticed that some of the publishers of text books are beginning to do this (Pearson and McGrawhill are two).
http://www.busyweather.com/
>> Nature will continuously update the e-text as the science and pedagogy evolve
Shouldn't that be e-volve?
1991 called, they want their "hyper-text" back.
(captcha: innovate)
This sounds like it could be much better than the current system, which constantly churns out new editions to keep the used book market at bay. This way could be cheaper and produce less waste.
Will it be compatible with my existing shelf infrastructure ?
This is a business model that is evolving away from the traditional print media. As soon as authors, publishers and printers/conversion vendors get it through their heads that content needs to be modular and easily accessible they more likely they are to win in this media format. Teachers/Profs want to be able to add/subtract at will and let students access the content. Students just want what they need, at a reasonable price. Institutions are being pressured to be green and keep costs low on these formats. It is nice in this model that the content isn't rented and is owned - the bad news is that the medium will likely change and the owner won't be able to migrate to the next big thing platform - that is the thing we should be thinking about now to make sure we don't get stuck locked to a specific technology. The answer is that electronic text MUST evolve in this fashion.
That only took about 20 years. Most industries take at least 40 to adopt new technologies, right?
Does a biology textbook evolve?
One area that's not often addressed or implemented is the concept of multi-leveled content. By this I mean that a traditional linear sequenced book conveys material mostly at one level of depth and proceeds sequentially. But I find for some material that a document that carries within it simultaneously beginner, intermediate, and advanced material can be useful. What I mean is that a reader proceeding sequentially through the book can choose treatments at the level suitable for them at the time and later come back and revisit at a deeper level, when they have enough background to understand deeper.
I've taken one book I'm doing and split it into three volumes with hyperlevels like this. Volume 1 is a series of lectures exactly such as you'd get in a lecture hall. Volume 2 is readings to go along with the lectures to provide more material, and these exist as beginner, intermediate, and advanced hyperlinked items. The idea is that a student can get the basic background everyone should have in the domain, the more curious student can absorb the intermediate level treatments of the same topics, and the advanced student can be exposed to the fine points. While this could be done in a print book, it is easier to implement in a hypermedia form. The advantage of such a split-up approach is that it can deliver a volume of work without making the slower students have to plough through a dense and long path, they just need to tread the road they're given. (Volume 3 is a workbook and uses same approach.)
However, a problem with such books is that with material fragmented so much and the structure not visible directly, it is harder for someone to grasp the overall structure of knowledge in the domain if they're first getting oriented. It's like a choose your own story book where you cannot see the overall story structure and could not speed read it easily, even if there is a linear table of contents.
Issues with an e-reader are: 1) lecture board views and graphics just don't fit on a reader screen and are a pain to have to scroll around for students. 2) sometimes small screens just aren't enough. I'd like to see a video output port (do you hear me, Lab126 in Cupertino?) 3) sometimes it is really beneficial for students to be able to print pages and mark them up.
Honestly, while this might be innovative if you consider it from the perspective of 'ebooks', it sounds a hell of a lot more like early-90's AOL, with its subscriber-interaction features and assortment of proprietary content licenses available to customers, albeit delivered as a paywalled site on top of the WWW, rather than by dial-in alongside it...
There also seems to be a fair bit of 'the large print giveth, the small print and structure taketh away' going on. On the plus side, hurray, a publisher not trying to enforce some 180-day DRM timeout scheme using a horrid proprietary format and ghastly custom reader program! Wait... $49 gets me a 'lifetime' subscription; but the 'textbook' is arranged around a 'class', with a professor and other students, which is presumably going to last a relatively short period of time. Does 'lifetime' mean that I am allowed to log in and pick through the cobwebs for as long as I can remember my password? Does it break when the 'class' dissolves?
Really, this seems sufficiently unlike a textbook, and sufficiently similar to certain other offerings, that treating it by comparison to ebooks seems actively misleading... If you were forced to describe the service as "Like an ebook; but..." that ellipsis would be rather long. If, on the other hand, you said "Nature is charging $50 per person, per class, for their hosted competitor to Blackboard or Moodle; and is sweetening the deal by throwing in a whole bunch of premade content modules." you'd basically be done...
This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing; but it isn't a book.
My database professor has said he wants to move entirely to a modular eText format, but his publisher (one of the big academic guys) is the one resisting the change. His textbook is $150 brand new, $120 used, and he said he'd really like the the ebook to be a third to half of that price. That's cash that the publisher, not him, will lose out on, since his royalties are significantly less than $50.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Someone has finally invented the website.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
They say it's standard HTML. If that's true, it's great - I'll be able to use it on any device anywhere. As long as it can be saved and printed, I'll cheerlead this one all the way.
If they change their mind and add DRM it'll screw up those benefits. So, Nature, do you have the cojones to keep it in an open format?
"Nature will continuously update the e-text as the science and pedagogy evolve.""
Will it keep track of changes, like a wiki, so that people can keep a better record of what the text used to say and what people used to think after changes are made?
Several branches of research have begun to use Living Reviews as a way of maintaining an up-to-date survey of the field. I'm familiar only with the Relativity section; it's excellent. The publishers are academic institutions.
Living Reviews is open-access, check it out!
http://www.livingreviews.org/
I know many students, myself included when I was in school, would sell back textbooks that we weren't interested in. Of course, being a math major, that meant there were a ton of used books to buy at much less than the cost of new books. (At the lower levels of course...) Same with physics and engineering books, how many drop out of those disciplines and sell the books back. Enough to have saved me a lot of money.
I like the features that can't be duplicated in a paper textbook but really, textbooks are a major expense and the ability to sell them back, and buy used books, made that a bit more bearable.
What I see in many current products is a lack of organization, a lack of student friendly setup, or a lack a obsessive focus on proprietary content. Here is what the internet is good for. Supplying content. Here is where a firm can profit. Organizing and presenting content. I have seen on example where this is actually done reasonable well. I have seen it done badly in many other cases. Simply placing every link found in google in a database organized by subject is not how this should be done. Believe me I have seen products that do this. What nature has done may or may not be well done. It does not really seem to be that innovative. I have seen other products that follow the same line.
One thing that works well for me in organizing content is Moodle. Like the Nature book it is organized into units. There is not built in mechanism to force students to follow a certain path, but content can be presented and valid assessment created. This is technology that exists the can free students from reading 1000 pages out of context, paying huge bills for books, and taking tests where the purpose is often minimizing cheating rather than testing skills. The question is how much will students pay for a moodle setup. Probably not enough to be worth setting it up.
On an aside, what is up with testing on the computer. Why do we still have tests that are mostly multiple choice? It is possible to have math questions with randomly generated numbers and calculated question. It is possible to have scripts and regex expression to check short answers automatically. There are tool bars that let students enter algebraic expressions. Computer have been around for nearly two generations, yet will still teach basically as we did 30 years ago. With books and scantron machines. It is crazy. There is no well paying job where one gets paid for filling bubbles. Learning is no longer simply reading a book for facts. Increasingly what we learn is process, how to interact with a computer so the results are what is expected. It is much more complex, experiential, dare I say hands on.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Great, now they can continuously update the darn thing so that it always is politically correct. Just a word from the lobby groups, and voila!
What would be really useful is to give diffs for each new version, i.e., "What's New".
Nothing more annoying than to have to read through 1000 page to find out what's changed, assuming you remember the previous version exactly enough to be able to discern.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Is this not just a very long or big SCORM package presented in a different way?
First, books are not all entirely sequential. One of the reasons I still buy paper books on IT is that I reckon I can often find what I want faster than by searching. Yesterday I wanted to remind myself how to iterate through a directory using Perl. I know the recipe is in "Perl Cookbook". I know that book is within arm's reach. I remember the chapter is about a quarter of the way through. Flick flick - bingo, all in about ten seconds. If I don't know the book well I look at the contents page, which is no slower than skimming links on a screen. Yes, I'm sure a computer is faster in theory, but that isn't my subjective experience, and I don't think that's because I'm incapable of using a computer. Grabbing a book and flicking to roughly the right place is actually not a bad random access heuristic.
Second, sequential is often good. It often *is* the pedagogy. When I first get a book (not a cookbook...) I often start on page one and read to the end, maybe skipping bits that really don't interest me. Yes, that takes longer if I'm looking for one specific answer. But, if the book is well-constructed, it often gives me a much better feel for the overall subject than I would get by looking at 200 modules, each of which is designed to stand on its own. And, in practice, I'd probably only read 20 of those 200 modules because there's no narrative to pull me onto the next module.
A great example of this for me is "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl. You can google most of the answers to specific regex problems, and I did that a lot. Ploughing through hundreds of pages of dense and often obsessive text (breaking off from writing a chapter to get Richard Stallman to patch emacs regexes counts as obsessive, right?) meant that I finally understood how regexes work, what happens under the hood and why some apparently innocuous regexes never terminate.
Hypertext and modularity have their place. But I wouldn't dance on the grave of sequentially structured information just yet.
Virtually serving coffee
I dont know why, but the image of the silly aliens making the translators say silly things as they attacked people came into my head. I mean, imagine if someone got access to it. They could replace Jupiter's definition with a series of cat pictures with oddly worded phrases attached. Or they could remove or change some number in some equaiton, or a couple of words, in a way that would be much harder to detect. Oh, sure right now its not that big a deal cause we still do have phyiscal copies... I dunno, I'm probably just paranoid. Its not like the corporations or any aspect of a government has ever just accidently lost very important information or forgot to ever set a password or literally lost computers full of sensitive information many many times now. Because if that were true, I'd be terrified.
Steve Guttenberg writes biology books now? Never saw that coming in the 80s.
And that will put an end to evolution of this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You'll find that the serial publication of reference material goes back to the Library of Alexandria at least - but I have no doubt these folks hold patents that will prevent general use today. We've institutionalized being retarded. The progress we see now is retrograde, and accelerating.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Fiat money.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Look, I am all for this project, but we cannot lose sight of one simple drawback: people *like* working with a hardcopy (myself included). I find myself more able to pay attention to a book than a screen. I'd much rather read a book than it's .pdf duplicate. There is something about a tangible medium like the book that just is not replicable in digital form.
I became herbally fascinated by the ability to use "footnotes" on a VAX machine in college to document "digression". I stayed up most of the night trying to sketch out the nested "footnote-on-footnote" regressions and became convinced it was some kind of post-modern, exponential literature. Wow, in fact it wasn't even constrained to literature, it could wander into philosophy, science, anything. It could begin a process of footnoting translations. Unfortunately, in the morning, everything I'd written was as boring as this article. Or perhaps it was just over my head.
Gently reply
We love eBooks, but need ways to compare, before buying any book... Suggestions?
How long will it take for an existing exclusive publishing contract, if any, to run out?
Honestly, I would be happy just to get animated gifs in my text books. It shouldn't be that hard, gifs are ancient and small, just provide a fall back picture for static display.
are they fucking high? A student buys a textbook for a specific course. When the course is over, they ditch or sell the book, as they will likely never crack it open again. WHY would a student spend a nickel on something they don't need?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Somewhere on Earth, several book publishers and schoolbook company executives' hearts skipped a beat, and the world grew as dark as a black whole for a sliver of a second.
Then they went back to eating caviar while swimming through piles of money and English interns.
New revisions, giving the book account to their friends or children, etc.
Newer courses and/or advanced courses (my Discrete Mathematics course book was required for one class, which covered maybe ~4% of its massive material, at best. The book, while quite terrible, has been very applicable to around 5 courses I took after the class that required it)
As well, if the student is getting a job in that field, then new and updated textbook data and studies straight from a renowned scientific journal/organization for that book's material for life, for free, is a god damned amazing deal.
*Also, $49 is pretty bloody cheap compared to the ebook versions of Science textbooks I've seen.
Weren't we warned about the dangers of post-print redaction and alteration in [ITALIC]Animal Farm[/ITALIC]?
What happens when Nature decides that the theories and exemplum present in the past become outdated, and they change them, how will we know the past, such that we can avoid the same pitfall in the future?
This is all well and good for a science book to gain new knowledge over it lifetime, but does it contain a 'revision history'?
How about History books, or Literature. When will we see history being changed dynamically and Literature censored in real time on your electronic copies? Only a revision history would inform the reader of the change and of what was 'revised'.
so i created a wikipedia article on the book.
This sounds like countless other online courses. There's even a free public school, k12.com, that does this sort of thing for 12 grades worth of content, for free!