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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).
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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.
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.
Depends on the environment. They eeevolve if the students are using netbooks.
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.
Not directly: Just as bare-metal VM hosts run hypervisors, rather than Linux directly, bare-metal shelves run an embedded Stress Allocation Geometry engine, rather than an OS.
If you want to run linux, you need to provision your shelves with one or more "Physical Machines", according to the requirements of your operation. Just be sure to observe caution: If you don't load balance your shelves correctly, all the PMs on a given shelf can end up crashing simultaneously. Also, if you exceed the provisioning constraints embedded by the vendor in your shelves' SAG parameter tables, you risk permanent damage to the shelves and the possible crash of some PMs on the over-provisioned shelves.
Delivering Linux services with a shelf-based architecture can be complex and challenging; but it is possible. For home/home office purposes, IKEA has some great whitepapers.
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?
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
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
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.
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Yo dawg I heard you like memes in your memes, so in soviet russia zombie linux badgers imagine a beowulf cluster of you, you insensitive clod! But, does it blend?
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