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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).
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
Does a biology textbook evolve?
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.
I've been working on and teaching a course (Math and the Art of M.C. Escher) from a non-linear online textbook for years now. The book we're using could never be a paper book, because it is too heavily illustrated, animated, and linked. It's also based of of learning modules (Explorations) rather than a linear read-through.
I would love to provide paths through the book - my coauthor and I teach the course in quite different ways, and the other users of the 'book' do as well. But it's proven technically challenging. We host our book with Mediawiki, and maybe that was the wrong choice, but it's worked well in many ways. Is there a good model of how to provide discourses or ontologies? I haven't really seen such a thing in a serious text. WikiBooks, for example, doesn't really have such a thing - if they did, we'd jump on board.
Unlike the book from TFA, though, we're not charging an arm and a leg for a dubious license. This makes me wonder how much of this 'innovative' biology book is really just to make a boatload of cash for the publisher. They must save a considerable sum on production costs, and the maintenance of this book sound quite a bit easier than the usual 'new edition every five years' model. They can gradually replace smaller parts when needed, rather than rebuild the whole book to justify selling a bunch of new copies.