Digital Textbooks Gain Momentum

An article in the Sunday, August 9th New York Times by Tamar Lewin takes a detailed look at the move to digital textbooks that is gaining traction around the country.

The story quotes Marina Leight from e.Republic's Center for Digital Education and Converge magazine and gives a good overview of developments in the still nascent but probably inevitable move away for traditional text books. This trend got a big shove earlier this summer when Governor Schwarzenegger announced a California initiative to move to digital math and science resources for students.

Not mentioned in the NYT article and worth a look: Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems has been an outspoken champion of free open source educational resources for many years. More recently, Aneesh Chopra, currently U.S. Chief Technology Officer, was working towards a physics digital flexbook in in his previous job as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Chopra outlined his views on Virginia's digital flexbooks in the video below, filmed in the fall of 2008.

Bring the Love Back... Will Advertising Survive?

Its not just old school media that's feeling the evolutionary pressures these days. The advertising industry is fraying at the edges and struggling to find its way in a world of new media.

I saw this clip at a recent American Business Media conference. As they say, picture is worth a thousand words.

Watch this - its great!

Three e.Republic Titles Annouced as ASBPE Finalists

Three of e.Republic's national magazines were named as finalists today in the American Society of Business Publication Editors' (ASBPE) annual Awards of Excellence.

The publications included Government Technology, Public CIO and Emergency Management. The awards will be announced at ASBPE Awards of Excellence banquet to be held July 16 in Washington D.C.

We are excited and honored to be among such a prestigious group of magazine finalists. Members of the e.Republic team will be in D.C. on the 16th to celebrate!

e.Republic Wins Four Magggie Awards from the Western Publishing Assoc.

Received word this week that e.Republic received four major recognitions at this year's Maggie Awards sponsored by the Western Publishing Association.

This is a competition among hundreds of national and regional magazines published in the Western U.S.

e.Republic came home with awards in the following categories:

Best Overall Design/Trade Magazine -
Public CIO

Special Theme Issue/Trade -
Emergency Management
November 2008

Best Public Safety/Trade
Emergency Management

Best Non-Paid Circulation/Trade (circulation under 50,000)
Public CIO

We are very proud of our editorial and design teams for their consistently awesome work on these and all our print, web and video media products!

Can Great Design Save Print?

Came across this insightful presentation from European newspaper designer Jacek Utko. He's doing amazing stuff and taking a fresh look at an old media. If you love print it's worth a look.

Snapshots From The (Media) Revolution

Whether intentional or not, the Business Day section of each Monday’s New York Times has become a great collection of snapshots on the conflicted landscape of old and new media.

This was especially true this week and is worth a quick review if you missed it:

An article by Ashlee Vance details a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud which hooks vanity publishing up with cloud computing. The service allows content creators to plug into a network of high speed, high quality digital printers and produce their own short run glossy magazines. Similar technology can also be used for short run book publishing. The Long Tail comes to print.

The MagCloud piece was opposite an item detailing the troubles that may soon see shuttering of the San Francisco Chronicle, which lost 30 percent of its circulation between 2003 – 2008, while another article details how daily papers in Europe are allegedly doing a better job than their U.S. brethren in weathering the internet storm.

Struggling to maintain a hold on eyeballs isn’t just limited to newspapers. Media analyst David Carr has a column on what he calls the “hyperbolic rhythms” of cable news as they try to retain viewership numbers after the flush of November’s TV-friendly election campaign.

Next to Carr’s is a feature entitled “Why Pay For Cable?” which outlines how rapid gains in online viewing of television programming is shifting the ground beneath cable and network TV operators...

where have all my subscribers gone?... Uh, check Hulu and Boxee... (Can we cut a deal with those guys?).

There’s an article by Matt Richtel on how the video game industry (one of the $$$ bright spots of the media world) is under assault from the proliferation of free or low cost games on the web and the explosion of new hand-held devices. “The model as it exists today is dying,” says one video game industry exec.

But wait, there’s more: An article about how Skype, the internet calling service is moving aggressively to bring cheap calls to mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. Another on the chatter on how microblogging wonder-site Twitter might monetize and an Associated Press story on a Huffington Post initiative to fund investigative journalism on the nation’s economy. There’s also, a short item on a big deal between Sony and AMC Entertainment to bring digital projectors to movie theaters; this means that movie houses will soon down load movies direct from satellites or the cloud and goodbye film. Such a move has the potential to reshape the traditional movie theater.

Someone said that newspapers are the first draft of history. When it comes to the evolution of the media world NYT's business section has been doing a lively job of late. This is (advertising subsidized) content I would (an do) pay for and would much rather read on newsprint while having breakfast. Keeps crumbs off the keyboard.

A Most Perfect Invention

As newspapers, television and periodicals are under continued assault by the digitization of almost everything, I sometimes wonder about the future of one of mankind’s most perfect inventions: the book.

While devices like the Kindle are useful but niched riffs on the real thing the book (whether hardback, paper or pocket) has a great future.

I’m biased. I generally adore them and enjoy their company.

For a recent birthday I received a copy of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion. An excellent read that spills over with gems.

Here’s Churchill on books:

“If you cannot read all of your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, your will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”