The Ed Techie

How long should a book be?

(My book will be considerably thinner, and less influential, than this)

I sent the manuscript for my Battle for Open book off to the publisher Ubiquity Press last Friday. I can't find the origin of the phrase "a book isn't finished, it's abandoned", but I was contemplating it last week, in trying to decide if the book was finished (or at least bar copyediting and review feedback). It came in at about 57,000 words. That's quite short for a book, and my initial reaction was "create another chapter or two to bring it up to 70,000 plus words". Having written three books previously, they've all been around 80K words. 

But then I caught myself and thought "why?" Convention dictates that books are around that length, but that convention is really the result of the economics of book publishing. It doesn't cost much more to print and distribute a 50K, 80K or 100K word book. So they are priced the same, but people tend to shy away from purchasing thinner books. The convention then settles on 80-100K words being the optimum. 

Now ask yourself, how many academic books (or even fiction) have you read that were really a 40K word idea stretched out over twice that length? Me, I'd say nearly all of them. This is a classic example of old conventions dictating the possibilities of the new. My book will be available freely under a CC licence as an epub and PDF version. There will be a physical copy available at a reasonable price, so the need to make the book 80K words in length diminishes. I had made the case I wanted to make, explored it in depth, and kept it reasonably concise. People might even read it.

How long should a book be? As long as it needs to be. Won't that be refreshing.

Calling OA academic book publishers

Now is the time for you to seize the moment and make a small to modest profit while performing a useful academic function. 

Okay it's not quite a passionate rallying cry, but I've been thinking about open access book publishing recently for two reasons. The first is that on an almost monthly basis I get emails from colleagues/peers/random people asking me about my experience of publishing with Bloomsbury Academic because they are writing a book proposal and want to go open access. They've either been told no by established publishers or 'yes, but it'll cost you £20,000 - will your university fund it'. To which the answer is no, or 'eff off you cheeky money grabbing ...', depending on the author. This indicates to me that there is a market for more OA book publishers out there. 

While we're here, I'll answer the query about Bloomsbury - my experience was very positive, they did a professional job on copy editing, they were prepared to go to several designers to get a cover we liked, they produced a good web site for the free online version, and were brave in giving it a CC-NC licence. So, I'd commend them to any authors.

The second event that set me thinking about OA book publishers was the recent FlatWorld Knowledge debacle. Once proclaimed as a model for sustainable open textbooks, they recently announced that, erm, they weren't offering books for free anymore.

I don't know FWK's business model but it seems to me they went too ambitious. They were after that big US set textbook market. This means you have to have a big product. Which means you can then get venture capital (of $26 million), which means you have to have a really big product, and so it goes on. They developed their own platform to allow annotation of books, and sales system. But when you're doing that you get through a fast money burn rate, and then the idea of, you know, giving books away seems less appealing to the VCs who've piled their money in.

But I think the more modest market of academic text books could be accommodated by a far simpler model. The reason academics are going to publishers and not just sticking their own books up online is that they get a range of benefits from the publisher, which include:

• Reputational benefit - if you self-publish you're seen as a looney with a fragile ego, if a publisher puts your book out, you're an author. This matters in academia where the book sales won't amount to much more than in literature (where you can be the next 50 shades success and not give a damn about reputation because you have a massive yacht).
• Copyediting - you really do need a professional to go through an 80,000 word book and do a proper job of copyediting
• Layout, design - no, you can't use that clip art. Or comic sans.
• Manufacture - making all those book things
• Promotion - this is probably the biggest one. Getting books into libraries, promoted at conferences and reviewed in places is difficult. I have to say all my publishers have really relied on me to provide places for review, and even then I'm not sure they ever got them reviewed, so this service isn't as good as it should be. But library distribution is important.

I've raised this before, but it seems to me that these functions are not difficult to realise for a commercial publishers and don't require huge amounts of upfront investment, unlike FWK, if they make use of existing tools. Let's take each of them in turn:

• Reputational benefit - this will take time to acquire, and will need the publisher to operate a quality threshold. This will probably necessitate reviewers looking at proposals and making recommendations. I do this occasionally and going rate seems to be about £50-£100.
• Copyediting - this is generally outsourced by publishers (mine were in India). 
• Layout, design - again, this can be outsourced. You'd want a housestyle and template, and much of it can be done by the author.
• Manufacture - use print on demand or simply operate through a provider such as Blurb. You provide the online version free, and take a percentage of the sales of the print ones.
• Promotion - this would require decent knowledge of how to get books into libraries, and a good social media, network presence. But it's not insurmountable and most publishers don't do great at this anyway.

So how to make it all pay? I'd suggest two options:

1) The authors pay upfront the production costs (for copy-editing, reviewing, design and initial print run), but then keep a large proportion of profits. My royalty because I wanted to go OA was less than 10%, so authors may want to gamble and go for a 50% return if they think it'll sell well. 

2) Company pays production costs, but claims a larger percentage of royalties.

In both cases the online text is free under a CC licence and the physical book costs (and maybe a 99p Kindle version?). I think there are a lot of models that could be explored here that existing publishers don't seem willing to engage with. This would be a prime model for University presses of course, but most of those have been sold off or disbanded, so I'll reiterate my call for a rebirth of university presses. But it looks like some publishers are giving it a go - Open Book Publishers are operating a model similar to the one I've set out for academic texts in the Humanities. I think there's room for a few more in the market too.

It's not without risks, and the returns may not be as large as FWK hoped for, but I think it's a viable business model. And it's one the sector seems to require. So, go on you entrepreneurial types, give it a go. I'll come on board as your Chief Biscuit Officer if you want.

 

 

Better angels of our edtech nature

Over the summer I finally got around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. In case you don't know about it, Pinker makes the argument that violence of all forms has declined - between states, domestic, national and criminal. It's a lengthy book, but he goes through the arguments very carefully and brings a range of research together to make a compelling case.

What he does very well is take accepted arguments or facts and challenge them - for instance that the 20th century was the most violent one in history. He demonstrates how these are often based on a combination of a rose-tinted view about the past (we were all happy farmers) and a misreading of data.

I was often struck when reading it how lazy people are - and not just journalists or lay perceptions, but academics also. Certain beliefs become an accepted starting point, and when you really examine these you often come to some surprising, counter-intuitive findings.

In education and education technology I think this is also true. Many claims appeal to our "common sense" or widely held beliefs about how society is today, without really backing this up. For example, the raft of 'technology is destroying society' type books or beliefs often only draw on indirect data at best, but usually rely on anecdote. Take Sherry Turkle's argument that we're losing the art of conversation and becoming more isolated. What is this really based on? There is evidence that families are spending more time together, yet you would be hard pushed to find anyone who had this as a starting point in an argument.

Or take the argument that education is broken (which I've moaned about before). This often starts from the 'fact' that truancy is at an all time high, therefore schooling isn't working, therefore we need to do something radical. I haven't analysed truancy rates in sufficient detail (in fact there doesn't seem to be much meta-analysis of truancy rates), but I know the manner in which they are recorded varies considerably. One must also ask the following questions:

• Is any change now a statistical one, or within the realms of normal variation?
• Are historical comparisons valid (ie are they comparing the same measures)?
• Can an increase in truancy rates be accounted for by an increase in population or targeted school attendance (eg if you are working harder to make sure certain groups are registered in school in the first place, will you get more truancy)?
• Is it an increase in more pupils being truant, or the same number of truancy pupils being truant for longer? (eg this article suggests7% of pupils account for one third of all truancy numbers).

And so on - I'm not suggesting truancy isn't an issue, but merely making the point that we adopt lazy interpretations in education, and then make quite sweeping demands for change based on them.

And, naturally, I can't resist one more digital natives swipe on all this. The whole digital natives argument was dogged by this failure to make any real historical comparison and instead rely on anecdote and over interpretation.

Because ed tech is often dealing with new things, it is easy to do this. And I definitely don't advocate doing nothing until you have all the data 20 years from now when you can declare 'yes, the internet will be significant.' It's perfectly okay to have hunches, intuition, to draw from experience and to have a working hypothesis. But equally, because this stuff is all new, we should be forceful in making sure claims are really founded in evidence.

So here's an activity you can do with students, or just for the fun of it: Take a claim or widely held belief in educational technology and examine the precepts that underlie it. How solid are these? Are any of them subject to the kind of Pinker analysis and review?

For now, I would just heed caution to any argument that is based on something that is 'obvious to everyone'.

 

A simple open vs closed tale

Science in the Sands reports how a US Professor, Dianne O'Leary, wrote to the publisher, Springer, asking for a PDF of her own paper. They refused and as her university doesn't subscribe to the journal, because it is prohibitively expensive, she couldn't get a final copy of her own article.

A later update reveals that, she could get the copy, but you have to ask the right person. This is something I have often encountered - getting the definitive copy, as quite often the last version you hold on your machine is not one that has been through final edits. So even when she could get the copy, it took a long time to obtain it, you had to find the right person to ask, and it often comes with limitations on use (such as you can't post it on a website). 

Now, contrast this with a recent experience I had with my Digital Scholar book, which is published by Bloomsbury under a Creative Commons license. I realised the other day that I too, didn't have a PDF version of the final book. The version they make available is in HTML. I knew that the book torrent site Library Pirate had made a version available. As it is a non-commercial license, this is perfectly legitimate (I think). So I went to their site and downloaded a 'pirate' version of my own book. Within minutes I had a PDF (Download TheDigitalScholar), which I could do with as I wish.

As an author, which process is preferable?

Why don't academic authors self-publish?

<Photo by MonsierLui http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsieurlui/316350341/>

I got an invite from Frank Rennie the other week to contribute a chapter to a book he is thinking of putting together around the subject of the mismatch (or distance) between academic thinking and the potential of new tools. Frank is a big fan of the self-publish sites and has suggested we eschew an academic publisher, and just publish ourselves via Lulu or Blurb.

This got me thinking as to why more academics don't do this, and still chase the book contract. It certainly isn't for the money, so it must be for the prestige. This can be broken down into personal and external I think. There is the personal prestige one feels in having a book accepted by a publisher and going through the actual process. One feels like a proper author. There are some practical advantages also - real deadlines to keep you motivated, professional copyediting and some promotion. But these practical advantages are often over-played, for example, as an author you have to suggest most of the avenues for publicity.

The external prestige is probably the greatest factor. This is strongly reinforced in the UK by the REF, which wouldn't really consider a self-published book, but also by promotion committees and just general esteem amongst colleagues. Self-publishing is seen as rather sordid and the last recourse for the demented author who couldn't get published anywhere else. It tended to smack of desperation somewhat. But that clearly isn't the case anymore (if it ever was), with the news that author Barry Eisler turned down a $500K contract to self-publish. Going it alone is seen as a sensible option.

Academic authors are not in the same position as Eisler, but they never were anyway. The return on most academic books won't buy you a yacht cap, let alone a yacht. But increasingly academics are developing what we might nauseatingly refer to as personal brand. That is they carry sufficient credibility and connections within their own networks to make self-publishing as viable as traditional publishing in terms of generating interest. Add to that they can be in charge of rights and make their books open access. So the question then is what is the aim of academic publishing? Is it to be as widely read as possible or to generate items for your CV?

So why did I go with a publisher? Well, they are doing open access so maybe, you can have a bit of both. And I don't think I've quite shaken that prestige thing.

Job selection and the paradox of choice

<Image by Ted Percival http://www.flickr.com/photos/tedpercival/3115404982/>

I read Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice recently (after Erik Duval recommended it). The title kind of tells you all you need to know, but his basic argument is that, contrary to what we might think, greater choice isn't always a good thing. As we get more and more choice, we become either paralysed by the possibility of making the wrong choice, or we revert to standard, old practice, ignoring the choice we have.

This came to mind recently when both selecting people for a job interview and talking to someone else who was trying to shortlist. The 'problem' is that in times of financial hardship you get a lot of applicants for every job. In order then to shortlist and also to meet regulations on fair selection, you need to apply a score to the job criteria. With so many applicants, you are effectively looking for reasons to reject, not to include. For example if you have 100 applicants for a post, you can only interview 6 maybe in a day. That's a 94% rejection rate you need to get to in order to progress. 

So, what happens is that you reject people who don't get a perfect score on every criteria. This may mean you get an excellent candidate. But compare what would happen if you only had 20 applicants, say. There you might reject half of them as not having the right skills, but the remaining 10 you would whittle down by looking for who was possible to include. This means you may include people who look interesting, for example, but who haven't quite got the appropriate experience or not exactly the right skills.

The danger of the paradox of choice in job selection is that it essentially narrows your field. You inevitably end of selecting people who are like existing members of staff, because they will most readily meet the criteria. In the long term this may be harmful to the diversity within an organisation. You don't even get to interview people who might be interesting, and offer some alternative views. It might also be harmful for a society going through an economic crisis, because people find it difficult to switch between careers as their experience will not be as readily matched to the criteria.

I know that people can make a case for equivalent experience, but the combination of dealing with an excess of applicants, fair selection criteria and the paradox of choice, almost inevitably leads to the end result of employers getting a narrower range of candidates, not a wider one.  

I'm not sure anything can be done about this, I'm not blaming anyone, rather highlighting how this combination of effects may conspire against the long term goals of an organisation.

References are like airport security checks

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4228752706/ by Mike Licht>

This is the penultimate post in my week-long series of reflections on the book writing process (you have been reading them all, right?).

I've moaned before that referencing is largely an anachronistic practice which is located in dealing with physical objects. As I said in that post, there are two main reasons that I can see:

1. To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse.
2. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author (they can't make up references or misrepresent them), and also promotes knowledge sharing.

The first reason, that of acknowledgement, is obviously valid. But in an online context this is achieved by linking - the link is the acknowledgement, nothing else is required. And indeed, proper acknowledgement is one of the cultural norms of blogging, twitter, etc. We don't have problems with acknowledgement.

But in compiling the references section for my book, I was struck again by the redundancy of official referencing systems. You want to know where a book was published? Really? Isn't Amazon enough? You need a full reference for a quote when the quote itself is the reference in Google? Is an accessed date for every online reference really necessary? 

But I'm a good boy and I have a properly structured reference section of around 230 sources. It seems especially strange as most of my references are online, so I have to find a way of structuring the link into a recognised format, so something like "As Anderson notes.." becomes "Anderson, C. (2008) ‘Freemium math: what’s the right conversion percentage?’ <http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2008/11/freemium-math-w.html> [Accessed 11^th February 2011]". I'm not sure what additional information is conveyed in the second version of this.

This then goes offline into a printed book, fair enough, and will then go back online. But what bugs me is the supposed supremacy of print in this. For an online reference of a journal article, the URL is not sufficient but rather the full journal reference is required, because that legitimises it.

And we treat referencing as such an immutable practice. This is a classic of example of where the method has become confused with the intention. What we want is to find sources and for that work to be acknowledged. In a print world a standard method of describing these characteristics to enable location made sense. It makes little sense in an online world. 

This reminds me of airport security checks, such as questions around whether you packed yourself or are carrying guns, body checks, etc. Any questioning of the practice is dismissed with very serious concerns about terrorism. Just as querying the reference system is met with furrowed brows and deep sighs about plagiarism and proper scholarship. But like those airport checks this adds delay, is cumbersome and only inconveniences people who are happy to play by the rules anyway. It does nothing to catch the hardcore plagiarists, and doesn't guarantee a reference will still be available any more than a link does. Yet we have no choice and have to persist in it.

If I had the courage of my convictions, here is what I should have submitted for my reference section:

JFGI

Book analytics

This is the fourth in my musings on the book writing process. When my book comes out it will be freely available online, in HTML (I think). I don't know how the site will be constructed, but it strikes me that as an author this is potentially very interesting.

I'm at the Learning Analytics conference at the moment, and Tony has been talking about Google Analytics. I run this on my blog, and it's always interesting, but the type of data it might give a book author is more revealing. On my blog it tells me where people have come from, that most people tend to come from search, and come to one post only. That's probably what you'd expect.

But analytics on a book is a different thing. As an author you have no idea how people actually read your stuff or what they find interesting. Potentially (it will depend on how the site is constructed) it could show me the following:

1. How long people read
2. What elements are most popular
3. What search terms bring people to my book (which could be seen as a proxy for what the audience really is)
4. What sections are being linked to (and therefore are presumably of most use?)
5. If people come back, which would be some indication of interest and relevance

You'd never know this stuff from a conventional book, which is one of the advantages of working this way. What would be interesting then would be if I did a rewrite of the book, how much this analytics might influence the process. If one chapter hardly ever got read, should I just excise it? Conversely should I expand a section that gets lots of links? 

What I won't know is if there are different reading patterns for the physical book and the online version. I suspect people will tend to read the paper version in longer chunks, and the online one in a less linear fashion. But paper doesn't give me any data back, dammit.

 

A tale of two books

Continuing my thoughts on the book writing process, this post is about how the process itself has changed, for me at least, over recent years.

I start my book by comparing the process of writing this book with my last one about 6 years ago. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book:

1. Books – via the library but increasingly as ebooks and on Kindle, and one audiobook
2. E-journals – my university library has access to a wide range of databases, but I also made frequent use of others through tools such as Google Scholar and Mendeley
3. Delicious/social bookmarking – as well as searching for key terms I would ‘forage’ in the bookmarks of people I know and trust, who make their collections available
4. Blogs – I subscribe to over 100 blogs in Google Reader, which I try to read regularly, but in addition I have cited and used many posts from other blogs
5. YouTube, Wikipedia, Slideshare, Scribd, Cloudworks and other sites – text is not the only medium for sharing now, and for certain subjects these ‘web 2.0’ services offer useful starting points, or overviews, as well as insightful comment
6. My own blog – I have kept a blog for around five years now, and it provided a useful resource for items I have commented on, and drafts of sections of this book. I also have a scrapbook type blog I keep using Tumblr where I post any interesting links or multimedia, and revisited this for resources I had harvested over the past few years. The blog was also a means of posting draft content to gain comments and feedback, which could then be incorporated into further iterations of writing
7. Social network – my Twitter network is especially useful for gaining feedback, asking for suggestions, and on a daily basis, as a filter and collection mechanism for sharing resources
8. Work and personal network – undoubtedly working in an intellectually lively environment, and having face to face discussions with colleagues has been invaluable
9. Google alerts – I set up alerts for a few key phrases, which would then provide me with daily email updates on new content containing these key words. This allowed me to find new resources, track conversations and stay abreast of a field which was changing as I wrote the book
10. Seminars and conferences - my attendance at face to face conferences has declined due to other commitments but I regularly attend, or dip into conferences remotely (see Chapter 10 for a more detailed exploration of the changing nature of conferences)

 

If I compare this with the tools I used when I wrote my last book in 2004, then many of these services did not exist or were in their infancy. Of this list I probably used books, journals and face to face conferences, with maybe some initial exploration of blogs. 

In many ways the changes are not dramatic – books and journal articles still constitute a large part of the information sources I draw upon, although blogs in particular have increased in significance. And the output of all this is still that most traditional of information sources, a book. But the changes are also significant for three reasons, I would suggest.

Firstly, the quantity of this information that is available online has increased considerably. I could access nearly all of it from my desk at home, there was no need to visit a physical library or bookstore. The digitisation of relevant content was almost total for the information sources I required for this book, compared with about half of that in 2004.

The second factor is the significance of my online network in the writing process. I have around 3,000 followers in Twitter and around 2,000 subscribers to my blog (often they are the same people), which represents a wide pool of experience to draw upon. Sometimes I would put out a direct call to this network, along the lines of ‘Does anyone have a good example of …’ In other cases I would post drafts of the content to my blog and receive comments and links to relevant material. Even without these direct appeals this distributed, global peer network represents an invaluable information source, comprising links to resources, commentary on issues, extended debate, use of new methods and technology, and contributions in the form of blog posts, videos and audio.  

This last item leads me to the third significant difference from the previous book, which is the range and variety of content that I drew upon. Even six years ago the type of content was largely limited to journal articles and books. Now, this has diversified to include blog posts, videos, draft publications, conference presentations and also the discussion, comment and debate surrounding each of these. The change from 2004 is partly a result of the first factor, quantity. There is just more of this stuff around. But it is also a result of a shift in attitude (at least on my part), in the legitimacy of these other forms of output, and their central, vital role in everyday scholarly activity.  

The comparison of writing these two books is instructive, I feel, because it gets to the heart of digital scholarship: it is both a profound change and a continuation of traditional practice. This can be seen with the final output also: the previous book existed only in traditional, paper format, and the copyright to this was owned by the publishers. The new book is available in the traditional format, but also online, freely available under a Creative Commons licence. In addition there is a set of resources, such as videos, presentations, blog posts, etc which relate to the book, and then comment and reaction to these. And this is becoming more common: my colleague Grainne Conole, is writing a book by blogging chapters and gaining feedback in a site called Cloudworks (http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2155). Conor Gearty, a Professor of Law at the London School of Economics, is writing a book by posting a weekly video which sets out his theme and encourages discussion (http://therightsfuture.com/). The boundary between Gearty’s book and a course, and the comments of the participants is deliberately blurred.

This conflict between what, from one perspective, seems a substantial change in practice, and from another, appears to be a conservative, minor adjustment to standard approaches, characterises not just book production, but any aspect of scholarly activity, including research, knowledge dissemination, public engagement and teaching. Both radically different and yet familiarly traditional seems to be the story of digital scholarship at the moment, and it is the tension between these two forces that my book sets out to explore.

The book isn't dead, it just has new friends

So the first of my reflections on completing my digital scholarship book can probably be filed under 'No shit, Sherlock':

The book is a good format for some ideas 

I have suggested that books and articles have had a monopoly as the format for the dissemination of ideas, and new media liberate us from this somewhat. In my case the book has grown out of stuff I've been blogging over the past 4 years or so, but it isn't just a load of blog posts bundled together (whatever you may think). The length and format of a book is a very good means of both exploring ideas in depth and pulling together various strands that have been rather fragmented. Who knew eh? One of the points I make (repeatedly, ad nauseum) is that we now have alternatives, where there were previously limited options. It is not the case that the book will disappear, or is dead, but that we have alternatives now to expressing and sharing ideas. Is an article, a blog post, a video, a slidecast, a podcast or conference presentation the best? Sometimes the book really is the best format. 

Perhaps more interesting is not which one of these you choose, but the combination of them. What is the boundary of the book? Is it the physical object? What about the shared comments and highlights on Kindle? Then there will be related media, blogs, twitter conversations. The decision is less about which sole method you select but rather which one you place at the center of this distributed knowledge bundle.