More on Nature's forthcoming digital texts

A few days ago, I posted a positive note about a series of electronic texts announced by Nature Publishing. It sounded like a significant improvement over the electronic textbooks being offered by other major publishers, so, I followed up with an email interview of Vikram Savkar, Publishing Director for Nature Education. The questions and answers follow, and the added emphasis is mine, not his -- all good stuff.

When will it be possible to play around with the etext or at least a sample interactive lesson or other material?

We expect to be able to demo sample modules for press in early to mid August, ahead of publication of the full product for the broader market on September 1 2011. Review access will be available to instructors from September 1, 2011.

Is the etext a collection of interactive lessons or are the interactive lessons a supplement to an integrated textbook?

The interactive lessons in fact are the textbook. Each lesson is a thorough exploration of the topic at hand, beginning with background information, followed by a discussion of core concepts, mid-point self-tests, interactive activities to allow the student to apply core concepts, and end of lesson test questions. There are approximately 200 such lessons arranged in the sequence in which introductory biology courses are usually taught. Instructors will be able to rearrange the lessons if they teach topics in a somewhat different order. The lessons are interactive in two senses. First, because they are online - and integrated with the gradebook, annotation tools, self-tests, end of lessons test questions, and so on - students will actively drive their own progress through the material, with continual feedback to let them know where they stand. Second, most lessons contain rich interactive demonstrations (available in both Flash and HTML5 versions) that immerse students even more deeply in particularly key concepts. Taken as a whole, the interactive textbook combines what is best from print textbooks (thorough text, peer reviewed figures) with the best of what is only possible online. Note that the textbook will come with a rich set of supplements, including lecture notes, instructor guides, and more.

How often will it be revised?

One of our core goals in designing Principles of Biology was to enable it to evolve frequently, in response to both emerging scientific discoveries and suggestions that instructors have on how to expand particular modules. We plan to make these revisions on an ongoing basis. Instructors will be able to choose on a case by case basis whether or not they import these revisions during the semester, so no instructors will ever be surprised by an automatic update to the text. We think of this approach as creating a "living edition".

Will it be for sale to the general public as well as students?

Yes (and I agree with you, I think there are many lifelong learners who could benefit from this book) Principles of Biology will be available for individual purchase from the Nature Education website from September 1, 2011. The general public can pay $49 by credit card and will receive the same lifetime access that students do, with the same continual revision to maintain scientific currency.

To what extent, if any, will uses be able to cache material for offline study?

Students will have access to an offline digital version, which has most of the instructional content but won't be tied into the gradebook and a few other connection-dependent features. It's not a substitute for the full interactive textbook, but it should allow students to do some good studying on a plane or wherever else they happen to have time but no internet access.

What about DRM?

There is some DRM, but the heart of the anti-piracy strategy we've chosen for this program is ensuring that the official product is so effective that there is a significant disincentive to use a pirated version. For example, the assessments that we've integrated into every page of the textbook will feed into the online gradebook that instructors use to evaluate students' progress. Students who don't purchase the digital product won't be in the gradebook . . . that will be inconvenient for them. I'm sure some people will try to bend the rules. Overall, by pricing this product affordably, adding in plenty of value online, and mixing in a little bit of DRM, I believe we've created a strong case for people to use this product as intended.

Have you any art or sample videos that we can look at or link to?

Not just yet . . . the website is still in development and testing. We'll have samples available to you in August. We do have a few mock-ups of an iPad view of Principles of Biology if you would like to use them in the BYTE.com piece. These are early design concepts at this stage. You can see an example here.

Will there be a computer science "book" in the series? Will there be versions for non-majors, for example, "IT literacy" as opposed to computer science?

Since the natural sciences are our core strength as a publisher, our primary focus is to expand the program across most of the life and physical sciences in next few years. I would say that expansion into fields like computer science would likely only be through partnerships with publishers who specialize in those spaces.

If they deliver what they seem to be promising, and live up to the policies I've highlighted above, these will be terrific books. Since they are limiting themselves to life and physical science, I hope other publishers are watching.

(Here is another interview of Savkar -- check it out).

Textbooks -- moving beyond the "Gutenberg Bible"

Nature Education, in partnership with the California State University System (my employer), has announced a series of digital textbooks in college-level science. The first book in the series, Principles of Biology, is intended for biology majors and will be available September 1, 2011. It will be used at three CSU campuses in the fall.

Gutenberg's first books were reprints of the large handwritten bibles of the time. Today, traditional textbook publishers are offering machine readable versions of previously printed books and chapters. Nature's books promise to depart from tradition in the way they are created and distributed.

Nature's books will be "born digital" -- created from scratch by a group of scientists, instructors, artists, and interaction designers working together under the guidance of their editorial team. The first book will not be out until September, but it is undergoing extensive peer review by CSU faculty and is slated to include 175 interactive lessons and the usual supplementary material like test banks and PowerPoint presentations.

Nature's business model is also is also different. The biology book will retail for $49, which is cheap by the standards of the mainstream textbook industry. But that is not the big change. Students purchasing electronic versions of textbooks today typically gain access for a limited time, perhaps a year. Nature is proposing lifetime access to a continuously-updated book -- a textbook with an open-ended subscription.

They plan to sell direct to students through college book stores or sell site licenses to schools. But, if the subscription/books are as good as they sound in the press release, won't there be a general retail demand for them? Hey, I want one.

The textbook industry is ripe for change. There are a few dominant companies (including Nature’s parent company, MacMillan) with large sales forces, high printing and distribution costs, and bookstore markups. (Click the image above for a cost breakdown). These books from Nature may be game changers. Nature is a prestigious publisher, the CSU is a large textbook customer, and the access model and price are very attractive.

Nature is departing from the traditional textbook model by having a team of collaborators create a digital book from scratch and selling it as an ongoing subscription at a low price. If they can deliver, they may be the Aldine Press of our day. (Aldine's 15-16th century innovations included publishing small, portable books, punctuation like the period at the end of a sentence, and typography like italic text). Stay tuned for more when we get some hands-on experience with the biology book and interactive lessons.

Some experience with a modular electronic text

I have been building and using a modular electronic text (etext) for an IT literacy course this term.

I recently gave a presentation on modular electronic texts and my course. You can see a link to the presentation and comments on it here.

The following is a digest of those comments and some of my reactions to them.

Cost: Several people noted that lower cost was an advantage of etexts. The etext for my course is free, but traditional publishers charge for etexts. While those charges are high today, they will eventually decline to reflect savings in printing and distribution cost.

Environmental concerns: An etext can be read from a screen, which requires power, but no printing. Many students print the module transcripts, but that is not as costly to the environment as printing and distributing a book.

Portability: My course would easily fit in a flash drive; however, there is (at present) no facility for one-click download of a module, subset of modules or the entire course. This is less important to people with Internet-connected portable devices like tablets and smart phones.

Internet connectivity: Several people pointed out that Internet connectivity is needed to access the etext. Without a simple module-download function, that is the case. On the other hand, being connected is valuable even if you have a local copy of the entire etext. If one is online while studying a module, they can search for complementary information, send messages to other students, the professor and the module content creator, follow the module resource links, etc.

Flexibility: Several people pointed out that an etext was more flexible -- new content or a new way of explaining or illustrating a point can easily be added. However, others pointed out that this caused a versioning problem -- the transcript a student printed or the presentation they studied from might not be current. Furthermore, the videos might lag behind the presentations and not reflect all changes. An explicit version history can solve that problem -- I will start recording significant changes to presentations in the topic module comment section.

Campus infrastructure: This etext can be used for self-study, but I use the presentations in a face-to-face classroom. All of today's classrooms do not have Internet-connected computers and projectors, though they are becoming common. In general, infrastructure must become ubiquitous to generate cultural change. (See this post for more on ubiquity in education).

User interface: Several people mentioned the simplicity of the user interface. The fact that each topic module and each assignment has a unique URL makes it easy for the topic modules and assignments to link to each other and for a teacher to include one or many modules in a class. The presentations also follow a uniform format.

Still, the user interface is not as simple and standardized as turning a page in a book or looking up a term in the index. Some people mentioned that an etext user interface might be confusing to a student who was not comfortable with computers. For example, one person pointed out that a newcomer might have trouble differentiating between the links comprising a topic module (on the left side of the screen) and the cloud tag and links to other documents and sites on the right side. I will add that distinction to the "About our electronic text" page.

Focused content: Several people liked the relatively narrow focus of the annotated slide presentation format. The skills and concepts covered were explicitly stated, and the students knew what to study. For enrichment, they could follow the "resource" links at the end of each presentation. Each module is the rough equivalent of a section in a textbook chapter.

Multiple learning modes: Some students prefer the video presentations, others the PowerPoint presentations or the presentation transcripts. Some prefer reading from paper to reading from a screen. The modules are flexible in that a student can go through a presentation online, watch a video or print the transcript with its slide images for offline study.

I could easily provide audio recordings of the video sound tracks for podcast listening. I plan to add audio recordings of classroom presentations next term, which will provide another option -- a more spontaneous presentation plus classroom interaction.

Marginal notes: Marginal notes can be done by printing the transcript and writing on it or by keeping a notepad window open while watching a presentation online. There is definite room for improvement here -- one can imagine writing/drawing/dictating marginal notes while using a computer or tablet. (Dictated notes should be coupled with well integrated speech recognition to convert them to text).

Instructor convenience: One person commented that a modular etext makes it easier for a professor to develop a customized course. That is true, but most faculty do not worry about customization -- they simply select a textbook and build a course around the accompanying PowerPoint slides, test banks, etc.

Professors are used to adopting a textbook and letting it structure their course. The modular etext requires that they become editors and curators, not mere textbook adopters, and that takes time and thought.

Standards: The material for this course is browser based -- no special reading program is required. The material is in widely used formats -- HTML, pptx, docx, and Flash video. But, the electronic text is in its infancy, and I suspect that other standards for file formats, collaboration, and user interfaces will emerge.

Collaboration and community: An etext allows for collaboration among students, professors, and authors of the teaching material. This collaboration is particularly easy and scalable in the case of a modular etext, in which a community can form around a single module in the same way as Wikipedia users can focus on the articles they are interested in.

I had expected that the topic module and assignment comments would be used for this sort of collaboration and interaction, but they were not. Instead, students used an email list server and face-to-face contact in the classroom to give me feedback and to help each other. (We met twice a week). The comments or other collaboration mechanisms would be more important in a distant education or self-study setting.

The future of the (text)book

New media start by emulating old media, then evolve. Gutenberg's movable type was first used to print large bibles that, like their hand-copied predecessors, were kept in monasteries. It took about 50 years to evolve the form factor of the smaller "portable" book and still longer to settle on conventions for typography, punctuation, tables of contents, figures, indices, footnotes, and so forth. It took 80 years for early movies, shot with a relatively static camera, perhaps filming a stage play, to evolve into the fast-cutting style introduced by MTV.(Change is not always for the better :-).

The textbook is no different. A couple weeks ago, our class saw a digital book presentation by McGraw Hill. They are developing digital versions of their print books, starting with the best sellers and moving down the list. They supplement those with PowerPoint presentations, test banks, links to video, etc. geared to that textbook.

But, like the Gutenberg Bible, this is only the first step. I do not know where the textbook is headed, but I know we are not yet there. A few rough guesses as to future directions are that ...

• There will be a place for collections of modular teaching material rather than integrated textbooks for an entire course -- the professor will become a curator or editor, assembling material as opposed to a textbook adopter, selecting a textbook.
• Communities will form -- students, professors, and authors of learning material will be able to interact with each other, and their roles will blur.
• We will have different user interfaces. We are beginning to see new options with touch interfaces on tablets, but will see more. For example, we should be able to use voice input with speech recognition for control and annotation.
• Standards will evolve for formats, user interfaces, social platform interaction, etc., just as we evolved standards for book pagination, format, and punctuation. We are at version .1 today.

I could keep going on like this, but it is general and speculative. Many people are working diligently on the task of reinventing the book -- thinking about it and developing research prototypes and early standards and products. Here are some you might want to check out:

• The International Digital Publishing Forum is a trade and standards organization. Their activities include holding an industry conference and developing the open Epub format.
• Epub is an open standard for book publishing -- you can see reviews of Epub readers here.
• Archive.org has pioneered online access to audio, video, books, Web site archives and more. They have books in many formats including Epub, Kindle and PDF.
• Internet Archive also has a prototype reader. To try it out, pick a book, navigate to its detail page and click "read online," or jump straight to this example: Darwin's Voyage of the HMS Beagle.
• Pushpop Press has a noteworthy publishing platform and tablet user interface. Check out this 6 minute video demonstration featuring Al Gore's latest book.
• The Institute for the Future of the Book is a research institute focused on, no surprise, the future of the book. They value scholarship and research as well as aesthetics.
• If you'd like to read an old-fashioned book on the history of the book, check out Ivan Illich's In the Vineyard of the Text: a Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993.

Tablet PCs will impact education, but it will take time.

Many new tablet computers were announced at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.  Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal predicted that they will flood college campuses.

I agree that we will soon see students and professors carrying iPads and other tablets on campus, and, in the long run, I think we will view, annotate, discuss and share most of our teaching material on tablet-like devices.

But that is the long run -- they will not be part of mainstream education for many years.

Mainstream impact requires ubiquity.  Today, chalk and white-boards are ubiquitous.  We take them for granted and use them in every class.  Internet-connected computers with overhead displays are becoming widespread, and will also be taken for granted in the classroom.

Ubiquitous hardware is necessary, but not sufficient to drive major educational impact.  Standards are also needed.  The chalkboard works because we assume everyone speaks English or another language, and PowerPoint and Flash video are widely accepted standards for the classroom PC with a projector.

It will be some time before we can assume that nearly everyone has a tablet computer with a fairly standard hardware configuration.  It will take even longer to settle on standard formats for storing, annotating, and sharing teaching material.

Once the machines and standards are in place, we will see a significant impact on mainstream education, but that will not happen over night.

In general, we underestimate the time for a promising new technology to be adopted, but we also underestimate the extent of its impact on our lives, organizations and society when it is finally applied. I think this will hold true for tablet PCs in education.

(For an 18-year old article along these lines, see http://som.csudh.edu/fac/lpress/articles/uart.htm -- you can see what I got right and what I got wrong :-).

Electronic text books

Monterey College of Law is distributing Apple iPads to all students enrolled in a supplemental curriculum program that helps them prepare for the state's bar exam.

The program is motivated by the desire to save time for busy night students who typically work full time and have families, not cost. However, technology improvement coupled with new business models will eventually drive the cost of electronic textbooks well below that of printed textbooks, as shown in this cost breakdown.

Electronic book sales have already passed hard cover sales at Amazon, and the cost of a Kindle reader is down to $139.

In addition to cost and time savings, electronic textbooks will have new features including capability for social or collaborative reading. It is too soon to know what those features will be or how they will work, but check the Institute of the Future of the Book if you are curious about the possibilities.

Would you prefer electronic to printed textbooks?