My employer, Grand Rapids Community College, is one of two schools taking part in a pilot program being offered by the Follett Corporation (the entity the college outsourced its bookstore services to several years ago) to rent textbooks to students as opposed to forcing students to buy them, which could result in a savings of over 40% in some cases.
It's likely Follett is being forced into this position by online services like Chegg.com which offer textbook rental and are quickly gaining popularity.
Given how much dissatisfaction there is out there with textbook prices, I'm amazed this didn't happen sooner (though the used textbook market and meta-search engines like BigWords.com have helped keep text prices lower). That same dissatisfaction could provide the momentum that gets the open source textbook movement going.
It's an uphill battle (as California is finding out), but if academics could agree on a universal platform upon which to develop them, open source textbooks could be the future. Think of it: a world where everyone has access to free textbooks created by the brightest minds from around the world on any given topic and proofed by thousands of pairs of eyes. If published on a flexible base (like XML), they could be turned into digital texts (or students could pay a third party to print a copy for them), they could be readily turned into versions for students with disabilities (braille or audio), pushed out to mobile devices, or incorporated into enterprise course management systems like Blackboard.
Interestingly enough I don't think traditional textbook publishers have to disappear in an open source model. They could sustain themselves by focusing on the ancillary textbook material for faculty: translation services, banks of test questions, suggested classroom activities, exercises, multimedia teaching aids, video game modules, etc. - the opportunities are limitless.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Monday, July 13, 2009
Do They Think We're not Watching?
Tip: If you're interviewing for a job - don't tweet that you're going to be wearing fake glasses to look smarter.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Telemarketing/Spamming on Mobile Phones
Simon & Schuster and the marketing company ipsh! recently lost a court decision after spamming mobile phone owners with text messages promoting Stephen King's new book. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act currently limits the use of autodialing technologies
So long as consumers incur any sort of direct "per transaction" cost for the traffic they receive on mobile devices, any marketer that tries to use those platforms for unsolicited advertisements is begging for trouble (and risking cutting themselves off from their audience permanently). It wouldn't take much for an enterprizing programmer to have a hit iPhone or Blackberry app that blocks unsolicited texts.
Rather than wasting their time and money lobbying or trying to create systems that skirt the law to advance ineffectual mass-marketing campaigns - marketers should be concentrating on developing relationships with their key audiences so that they WANT to stay connected because of the valuable and relevant communications from the advertisers.
It will be interesting to see how mobile device pricing evolves. One could imagine marketers offering to pay mobile service providers to make the cost of, say, an SMS text message free. One could also then imagine mobile service providers creating a new "service" that allows users to block advertising for a monthly fee.
Whatever happens, the current price structure can't continue as more and more people begin to use phones for mobile computing as opposed to purely for phone calls because it's ass-backwards: even though it's all just data moving through towers and pipes - users are charged more for SMS text messages and data transfer than they are for phone calls (which use more data).
So long as consumers incur any sort of direct "per transaction" cost for the traffic they receive on mobile devices, any marketer that tries to use those platforms for unsolicited advertisements is begging for trouble (and risking cutting themselves off from their audience permanently). It wouldn't take much for an enterprizing programmer to have a hit iPhone or Blackberry app that blocks unsolicited texts.
Rather than wasting their time and money lobbying or trying to create systems that skirt the law to advance ineffectual mass-marketing campaigns - marketers should be concentrating on developing relationships with their key audiences so that they WANT to stay connected because of the valuable and relevant communications from the advertisers.
It will be interesting to see how mobile device pricing evolves. One could imagine marketers offering to pay mobile service providers to make the cost of, say, an SMS text message free. One could also then imagine mobile service providers creating a new "service" that allows users to block advertising for a monthly fee.
Whatever happens, the current price structure can't continue as more and more people begin to use phones for mobile computing as opposed to purely for phone calls because it's ass-backwards: even though it's all just data moving through towers and pipes - users are charged more for SMS text messages and data transfer than they are for phone calls (which use more data).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
