e-learning - future of education?

Thursday, July 27, 2006

Publication on demand - the bridge between paper and e-book

What is print on demand?
Print on demand is a new idea related to development of digital printing. Digital printing my be prescribe as a typical laser printing but made by huge, commercial presses, usually with high efficiency. Digital printing allows to print color or black and white publication in low circulations on reasonable prices (costs of print do not depend on circulation– almost no economy of scale) with a very short time. Contrary to traditional (book) publishing and, printing on demand (POD) is done usually after receiving order (not before) - that’s why is called print on demand.

Publication on demand system
According to the concept of long tail (shortly - taking profits of niche products, that occupied last positions of your product sales list) WSiP decided to sell its print out books in POD technology. Additionally, it wanted to sell books of other commercial publishers and academic publication using POD concept.

Wsip created and developed a software that allows students via internet to:

  • search the publications database and take out from that books, articles or any other publications interesting fragments
  • combine all that fragments together - students or other person receives a personalized books. (For instant, student interesting in Digital Business Enhancement is able to search database, find some chapters or fragments from different textbooks, combined them and through that he makes its own textbook about DBE)
  • put an order to print – system makes a printable pdf file that would be delivered to one of the many POD spots - located on universities. At that spots publications is printed and blinded professionally. Books can be also delivered to his door within 2-3 working days

  • Results?
    It looks like a brilliant idea. Who would not want to have possibility to pay only for the interesting parts of the books and have it delivered quickly? But unfortunately, project do not succeed. Problems? (despite the organizational problems). The resistant of authors to allow its book be printed in fragments at POD spots. That is because copyrights fees would be calculated from single page.

    Addditionaly, they simply do not want to share with their profits of its book with WSiP. They also afraid of “taking over” by Print on Demand substantial part of traditional print outs – the traditional part of full textbook may decrease.

    Future?
    Anyway, the whole idea seams to be interesting. It is some bridge that combines traditional textbooks (physical) and electronic (e-books) form of the “content” delivered to learners. It gives much more flexibility of building an own, personalized textbook. Just look at our MBA classes and delivered material. It is very rare we have on source of information, one textbook. Usually it is a set of articles, extracts from different textbooks delivered to us.

    Similar systems (POD system) work on some universities (e.g. Oxford) and they succeed.
    To sum up the main point of existing of POD is that paper is still more readers-friendly than the screen. But how long?...

    Links:

  • http://www.printondemand.com/

  • Print-on-Demand - A Technological Revolution in the Publishing World by Grzegorz Boguta

  • http://www.wyczerpane.pl/- polish web-page with sold out books printed on demand

  • Oxford POD program




  • Wednesday, July 26, 2006

    Dictionaries and encyclopedias will die first!

    Dictionaries and encyclopedias are types of books that need to constantly searched. That's why they are just suited to be in digital form that makes it easier. Additionally, electronic versions of them are easily accessible (via internet) or portable (if on CD). That's why their physical production (circulations) fall staidly and publishers that specializes in it suffer seals decline.

    Agora's case
    However, last year Agora - publisher of Gazeta Wyborcza (GW - one of the polish biggest daily newspaper) in cooperation with PWN (publishing house) published 20 volume encyclopedia that was added to their paper. Each of the volume was added to Wednesday's issue of GW. Company do not exactly announced their incomes but at that project and other books series (added to daily newspaper) Agora made in 2005 180 mln pln ($60 mln) and all books projects were reasonable profitable.

    In spite of that in my opinion (probably common opinion) people that bought that encyclopedias do not do this to satisfy the need of "getting knowledge" but rather "having" or "collecting" it (book). They probably will not do it again soon.

    Electronic versions
    Today, thanks to internet we can easily find all information. In my opinion the biggest and the highest volume, however not always giving best results encyclopedia is Google. Google is answer for everything. All of us also know perspective project based of Wiki technology - Wikipedia. It is still growing up and the results are really good! Using them is easy, more comfortable, may be support for all possible digital supplements like sound or movie and what is very important is still (almost) for free.

    Some tools:
    Encyclopedias:
    Wikipedia 1,2m + articles in English and 253 000+ in polish!
    Dictionaries on-line
    Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary
    Polish-English dictionary

    Saturday, July 22, 2006

    The end of the books?

    This text is taken from the The end of the books? article published in The Guardian.

    Is it really end of the books? That questions is asked by almost of all publishers.

    "Perhaps the biggest issue for the future is whether electronic versions of textbooks will supplant the traditional paper versions. E-books have the advantages of being easily searched and annotated, instantly accessible, portable and capable of being linked to other multimedia. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and technical manuals are especially suited to being published in electronic form. "

    Some publishers still believe that traditional books are better!

    Rod Bristow, president of Pearson Education UK, the leading textbook publisher in the UK, believes there will be no diminution in the role of the textbook. "It's very hard to deliver what you get in a textbook more effectively in other ways. Textbooks are extremely convenient," he says.

    But as usually, the future is unknown! However....

    "Simon Midgley thinks we will see a multiplicity of media in future, rather than one medium replacing another. If you look at the history of media in general, when a new medium comes along, it does not usually replace an earlier one; it just adds to it. "Books came first, then radio, cinema, video and computing. None of these things has replaced the book. That's great because it enriches choice for the customer."

    Tuesday, July 18, 2006

    Polish textbooks market - short overview

    About the company
    Wydawnictwa Szkolne i Pedagogiczne SA is one of the largest Polish book publishing house. It specialises in the publishing of books for primary schools and junior and senior high schools, but offers also supplementary books for students and teachers, teaching methodology journals, encyclopaedias, school dictionaries, works on psychology and pedagogy, as well as multimedia resources. WSiP has been publishing textbooks for several decades. It is the only Polish educational publisher which offers the full range of general education textbooks for all subjects, forms and schools, from kindergarten to senior high schools. WSiP shares are floated on Warsaw Stock Exchange. For more information please visit WSiP web page

    Shrinking market
    According to different sources polish textbook market is worth from 700 to 900 m. PLN (180-240 m. Euro). It is also most profitable book market segment, mainly because of high circulations and stable, however, slightly decreasing demand. At the same time, there is common opinion that textbooks are too expensive. Hard to deny that fact comparing average costs of set of book for beginners in amount of 140 PLN to polish salary level. Last wave of disapprobation of high costs of polish textbooks comes with new elections and new Ministry of Education. He is pushing really hard get down prices of polish textbooks.

    Population of Poland (similarly to many European countries) is getting older. It means that fewer and fewer children are born. For companies operating on such market it means only one - potential market of polish textbooks is shrinking. Please look at the graph below.

    Graph presents polish population in age between 3 and 16.
    More information about population of Poland



    What influance may it have to production of textbook? Will it facilitate and accelerate development of e-learing?

    Wednesday, July 05, 2006

    E-learning as a subject of the blog

    Finally, not without hesitation, I decided to start my blog with “real posts”. I decide to write about E-learning. I hesitated between “internet reverse auctions” and just e-learning. Reverse auctions is the subject I already went through and scored some experience while e-learning is the topic I really have no idea about yet, but want to investigate it and find out about new possibilities!. So … e-learning won!

    However, I decided to start another blog, which will describe my project of reverse auctions. In that blog (out of assignment) I will describe my experience about implementing reverse auctions system in WSiP (already not the biggest polish book publisher; second position). This blog is on the side http://www.reverseauction.blogspot.com/.

    So I start to search the net! Of course form WIKIpedia.

    I would be grateful for any suggestion about e-learning tools.