Education and Knowledge – Unlatched
You never come away from a meeting with Dr Frances Pinter without feeling that everything is possible. If, in the whole world of print to digital transformation, you had thought that the scholarly...
View ArticleSharing: More News
Don’t you hate those tacky moments in presentations when the speaker says something like “Hands up who used a deodorant this morning?” and we all squirm a bit and try to think of the right answer – are...
View ArticleMOOCs Mood
I have been rumbling silently about MOOCs for a long time, but it was only when I read a report on the Domain of One’s Own experiments that I realised what it was about Massive Open Online Courses that...
View ArticleMarketing Nightmares in NYC
Was it the sandwich or the service that sparked the bad dream? And does it matter? After the sandwich episode I cannot recall indigestion, though it is certainly true that anger was one of the emotions...
View ArticleThe Atomization of Education
When lofty, intellectual figures like Mike Shatzkin (http://www.idealog.com/blog/atomization-publishing-as-a-function-rather-than-an-industry/) quote one’s sayings of many years ago there is real...
View ArticleThe Editor is You
For a brief but happy period I rejoiced in the somewhat overblown title of “Executive Publisher” at Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, and was delighted when one of the handful of Edinburgh -sourced...
View ArticleSpring in the Ku’damm
Spring came late to Berlin this year, as elsewhere in Europe. But with the Spargel festival just starting, the trees in bud on Unter den Linden, the German courts ruling that you cannot re-sell an...
View ArticleMeet You in a New Reality…?
I blinked at today’s announcement with incredulity. Neilsen Expositions sold to private equity for $950m? (http://www.followmag.com/2013). Where does this madness end? Since 2008 we have been living,...
View ArticleEducation: Ignore the Tablets, Eat the Box!
Yesterday may have seen the largest single step forward for school-based educational publishing globally for a decade, which makes it confusing, but rather appropriate, that the word “education” did...
View ArticleHow Do You Grow STM?
Two events this week turn us back towards this perennial question. One is the purchase of Springer by BC Partners after a prolonged affair and a lover’s tiff which forced the price up a notch to $4.4...
View ArticleOver Niagara in an eBook
The ineffable Shatzkin reports (www.idealog.com/blog) this week on an innocent story with dramatic implications. It seems from his calculations from Hachette UK releases that if eBook sales are indeed...
View ArticleRoyal Line Diluted Online
In a land where one cannot move for Royal baby hysteria, I seem to have found myself reading a great many “Death of the Textbook” stories in the past week. A good series from the Economist on the...
View ArticleThe Future is Already Past
Is there a better instance of “speed of change ” than that just when you are instancing something as a prime example of future change , you next read of it as history ? We keep reminding ourselves that...
View ArticleThings Every Boy and Girl Should Know…
” Well,” she said, in a determined and slightly defensive tone of voice “the last thing we intend to do is turn ourselves into a software house. We are publishers and cannot be expected to understand...
View ArticleGoodbye Native Websites!
It was the second afternoon of the last EASDP annual conference, last Friday in Amsterdam. The Big Business of the day was said to be over, in that at their General Council EASDP, representing Europe’s...
View ArticleNever say Never
I really enjoyed a brief stopover in New York last week, en route to the Outsell Signature Event in Northern Virginia. It meant that I was able to respond to a kind invitation from BISG to chair a...
View ArticleGiants in Transformation Contrast
There are some major similarities and differences between the giant market players in the information/publishing media sector which are not all about markets and competition. For example, Wolters...
View ArticleTales of the Joseon
I have always felt that the further East you travel the more wisdom you encounter, and the prejudice was sharply confirmed earlier this week in a conversation with Dr Myungdae Cho , Director of the...
View ArticleNeon City
Perhaps the one thing that Korean cities like Busan and Seoul have in common with Hong Kong is the neon . Looking out of a Hong Kong Club window earlier this week around 8 pm I observed the office...
View ArticleMiley Cyrus v Pope Francis
A good headline attracts attention. And I do have some, lame, excuse, since my headliners were both in the top 10 mentions on Facebook. As a commentator on these matters I am only deficient in two...
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