Future of the Book
Spent the last few days in Los Angeles as a guest of The Future of the Book. I had the pleasure of working with friends and colleagues in a round table discussion regarding the future of textbook publishing. The Future of the Book is run by Bob Stein who did an excellent job hosting all of us. He also publishes TK3 (which when I showed it to my former dept, they had no idea what it was or why we should buy it - no surprise there) and the soon to be released Sophie. We saw a brief demo of Sophie. When finished, it should be a very powerful piece of software. It will allow us and our students to produce very exciting texts.
Overall, the discussions were lively. This type of work - open discussion even when there is no definitive outcome of the discussion - is what rhetoric and composition needs badly. The field is so fixated on outcomes and tangibles that it forgets about the need to bring together minds for thought experiments.
Los Angeles reminds me too much of my hometown, Miami. Spanish style homes. The trees. The terraces. Strip malls. Traffic. I’m reminded of Woody Allen in Annie Hall; when he arrives in California to accept an award, he becomes deathly ill. “They don’t throw out their garbage here,” he says. “They put it on TV.” I don’t miss Miami. And I started getting this bad cough while I was there…
[…] Jeff Rice has a post where he discusses his participation in a discussion about the future of textbooks sponsored by the future of the book organization. Interesting enough, but… well… I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I think there are three basic problems with the basic premise of open source textbooks (though what they’re talking about here is not necessarily open source, I don’t think): […]
Pingback by Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog » Blog Archive » The future of my own textbook… — April 28, 2006 @ 6:36 am
Printcentricity Does Not Bother Me…
Jeff Rice posted a brief reflection on the Institute for the Future of the Book meeting we just attended. And Steve Krause posted a response with some further thoughts about book publishing. I have some comments and hope to keep……
Trackback by I am Dan — April 30, 2006 @ 9:34 am
Just a quick note from Ray at the Institute for the Future of the Book. I completely agree with the need for more experimentation. After twenty-five years of applying digital technology to education, we have only seen glimmers of what is possible (in general and in rhetoric and composition.) Open discussion at this point is crucial because it is easy to get caught up in institutional inertia. We tried to encourage an environment where the group could think of new potentials and then also pathways of getting there. I’m glad that you found the meeting useful and productive. Finally thanks for the encouraging review of the Sophie demo. An important feature of Sophie is that it will be open source and free to use, which will address the obstacle of convincing departments to purchase the software.
Comment by Ray — May 2, 2006 @ 12:10 pm