Librarians at my institution have been talking about etextbooks in the context of our overall ebook initiative. I found this interesting case study today about etextbooks at Indiana University.

A couple of interesting points:

• The pilot preserved faculty autonomy in book selection by using an opt-in model. No faculty member had to participate who didn’t want to.
• Students actually preferred etextbooks by a significant margin. This suggests to me that if the pricing is favorable, the content is well presented, and (perhaps most important) etextbooks are integrated into the course in a useful and sensible way, etextbooks have traction. (I also note that the linearity of reading for English, science, and business courses may be a factor. Compsci students at the University of Washington didn’t like etextbooks, but I wonder if the navigability of the content was an issue; in programming classes, you jump around in the text a lot.)

If Time magazine is discussing OA, maybe OA’s time has finally come.

As information has moved online, library usage has gone up, not down. E-books are causing similar increases: in reading, in bookstore traffic, and even in sales of printed books.

At some point in the past year I had a conversation with a faculty member at my university who said that his principal objection to e-books was that they didn’t work with his research style. His habit, he explained, was to spread all of his monographs and articles out on his desk so that he had all of the research in front of him. “There isn’t an e-reader that can duplicate that experience,” he said. “Not my computer, either. Multiple tabs on a browser aren’t the same.”

Point taken. The problem being, of course, that an e-reader is just about book sized, whether you’re using a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad, or something else. This professor’s way of reading and organizing research doesn’t work with that setup, unless he had multiple e-readers—which sorta defeats the purpose.

But as he explained his objection, I found myself thinking: what if it wasn’t just the reader device or the writing interface, but the entire working surface? What if it was something like this?

That scene, and similar ones from movies like Firefly and The Hunger Games, made me think that there might be something to the idea of your entire desk being a reading, writing, and research interface. Of course, all three of these movies are sci-fi or have sci-fi elements (Bond is Bond, but futuristic technotoys are part of the fun), but products like Microsoft Surface already exist, even if they still seem to mainly be novelties.

Still, something about this idea really appeals to me. While I know a lot of people who like and read e-books, quite a few of whom don’t bother with the dead tree versions anymore, e-books still haven’t penetrated all that far into the academic and research sectors. I think it’s because the interfaces work much better for linear-style leisure reading than for research, which involves flipping back, flipping forward, marking up, highlighting, tearing your hair out, and spreading your research literature out in front of you in hope of spontaneous gestalt.

I suspect that it isn’t only academics who do research this way—and I suspect that quite a few people would like a desktop interface that was actually their desk. What if you could open a book in the middle of your desk, pull pages out, shuffle them around, put them side by side, group them with other books and articles and pages, annotate them, mark them up—and then shove them all aside when another task arose? Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

With a price tag starting at around 10 grand, I can tell you that Microsoft Surface won’t be appearing at my cash-strapped university anytime soon, at least not in numbers sufficient for all faculty and some proportion of students to use it. But as the prices on touch interfaces come down, other, smaller devices, notably iPads, have started appearing in my library and in my classroom. Once it’s more affordable, I can easily see something like this becoming a reality.

By then, I doubt we’ll be calling them e-books anymore, either.

Admittedly, this is an effect of the author-pays OA model that I should’ve picked up on before this. I’m a big believer in open access scholarship and I think the author-pay model is one valid approach among several. But the potential for abuse here is evident. I’m glad that Jeffrey Beall, among others, is keeping tabs on the problem.

Elsevier has a point blaming the academic publishing process, but it’s rather blunted by their own contribution toward the process’s commercialization. And comparing themselves to Wiley-Blackwell doesn’t exactly put them in a favorable light, eating-up-my-acquisitions-budget-wise.

“‘They Increase in Beauty and Elegance’: Transforming Cadavers and the Epistemology of Dissection in Early Nineteenth-Century American Medical Education”

From the current issue of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, natch.

Found on Facebook. If you made it, please let me know!

There’s something interesting going on right now, and it involves Elsevier.

Elsevier is one of the publishers that libraries love to hate. Their bundling practices eat up substantial portions of our subscription budgets, and force us to subscribe to dozens if not hundreds of titles we may not be interested in just so we can get one or two that we are, or that our faculty want, or that are core titles that we really can’t do without. The issue is arguably worse for small libraries like mine, serving teaching-oriented institutions and with a primary mission to support the curriculum. We have a smaller number of faculty and a narrower range of research specialties than an R1. Bundles can be an easy way to cover all of these, but at considerable financial cost and with the added burden of hundreds of journals for which we have no conceivable use.

Library resistance to this is rare, and none has received much attention since Cornell’s much-publicized rejection of bundle subscriptions in 2003. The reason is contained in the Cornell case itself: the Cornell Libraries did not make this decision unilaterally, but after considerable on campus debate and a resolution from the Faculty Senate. Simply put, if the academy is going to push back against the excesses of commercial publishers, academics themselves must lead the charge. If academics are publishing in, editing, reviewing for, and using journals published by Elsevier—or any other publisher—the library cannot in good conscience refuse to subscribe to those journals. What we can do is make our researchers aware of the problem, and of how they can help us solve it.

And academics are listening. As reported yesterday by the Chronicle of Higher Education, last week mathematician Timothy Gowers detailed the sins of Elsevier in his (well worth reading) blog and publicly refused to have anything to do with them. Next thing you know, there’s a boycott, standing (as of this posting) at 2280 participants.

There is simply no good motive—beyond profit—for academic publishing to cost as much as it does. We’ve defeated SOPA/PIPA, only to be confronted by the Research Works Act, which will, if passed, roll back much of what progress has been made toward making the research that the public has funded freely available to that public. Among Gowers’s other grievances, Elsevier is a supporter of the RWA.

Short version: you did.