Sony and others will present a seminar about ePUB etc during the London Book Fair.

I have sent in a question

There is a problem in that ePUB files are being viewd on Stanza and other software for computer and phone screens.

Have people been warned about staring at such screens too long?

This is a question for Stanza obviously but also about the prices for dedicated devices. Can they be afforded? When will the prices become more suitable for a larger audience?

The numbers I have seen suggest that there are more Stanza downloads than sales of Readers. Is there any evidence that this will not continue?

Maybe trhere will be an answer before the 20th April.

The Cromwell room was also used by the LCC Futures Conference so this will be a good test of my theory that access will be easier when the entire ground floor is one space.

The idea of a blended space could apply to Earl's Court. Like blended learning the Web aspect includes travel in time and space. I think it is time to realise that trade shows only take place in UK time, at least for most of the ones I attend. drupa is every four years but even for the printing industry time is not standing still.

Somewhere on the planet another trade show or event covers most things as they happen online anyway. On the blogs for IPEX and drupa I have recently looked at ePUB and the Total Print Expo where I will suggest some slides for the LCC Futures Conference.

LCC Futures 2009

View more presentations from will789.

It could yet happen that the Print show would happen at the same time as for Publishing. It makes sense to me. Print in Earl's Court 2, all software on the upstairs floor. Apart from anything else there could be a direct escalator from the print equipment to the LCC Futures Conference. walking all the way to the front of the building then usually back again is just not sensible.

The book discussion is linked to print. Digital may be catching up with litho. The eBook production technology relates to workflow for prepress and Web2Print.

But why stop there? Online Information has Oxford University Press and several others who could usefully explain their digital publishing strategy. They could be at Earl's Court also, along with BETT to supply some energy and fill the upstairs with software. Learning Technology could be run alongside BETT at Olympia for a few years till this idea takes off.

Meanwhile I have an apartment on Twinity but they have yet to reach London and may start closer to Soho, moving out slowly.

Oh dear my stats for slideshow downloads are back to normal. It was an April fool joke.

Still, the Scribd numbers for the associated papers are still ok, a lot more people than were there at the time.

So I have done another presentation as draft for the LCC Futures Conference. See blog about drupa.

The Guardian has a report on Business Schools, corporate responsibility, sustainability and the MBA culture that may have contributed to current financial problems.

There are quotes from Hugh Wilmott and Alessia Contu but the word "critique" is hardly mentioned. The impression you might get is of of a fairly mild social responsibility stream within a free market business school. This is a major problem I think. Managers who do go on a critique course could easily be confused by Habermas and Foucault etc. if completely unexpected.

Some clarity would be helpful.

Sage have an offer on journals at the moment, including Management Learning. It seems to be about practice but it is not easy to understand. Might there be an introduction or guide somewhere for managers who might want to relate to this sort of writing?

I am trying to imagine the Lancaster Learning Zone as a blended space. A blended space is a location for learning as remembered or imagined as well as being real if you have the attention span to notice.

I took some photos last year and here are some more from Flickr. Sidelong has made them Creative Commons so it is ok to lift them for this blog. Comment on Flickr is that the "virtual world is strangely grey", looking at the back view of the students on the hoarding. The thing is that official photos have to be unidentified to avoid legal problems. This is especially the case in schools. I think it is likely to represent young people as threatening if you never see their faces.

So a learning zone more Web 2 would have more informal photos, as I guess it.

Still, this learning zone is something towards informal Web access so is well worth thinking about. It is located near the library the bookshop and the newsagent, not to mention the post office. Comparison with a city centre could follow. In Exeter meanwhile LifeBytes has folded but there is still some Web access on desktops. Wireless devices seem to be the growth area.

Blended spaces abound.

Scribd praise post now on Scribd-

In Praise of Scribd

Publish at Scribd or explore others: scribdpraise

In Praise of Scribd

The new week starts in lean forward mode. The weekend is for leaning back and just accepting what the Sunday Newspaper has to tell us. Digesting food may take longer than usual and there is time for a walk in the sunshine. But then you realise that some things in the papers make no sense at all.

Henry Porter writes a normal sort of opinion for a known writer about the dangers of Google for copyright. "Google is just an amoral menace". Then he turns on Scridb as apparently another one of the "worldwide monopolies that sweep all before them with exuberant contempt for people's rights, their property and the past."

It is true that Scribd offers free downloads of documents for 55 million readers. Whether publishers are taking more action than usual to remove texts from the list is disputed. The main news development that Porter fails to mention is that book publishers including Random House and Simon & Schuster have agreed with Scribd to post promotional extracts from their titles as part of the Scribd resource.

Scribd Partners with Major Publishers to Bring Books, Exclusive Content to Community of 50 Million+

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Law & Government Business & Law publishing partnership

My guess, and this is obviously speculation, is that UK publishers are less keen on the global potential of the Web. they may prefer the protection of regional copyright deals. Look out for announcements of Scribd deals with publishers mainly based in London.

I have been posting documents to Scribd for about a year and welcome the response.




I have done some papers for academic conferences from a practitioner point of view. One about ISO 9000 has had almost 1,500 views and one about Dr Deming is approaching 5,000. Most of the comments are positive.

The design of the website is easy to use. They use Flash for display from any source such as Word or PDF. It loads very quickly compared to launching Word or Acrobat from a browser. The design is not Flash as in Adobe however. The Adobe websites now always feature something animated or load a video whether requested or not. Flash is forced on you all the time. The Scribd site seems to be designed by people who like text documents and classic page layout.

Scribd claims to be the "largest social publishing website". This social aspect allows for groups and collaboration as on a music site. My paper on ISO 9000 has been added to a couple of MBA study groups where I can find other material.

The Guardian today has a story about Cambridge University Press. My guess is that there is more of a Web strategy than appears from this report of the difficulties for litho printing. Problems include the development that "academics who used to rely on hardback books to help climb the career ladder have more recently been turning to the kind of self-publishing and free distribution offered by the internet."

The report has no more detail on open access models but my impression is that only Science Medicine and Technology journals have really engaged with the issues around public access to knowledge. Humanities and Social Science journal publishing is still closed down to university libraries by prohibitive subscriptions. So the leaks of papers in draft and alternate versions that may turn up on the Web are entirely to be welcomed, in my honest opinion.

Open access publishing is often discussed in Information World Review, a recent editorial for example. "What is clear is that open access publishing isn’t going to go away, and discussions to overcome the substantial differences between the different stakeholders must go on." It was recently reported that journal contracts allow more rights than is often supposed to publish draft or alternate versions of papers. My suggestion is that they should be posted to Scribd where they would be easily found. Department archives or personal websites may be as obvious for the spiders.

Previously Oxford University Press has made arrangements with Stanford for digital journal publishing. It may seem too simple to give up on a long tradition of printing and subcontract a new method of publishing. But it may be effective. At Online Information 2008 Highwire Press showed they were extending their platform for other content.

These issues will come up during the London Bookfair. Sony have sponsored a digital space with several presentations. It is possible that the 2009 London bookfair will be remembered as an occasion for progress in digital publishing. At the moment it seems more likely that the noise in the print media will be a continuation of misinformation and self-serving nonsense.

As far as I know there has not been a print review from London of the book "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger although he has been a keynote speaker at Online Information with similar content. What is the connection between publishing as technology and the world of book reviews? Not very clear. Here is the result for a search on Scribd - reasonable guide to the issues, might persuade someone to read the book.

Everything is miscellaneous Weinberger

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Presentations & Spre information order

Following the London Bookfair some of this text may be recycled for an OhmyNews story so comment and link suggestions are welcome.

Sustainability and ISO 9004 relate more than I thought. I have not been paying enough attention. Possibly the words are not meaning the same as for academics in Lancaster. still there is enough overlap for some sort of conversation.

A new version of ISO 9004 2009 will be issued later this year. Can't find a draft online but the title is

ISO 9004:2009 - Managing for Sustainability – A Quality Management System Approach

Apparently it is not related to ISO 9001 clause by clause so may just add to confusion. It is intended to show management how the standards could be useful. I have found a couple of PDF slideshows that offer some idea, but not details of the standard. Suggest right click and save as, these may not load as PDFs.

Inlac

ASQ Windsor

Some academics will doubtless just write this off as more neoliberal rhetoric etc. but some people have to work with these standards so my preference is for some study before reaching a conclusion. Much will depend on how the standards are reported and considered when actually published.

How do organisations survive? Could be getting harder for those associated with print. Disruption is gaining pace. ISO 9004 looks interesting but changes could be too rapid in some cases. Individuals still benefit from understanding and can transfer to another situation. Problems in the UK printing industry (see BPIF survey) may be followed by problems for libraries and book intensive universities. What would a sustainable business school be like? This sort of question widens the discussion for a general web audience.

Coming back to "Sustainability" it may be relevant to look at ISO 14000 on the environment. Also the guidance on ISO 9000 uses the same word or is heading that way. See ISO website as a starting point.

The Deming SIG is not yet ready to launch the documents on a sustainability model but meetings continue. Next one probably in June, details will be on the website.

There could be more dialogue with academics. Plan - Do - Check/Study - Act is arguably a learning cycle.

Slideshare Team rate me as a Rockstar! Do they send these emails to everyone?

We've noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job ... you must be doing something right. ;-)

Why don't you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

There are various sites I have tried over the years and a slideshow presentation is quite rare for me. So they must mean the ones about ISO 9000 and whether it is worth another look following the 2000 revisions. (The recent revisions may have prompted some interest but not as extensive as several people see it) When I check it out the views on both sets of slides are over 10 thousand. Maybe most of this is recent.

The paper has had 1,400 views on Scribd so it is clear that people prefer slideshows...

Is ISO 9000 worth another look?

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Business learning ISO9000

The first slideshow includes graphics of various kinds that flipped through to meet the moment. M@nagement web site had various problems and redesigns. I claim quality theory could relate to this. Hugh Wilmott views on quality are the blocking condition number one for any constructive dialogue in this area in my honest opinion.

Miscpdf

View more presentations from will789.

The second slideshow follows the paper pretty much

Look9 Screen

View more presentations from will789.

At the time there was not much interest in this. The first Management Theory at Work took a turn when Chris Grey spoke about relevance. Maybe universities stand a better chance without claiming to be relevant. Something like that. Anyway, interest in ISO 9000 at a "research" level has remained low as far as I can tell.

Meanwhile I have written stories for OhmyNews, a citizen journalism site in Korea. The ISO Surveys have shown rapid relative decline for the UK on the ISO management standards scene. China is clearly in the lead and both the USA and UK have now started to show lower numbers, not just as a proportion of global certification.

China Leads Continued Growth in ISO 9000

Quality Certification Declines in Mature Countries

An email from Lancaster university suggests i would be interested in a new course on Leadership for Sustainability. Previously I have tried to link in ideas about quality systems but I don't think i have time for more study at the moment. More like blog and twitter level seems to be the case. But sustainability is definitely an issue. I attend meetings of the Deming SIG of the CQI where work is advanced on a document about a model of a sustainable organisation. "Sustainable" for the Chartered Quality Institute includes the idea that the organisation in question survives itself. My guess is that for academics the environment would be more of a priority. not sure about this but something to look out for as the course continues.

I have loaded the flier PDF to Scribd.

Leadership for Sustainability MA at Lancaster

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work leadership sustainab

It turns out that Lancaster is using social media much more than I realised. The code for the video at the bottom of the course page is dodgy and a Google search only finds Twitter to lead straight back to it.

However Google Video finds probably the video intended.



Over half an hour, no wonder it is not on YouTube. Attention span test before starting the study.

Later, more on learning organisations and ISO standards.

Not much happening, too little notice to encourage people to join Twinity online. LifeBytes is slowly winding down. More next week.

Also Twinity has been a bit wobbly today. You can now teleport direct to Humboldt University but it may not all be there.



Couple of short videos

more vanishing

finding Humboldt

This is the last weekend for LifeBytes, web resource in Exeter. There are places to eat that also have web access but it seems the era of the dedicated web retailer is coming to an end. Maybe it means that mobile devices are now good enough.

For me the downside includes probably not visiting Twinity for a while. At home my PC is full of junk and Twinity fails to install. Also the bandwidth is not that good. At LifeBytes they delete almost everything quite often and a new download of Twinity usually works ok.

So here are some stills with the essential point for the moment. I may have time to save some more in the next few days. If it was a video the plot outline would be to start with some tech vision in the Sony Centre



Then teleport to Brandenburger Tor, then follow Unter den Linden to the square near entrance to Humboldt. Discussion around the learning claims of the technology. Whatever energy survives spreads to cafes and apartments at the end of the day.







Basic structure of conversation much the same in other locations. The characters from Second Life are gradually getting spaces on Twinity.

Video from the spaces-

Kings Cross

Morecombe

Earl's Court

The various blogs could fit together better. I am trying to do another version of "Hello Spiders" and the "The Going of the Book" as if there is some sequence of events. The theory comes mostly from attempts to study at Lancaster. The problem is how to pass go. I still get the impression that "quality" is not part of the Management Learning scope. Maybe it is an HR thing as if operations are something else. Not sure at all. Maybe "critique" has to be part of the academic mix and quality is an easy target. They have to be polite about HR some of the time. Anyway I may be wrong in my memory and this impression could be tested again.

The current situation is that ePUB is doing well. I got into this looking at the print tradition and how it could morph. Today it is announced that the Google scan archive will be in ePUB format for the Sony Reader. When will Chris Argyris turn up? Some of his stuff was written a long time ago. Anyway back on topic, this is consumer electronics and the global cloud. Whether or not the ePUB design intention meets the criteria for conditions for dialogue, it exists and is widely available. It may be easier to look back on how learning has happened within a quality system. That is if you look at the history so far on e-books as a series of problems in production and customer objections. Starting out to ask academics who know about management learning to comment on a quality related design would have been more of a problem.

I still think ISO 9000 is a part of the quality scene and should be considered. In the UK the number of certificates continues to decline but on the planet, growth continues. So the explanation that people in the UK are now more sophisticated and do not need to bother may be only partial. It could be part of a decline in manufacturing or management.

So here are a couple of statements that could be checked out during study and also help to pass go.

1a ISO 9000 can be part of an effective quality system

1b Learning is part of what happens while people engage with ideas about quality

On the drupa2008 and IPEX2002 blogs I am obviously out of time sequence. Issues just keep repeating. The Job Definition Format is getting less attention over time. "Web-to-Print" turns up more often in Printweek. So JDF and XML is in the background. Meanwhile ePUB offers an XML friendly route from author to reader fairly quickly so XML will continue as a publishing topic. The discussion around PDF and portable job tickets is urgent or else an explanation of why the hard copy aspect of publishing may decline as a proportion. I still find Adobe confusing in their insistence of Flash as a direction but this could be because they do not have confidence in the classic Adobe products to offer much margin.

2. The project around Postscript and PDF has reached a stage when the technology is widely understood and available. Because of standardisation and a range of current suppliers, developers look at other areas for innovation opportunities.

Jeff Jarvis on Buzzmachine is moving on ahead. He seems to assume that print is on the way out, though I think it will continue for some time.

Then he links to Hacking Education. This is still a bit sketchy at the moment.

Adult Education

Over the weekend I realised that e-books are making progress. there is enough momentum for a definite culture around them. What I wrote in blogs for IPEX and drupa is still making sense so I am starting to think about the ways this could influence approaches to knowlwdge and content. The Kindle format is carefully controlled and Amazon will try to keep pricing close to print books as requested by publishers. The ePUB format is based on open standards and seems better suited to open content. Adobe can arrange Digital Rights Management but anything on the web could be moved to XHTML fairly readily and the method for creating ePUB is better understood over time. InfoGrid Pacific have a route from Open Office though the business model is a bit vague at the moment. They are open to offers as to how they could be paid.

Previously I thought about knowledge as "official" and "grassroots" as in "Everything is Miscellaneous" by David Weinberger. So the collective view from people on the web is one sort of knowledge, the book suggested by a librarian is another. There are modes of knowledge production described by Gibbons and others. Some conferences distinguish academics and practitioners. I don't fully understand the "critique" theory, but part of the reason Chris Grey is "Against Learning" seems to be the positioning of official education.

There may be a new meaning for "adult education" around knowledge available through Amazon and/or as ePUB. Not sure how this will work out. The academic journals are now mostly digital but this has made public access more difficult. Texts appear online as drafts or leaks for humanities and social science but this is still in flux, like much else.

Sorting out photos from Learning Technologies. Story for OhmyNews should be ready over the weekend.

Found this link from Google blogsearch. Seems that "informal learning" is part of the main conference.

This is a draft for a story around Learning Technologies for OhmyNews.
Comment welcome

--------------------

Adobe presents a case study in e-learning
"We always had confidence in the leadership" says researcher


draft story for OhmyNews around Learning Technologies -28/9 Jan


Next Generation Learning @ Work - driving business benefits

probably this will cover leadership, change managements, organisations.

Adobe have a stand. Last year the word Acrobat was visible but the messages were all about Flash, almost nothing on PDF or Postscript.

So a possible story could look at Adobe as an example of an organisation. How has it learnt over time? What is going on at the moment?

My guess is that the "towards maturity" research will not show top management as a major pressure for e-learning. Mostly it seems to be something that slips in through HR or somewhere over time and eventually is accepted. To be checked in conversation on the day.

Adobe is different. They are interested in software. Started in Xerox Parc a long time ago. Warnock and Geschke still seem to share being Chair. What is the influence of this?

Geschke to Knowledge at Wharton-

[running a company] can feel pretty lonely. Who do you talk to? That's one thing John and I have always tried to do for Bruce and Shantanu. We don't keep an office at Adobe. I don't want to be perceived as looking over their shoulders. [But] we make ourselves available anytime that they want to sit down. We usually have breakfast once a month with Shantanu to chat and see how things are going. If he wants to call, we'll be there immediately.

Around the time of buying Macromedia there seems to have been a shift in Adobe as if the entire Postscript / PDF project had been traded in. How would Warnock or Geschke think about this?

from same interview-

Knowledge@Wharton: What do you think is the biggest challenge Adobe is facing going forward?

Geschke: Inventing the future. We'll never succeed unless we continue to open up new vistas.

I honestly believe that our technology and what's happening in the market -- where essentially all visual communication is going to the web -- is the sweetheart point in our whole envelope of products and technologies. Shame on us if we can't figure out a way to take advantage of that shift in the way the world is moving with the distribution of information.

A lot of what are there today -- the limitations of browsers and of the web imaging standards -- are things that we think we have a solution for. As they become the primary delivery mechanism, that value is going to differentiate.


So "all visual communication is moving to the web". Is print just part of visual communication?

YouTube link to Warnock on newspapers in 2007

The Chief Technology Officer is now Kevin Lynch. I cannot find through Google that he ever mentions PDF.

So there could be a major shift here. I am still interested in print and PDF and find it quite hard to communicate with Adobe. The description "paranoid" sometimes makes sense but in a formal technical sense as described by Andrew S. Grove in his book - Only the Paranoid Survive

Look out for the inflection points. Move out of declining products fast.

Adobe may be right about this but I find it hard to keep up. Academic journals for example. What will happen? There is still a lot of text there but maybe future students will just not be very interested.

Am I making this up? Recent Adobe blog entry

many of you may have heard about Acrobat.com and simply dismissed it as some kind of PDF-Mecca

so being interested in PDF as such is not very cool.

I think about the change as Adobe Classic and Adobe(FLSH). Thsi Adobe(FLSH) comes from a blog after Max that I can no longer find.

Another sign is the lack of promotion for MARS or PDFXML. No blog updates since September and there is no other promotion.

Back to organisation theory.

At BETT I found a stand for the LSIS hidden away on a balcony. They merge quality and learning, though this ssems a slow process. I have worked on quality systems but find it hard to get people who study learning to be much interested. Maybe the academic theory relating to NSIS will be written down later once the practice is sorted out. There is a model here that includes leadership but I still have doubts about how many case studies it would fit.

In my story for OhmyNews about BETT I did not go into much detail about Adobe or Microsoft. I think both are looking too far into the future. Silverlight may serve a purpose later, but currently there is still interest in text and flat graphics. I did get some email response to earlier drafts so this may be included in a story about Learning Technologies. See below.

I think the ePUB format is interesting. There may be signs of devices at the show. However Adobe are not doing much to promote the Digital Editions Reader. Can't remember any sign of it last year. It turns everything into Flash.

Story will be based on what is actually displayed on the Adobe stand. The implication could be stark for how comprehensive an organisational change can be.

Questions

Will the price of Postscript and PDF products be reduced? Acrobat Elements any time soon?

Is there a business plan for Adobe Cloud?


Below, from replies to previous draft ahead of BETT

---------------------------------

while EPUB is fast on its way to becoming the standard for reflow-centric eBooks, I think it's a bit mixing apples and oranges (ok, chalk and cheese to you) to compare with PDFXML (Mars) or XML Paper. EPUB is designed to represent in a single file the structure of a publication, but not a particular final-form paginated appearance. Speaking only for myself, I think the reason that these other formats are not taking off (in the case of Mars, I will add "yet") is that PDF has ably occupied the fixed-format document standard, and now is a fully open ISO-level standard, which does not leave a compelling reason for another format standard to be broadly adopted to do the same job. While there's some advantages to XML-friendiness over the binary PDF format, and a more modular approach to packaging (ZIP vs. COS), on the flip side there's 1000s of software programs and libraries that grok today's PDF. EPUB is not a competitor since it is at a different level of abstraction (with with the addition of page-templates over time there will be EPUB publications with a reasonably polished preferred presentation, the intention is that different devices may still render quite differently, and I doubt that print/prepress workflows will ever work with EPUB, otherr than as an input format a la MS Word, RTF, etc.).

Our Digital Publishing team has a blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions, and there's an Adobe DevNet digital publishing technology center that focused on EPUB best practices etc. at: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/ . My own rather non-technical blog is at http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy.

Cheers,

--Bill

Bill McCoy
General Manager, Digital Publishing Business
Adobe Systems Incorporated
bmccoy@adobe.com

-------------------------------

Will: I do not think that Adobe views the business of communicating information broken into two distinct camps as you have portrayed. I think we view it as a spectrum with "old" printing at one end and "new" rich internet applications at the other.

Most of our Creative Suite (CS) component products are used throughout the information communication industry. We estimate that 85% of all web pages have had some of the content processed in Photoshop. And Photoshop, well even the complete CS, is the primary tool for traditional publishing/printing.

Although in enterprise there was a split at first between the web team and the traditional print marketing materials team, nearly all companies have realized that there is so much in common that they have brought those teams back into one management structure. Companies are interested in getting their message out using whatever means is the most effective. And the most effective way for them to do that is to have people responsible for the objective and free to use whatever technology and tools work the best. Adobe serves that more general audience.

Just my thoughts,
Jim King
PDF Platform Architect

OhmyNews have now published my story on BETT.

More on this later.

I have sent in a story about BETT for OhmyNews. Not edited yet.