From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2015 06:54:06 -0700

Three different messages cross my screen and seem to speak to each other.

First, study of what is actually happening with the academic book in
particular in a time of many formats, changes in reading practices,
and abundant distractions.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/03/24/the-academic-book-of-the-future/

Second, reports of funding for two well-admired institutions to take
the hard work of production forward.

http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/22771-mellon-funds-u-m-press-collaboration-to-create-new-ecosystem-for-digital-scholarship

http://library.stanford.edu/news/2015/01/stanford-university-press-awarded-12-million-publishing-interactive-scholarly-works

Two related observations from this scholar-librarian:

1.  It's interesting that we are just in a moment in which we seem to
have shrugged just a bit about format -- ok, fine, so we'll read them
in hardcover, softcover, Kindle, web, PDF we might print out,
whatever.  That does seem to describe practice and I'm perfectly happy
to say that I embody it -- I'll read whatever I read however seems,
unreflectively, to be most convenient to me, a convenience driven by
availability, price, accident, and whimsy.  OK, fine, but there's lots
of reasons to think that *how* we read is not a matter of
indifference, that the way we read, what we retain, and what we can do
with what we've read will differ widely based on format and reading
practice.  There's something happening here and just at the moment
many people aren't particularly paying attention or making
well-informed choices.

2.  There's a larger story I've not seen written, where I think we're
already in chapter 6.  As the media change and as the reading
practices change and as the business models change, it seems obvious
that the books we actually produce and consume will be changing.  If
even university presses need to work harder to sell books, if everyone
has too much to read, and if everyone is reading their books and
journal articles while *also* reading blog postings and tweets, it
would seem likely that the nature of the things written and published
as "scholarly books" will be changing.  Anecdotally, I think I see
that's true.  Has it been studied carefully and made sense of?

Together my observations say that what Michigan and Stanford
are doing is quite important and quite non-trivial.  It's not a question of
migrating formats and migrating business models *only*, but a question
of what we are doing when we read and write scholarly work and therefore
what the forms of production and consumption might be.  McLuhan said
the content of a new medium was an old medium:  so we've tried for
the "e-book". Are we now ready for the electronic "post-book"?

Jim O'Donnell
ASU