Jorge Acosta's List: Publicación-e

"This isn't your childhood library. The Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is beautiful. The main floor looks more like a sleek Apple showroom than a stuffy library. And instead of a Genius Bar, there's an Ask Me alcove, where you can get help on everything from laptops to flash drives."

"Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation provides a framework to understand how businesses grow, become successful, and falter as nimble start-ups muscle in on their customers. It’s a familiar story, one that has played out in the steel and auto industries, among others. Now Christensen, in collaboration with 2012 Martin Wise Goodman Canadian Nieman Fellow David Skok, has applied his analysis to the news industry. Their goal in “Breaking News” is to encourage news executives to apply the lessons of disruption to the media industry as a means of charting new paths to survival and success."

"Notes surround us. Whether in the form of lab notebooks, fieldnotes, sketchbooks, class notes, or surreptitious shorthand notes on plays and sermons, notetaking forms the basis of every scholarly discipline as well as of most literate people’s daily lives. Millennia after a potsherd from second-century Egypt, notes remain the lowest common denominator of information management. Like written responses to reading, manuscript records of speech cut across different cultures, different fields, and even different phases of life: students take notes on their professors’ lectures, which in turn form the product of professors’ notes on books. And from Aristotle's philosophy to the works of 20th- century thinkers like Saussure and Wittgenstein, many of the foundational texts of Western culture have been transmitted or even generated by notes. Yet the definition of notes remains contentious: should we be speaking of “annotation” or “notetaking”? The former emphasizes something done to a text, the latter a more freestanding kind of writing; the former shades into commentary or metadata or marginalia, the latter into transcription of oral delivery."

The Internet Archive is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It's a 1300-page book listing hundreds of typefaces and their possible use cases.

“RIPE for digital destruction.” That is how the late Steve Jobs was quoted describing the textbook industry in a recent biography of Apple’s co-founder. It will soon become clear whether he was right—and to what extent Apple can benefit from Mr Jobs's insight. On January 19th the firm unveiled software aimed at reinventing the textbook. But in contrast to the music business, Apple will not have this digital field to itself. Amazon, Google and a host of smaller firms such as Inkling have all set their sights on the textbook market, which last year was worth an estimated $8.7 billion in America alone. 

These things always make me laugh. As technology advances, in many ways it really regresses. For example, as eBook readers improve, the metric by which they are assessed is how close the quality of the screen is to a real book. It reminds me of the fantastic cartoon below.

Click on the cover to access our full report, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy:  The 2011 Report, by Stephen E. Siwek of Economists Incorporated, prepared for the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) released on November 2, 2011.

"Cambridge University Library is pleased to present the first items in its Foundations of Science collection: a selection from the Papers of Sir Isaac Newton. The Library holds the most important and substantial collection of Newton's scientific and mathematical manuscripts and over the next few months we intend to make most of our Newton papers available on this site.

This first release features some of Newton's most important work from the 1660s, including his college notebooks and 'Waste Book'. "

"El contador de suscripciones anuales a la nueva revista Orsai acaba de llegar a mil. En nueve días, y sin noticias sobre los contenidos o la cantidad de páginas, mil lectores ya compraron las seis revistas del año próximo. Y eso que todos saben que habrá una versión en .pdf, gratuita, el mismo día que cada revista llegue a sus casas. Repito: acabamos de vender seis mil revistas. Seiscientas sesenta y cinco por día. Veintiocho por hora. "

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

"Brazil apart, publishers are struggling to persuade the growing middle class to read more books"

"REBECCA CHAPMAN, who has a master of arts in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, hit bottom professionally last summer when she could not even get a job that did not pay. Vying for an internship at a boutique literary agency in Manhattan, Ms. Chapman, 25, had gone on three separate interviews with three people on three different days. “They couldn’t even send me an e-mail telling me I didn’t get it,” she said. "

"We’ve written a lot about the disruption in the book-publishing industry over the past year or so, with Amazon not only creating a huge market for authors to self-publish on the Kindle — thereby avoiding traditional publishers altogether — but also signing writers to its own imprint, and cutting the Big Six publishing houses out of the picture. But it should be noted that working with a publisher can have its benefits as well as its disadvantages, and writer Edan Lepucki has put together a nice list of reasons why someone (including her) might decide not to self-publish. If publishers have any weapons against Amazon, they are on this list."

"¿Cual es el futuro del libro? ¿Desaparecerá el formato impreso ante la revolución digital que estamos viviendo?"

"The collapse of Borders is more than the failure of just another retail operation. It’s also a wake-up call to any publisher who takes its business ecosystem for granted, whether that publisher is in books, journals, or anything else."

Is any form of traditional media under more assault than the book? For half a millennium, it was happily contained between covers: easily understood by a child, disposable, nearly indestructible, demanding minimal energy, a triumph of economy and form. The Internet has upended all that, of course. Yet the strongest impression from several of the sessions at the Books in Browsers conference in San Francisco over the last two days is that while the off-line book might be dying, the online book has yet to be born.

The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes the first ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online.

"A book or a screen – which of these two offers more reading comfort? There are no disadvantages to reading from electronic reading devices compared with reading printed texts. This is one of the results of the world's first reading study of its kind undertaken by the Research Unit Media Convergence of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in cooperation with MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH. "E-books and e-readers are playing an increasingly important role on the worldwide book market. However, readers in Germany are particularly skeptical when it comes to e-books and electronic reading devices. The objective of the study was to investigate whether there are reasons for this skepticism," says the initiator of the study, Professor Dr. Stephan Füssel, chair of the Institute of Book Studies and spokesperson for the Media Convergence Research Unit at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. "This study provides us with a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects," explains Füssel. "There is no (reading) culture clash – whether it is analog or digital, reading remains the most important cultural technology." "

Los cambios en el mundo del libro y la lectura se han acelerado. Las nuevas tecnologías han transformado las actividades de los agentes de toda la cadena del libro: escritores, editores, impresores, distribuidores, libreros, lectores, especialistas en derechos de autor y bibliotecarios. En este contexto, para analizar estos cambios, el Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes ha convocado a un grupo de expertos al Primer Simposio Internacional del Libro Electrónico.

Este evento internacional significa un encuentro sin precedentes, en el que expertos compartirán sus investigaciones, experiencias y reflexiones acerca del libro electrónico, su significado histórico, su inserción en la sociedad, las tendencias del mercado editorial y el comportamiento de los lectores, entre otros temas.

En Conaculta confiamos en que esta iniciativa contribuya a abrir un foro de discusión sobre la convivencia del libro en papel como lo hemos conocido hasta ahora y las alternativas digitales para así contribuir a formar más y mejores lectores.

Dirección General de Publicaciones