My new job gives me fresh perspective and also many, many demands for eBooks. Delve under the skin of the requests and each person’s requirement is quite different; indeed they fall into two broad camps. Some want a digital version of existing material whilst others are seeking a digital reworking with audio, video and pictures replacing swathes of text.

Alongside these requests I perceive that people are seeking ‘the new’ and have a deep desire for the content to appear of the Kindles and iPads that their students, colleagues, spouses and selves are acquiring at a furious rate.

The Rift

Herein lies a rift that I cannot yet resolve: what are we really creating when we create an eBook?

One of the selling points of the eBooks that people are reading on their eInk Kindles and eReaders is the ability to resize the text and to offer hypertext features such as dictionary lookups or links to Wikipedia. To me it smacks of 1995, my first attempts at web design and the basic plain text html pages I created at university.

One of the selling points of the newly announced iBooks Bookstore is the addition of interactivity to books: a substantial change to the medium and something that cannot be achieved in print. I believe that many of this style of eBook are essentially HTML 5 documents, formatted to appear book-like when viewed on an iPad or tablet computer. Just like in the previous example, these remind me of web pages I [more recently] created.

To summarise these last three paragraphs: eBooks are functionally near-identical to web pages. The rift is that people don’t want websites, they want eBooks. Bit of course they don’t give a flying one about the format: they just want the content to appear on the virtual bookshelf of their chosen device and for the pages to turn as they swipe their finger across the page.

Librarians

I work alongside librarians who have increasing demand for eBooks. How can they serve the interests of a student with a Kindle (with its locked down store), a student with a Sony eReader and a student with a smartphone?

Publishers seem to have largely agreed on the ePub standard but they are struggling with rights management, much like the music industry did in the last decade of this century. Consequently, our first eBook purchased needed to be registered to a single user and cannot be transferred: hardly a distribution model that would suit a library.

The book industry must now follow the music and movie industries into the brave new world. They must develop a model that allows school libraries to buy books and lend them to students in a cost-effective manner. Note: perhaps I’m wrong here and the future of libraries is not as places where one goes to borrow resources but as places where one goes to find out where to locate resources. However, I have little background in librarianship and so do will not discuss further. Feel free to comment though.

Learning Management Sytems (Part 1)

Like many tertiary and vocational learning institutions, ours has a learning management system (LMS). As is the way with an LMS, ours requires that the student sign in to access their materials. Viewing of this content is subject to their having enrolled in a course (and where necessary having paid for it). They only view the content that they are entitled to see.

Sign in with Facebook

Visit a site like Prezi and you’ll be greeted with the familiar request to create or sign into the site’s account. However, Prezi is one of a growing band of websites that allow you to skip this and use your Facebook account as a means of accessing their services.

I don’t know the mechanics of what Facebook offer, but this option of a single sign-on provides convenience to both Prezi and its customers. I would love to know the proportion of active Prezi users who use Facebook to sign in.

Learning Management Systems (Part 2)

So hopefully you now see where I’m heading: my dream LMS. An LMS should store all content in a data format and make no assumptions about presentation. It should allow the content to be presented as a web page, eBook or printed book. It will compensate for a medium not being able to reproduce that which another can: for example a printed book will contain a QR code and shortened URL pointing to an online version of a video, whilst providing a text alternative (just like the alt tag in an HTML img element).

Many LMSs will interface with a student management system to confirm a student’s details, such as the courses they’re enrolled in. Develop a system similar to Facebook’s which allows a single user account to be recognised by others and you have the means of allowing books publishers to provide access to their materials to students enrolled in courses at the institution. An authentication system such as this would need to be extremely well designed as it would most likely be decentralised (unlike the centralised Facebook) and would thus rely upon a publisher being able to verify the authenticity of multiple parties rather than just one, however I’m sure some sort of digital certificate could be used to resolve this.

Learning Management Systems (Part 3)

So a student signs into their LMS. This sign-in allows the student to view a set of eBooks that they then borrow direct from the publisher because the publisher knows that the student is enrolled at an institute that has paid to be able to lend their books.

The LMS itself allows the content to be produced in variety of formats: web page, mobile web page, eInk eBook, multimedia eBook or PDF for print.

The content is stored in a single format and is presented to the viewer in the format of their choice. Publishers have a secure means of allowing 3rd parties to provide select access to their materials.

The challenge for Learning Technologists

I presently believe that the eBook is not a real (albeit non-physical) thing but a lens through which we view the real thing itself: the content. As learning technologists, it’s very exciting to begin creating eBooks using the growing mass of tools at our disposal and, indeed, anyone who fails to do this risks falling by the wayside and disadvantaging their students.

However, the eBook as a object that is discrete from printed books and online content is, I beleive, a transitional phase and it will not be long before the lines between webpage, eBook and app are so blurred that there will be no discernible border.

When this time arrives, I do not wish to look back at my efforts in creating eBooks as I go about rekeying the information for the new paradigm. The technologies that could provide this unity already exist. How long before they are unified, and who will do it?