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Does Anyone Read Books Anymore?
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Does Anyone Read Books Anymore?
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Segment:0 .
JEFF LANG: Hello, and welcome to the second SSP webinar of the year. You're joining us for a discussion titled, "Does Anyone Read Books Anymore?" I'm Jeff Lang with the American Chemical Society, the Chair of the SSP Webinars Working Group, and I'm pleased that you could join us today. In a moment, we'll get started and you'll hear from our panelists. During the session, your audio will be muted automatically in consideration of our presenters and your fellow webinar participants.
JEFF LANG: Please use the Q&A feature to send in your questions. The moderator will review your questions and present them to the panelists. To help her, please specify to which presenter you'd like your question directed. Also, please send in your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email.
JEFF LANG: We encourage you to provide feedback so we can continually improve the SSP Webinar Program. You'll also receive a link via email to the recorded broadcast of this webinar. Our moderator today is Shirley Decker-Lucke, the content director of SSRN. She explores ways technology and content can merge in creative and useful ways. And prior to joining SSRN, she was the Publishing Director for Elsevier's Life Sciences Book Program and led projects looking for innovation in publishing approaches.
JEFF LANG: She has over 20 years of experience leading groups through change in publishing in the social sciences, humanities, and hard sciences. Over to you, Shirley.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Hi, everybody. Well, thanks so much, all of you, for joining us. We have a SSP webinar planning committee, and we were sitting around a few months ago thinking, what do we want to do a webinar on? What are people interested in? And it came up in our conversation that about 3/4 of us had had careers in book publishing, and yet none of us were currently working in book publishing, myself included. And so we thought, there's something really interesting there.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: What is that about, and what might we do to kind of construct a conversation that would be interesting about what's going on in the books world? I would hopefully ask that all of you can go to www.menti.com, log in to that. And then if you enter the code, we wanted to start-- and maybe Jeff, can you hand over the screen to me? We wanted to start by just getting a sense from you in the audience of what you thought about books publishing.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And so if you can see this, we're asking all of you to now go in-- perfect. And start entering words. You can enter in multiple words. You can enter the same word in that somebody else has. Of course, if a word is entered by more people, the word gets bigger and so it gives a visual of what people are thinking about books. And we just thought it'd be fun to see of the people attending, what are the kinds of things that people think books do or are.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So we see everything, which is kind of an interesting-- vital, educational, contextual, essential. Yeah, please just keep on entering in some words, and we'll see what people are thinking. So all positive, thus far. It's OK to put negative ones, too. This is an open conversation if-- joyful, oh, I like that one.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Really interesting different ideas, relaxing. Again, very educational. Essential is a big one. Great. OK, I think a lot of cool things. You can keep entering that in. Maybe we will have a chance at the end of the call to go back and look at that again. But Jeff, if we want to go back to the deck and then the next slide.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So I did a very, very unscientific survey earlier this month, as you can see in the upper left hand corner, where I did a Twitter survey and found that 100% of respondents, all 18 of them, did believe the answer was yes to does anyone read books anymore. And if you took a quick look just on Google, the book publishing industry is quite sizable. In the US it's a $26, $27 billion business.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: There's broadly a broad definition of the kind of books and publishing world landscape. And what I'm really excited about with this panelist, if we go on to the next slide, is that this group is going to help us really dig into specifically scholarly publishing books and the question of does anyone read books anymore. And what I've asked them each to do is to present their own unique perspective, with their own experiences and interests, but also to sort of present a persona, if you will.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And so we've got Kevin Garewal, who is the Associate Director of Collections at the Harvard Law School Library. And he's going to be presenting the persona of a librarian and helping us to think about things from the librarian's perspective. We've got Eren Gumrukcuoglu, who is a professor, Adjunct Professor of Music at Duke, and he'll be representing the teacher, the educator, the professor.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie Williams is the Director of Wayne State University Press and she's going to be helping us think about things from the university press perspective. And then finally, Elizabeth Munn, who is at Elsevier, Managing Director of Education. And she'll be taking the perspective of a bigger publisher, if you will. And so now I'll hand it over to Kevin to get us started on what this conversation might look like.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE:
KEVIN GAREWAL: Good morning. I'm Kevin Garewal. I'm the Associate Director of Collections at the Harvard Law School Library. Can you advance to the next slide, please, Jeff? I wanted to take a moment and just sort of give my background, so it'll frame my perspective on how I look at books intersecting with higher education. So I actually started my career for five years at a public library, and then went to a law school library, and also after, that a university library.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But I've also worked in two other special libraries. Folded in there, I was also an auditor and an attorney, which frames my thinking as fairly analytical. And I think while I'm fairly analytical, I also realize that the qualitative piece is lost in there. So the feedback from users and faculty members or researchers is a piece that folds into the evaluation of books and use. So when I was preparing for this, I bounced this off of a couple of people.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I got a really interesting email back from one of my friends who's a PhD candidate in philosophy. And usually, I don't like long quotes, but I thought this was useful to share.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I share your experience even over the course of my graduate studies, there has been an increasing amount of journal articles and some diminishing amount of monographs throughout. Despite this, courses and research projects still continue to rely on monos. So even though there are far less system building projects worthy of a complete monograph at work and far more articles that are focused on a very small disjointed additions to the field, monographs are still very necessary part of the research and academic studies in general.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Can you advance a slide, please? So I use people like that as a benchmark when I'm thinking about these things. So when I thought about this as, you know, where was I five years ago, or what did publishing look like five years ago? It came to me that I was at the University of Akron running the Research and Learning Services at the University library.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I was in the midst of an analysis on our print approval plan and our ebook DDA and short term loan program, we were going through a budget shrinkage and we had to do the analysis of what this looked like. So we had a pretty comprehensive approval plan. We were spending about $100,000 a year on print monographs and they would come from the publisher shipped out from the vendor shipped directly to us. So I did an analysis of use data.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And what was kind of startling was that the cost for an average checkout of those books that we received in those five years was $43 per checkout. So in a five year time period, that was about 12,000 checkouts. Even factoring in renewals of those monographs, our total cost was still above $20 per circulation even when you bundled them as one. The result of that was we turned off all approvals and relied on firm orders from our faculty librarians and bibliographer to fill those gaps.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The next piece that we had to do an analysis of was the ebook usage. We were involved with a two year pilot on short term loans and demand-driven. So short term loans were a student or a faculty member would click on a book, they would get to use it for x amount of time, and then it would return back to the hopper. And after a certain number of triggers, we would purchase the book.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So in the two years we had a cost a total of about $200,000. The average cost per download for a book was $60 per download. And then the average cost of an actual acquisition of a book was $180, but that was because of the trigger of the short term loans. So if something was checked out two times and it cost $40 per time that it was checked out and then we paid for the full price of the book that's when it would trigger at $120 or $140 or $180 per book.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The result is we turned off that DDA plan because both of those were seen as uncapped cost. We didn't have a set threshold that we would spend on those. So we decided to turn those off and then funnel the money to other places. Can you advance please? Yeah, thanks. Sort of looking at it looking at it in the current state, I do want to acknowledge that open access and OERs are part of the formula now.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But from my perspective, there's still fairly early in their development. And I think the impact from the library perspective is it's good for core support, but it's still fairly minimal in regards to budget support or how we're getting any type of return on that right now. The impact for students is highly positive but there's no relief for us for backfilling textbooks or backfilling other core support materials.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So what's going on in higher education now? Most universities and colleges are doing ebook packages for purchases because in bulk it's cheaper and it's easier to load and make those accessible. You know, I want to acknowledge a new ebook purchase model that are being explored, evidence base is one of those and those are really good. We are purchasing based on user requests, and we've always done this, but I think that we're more hypervigilant about this before.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And where we may not have seen it as mapped to the curriculum, now we're purchasing those things because we're seeing it is on demand or relying on reciprocal borrowing agreements with consortia. So you know I'm at Harvard, so we have the other Ivy's that we have books loan from. Collective collecting initiatives are starting. Schools are starting to marry up their collection development policies that we'll buy x subject area, you buy y subject area, that way we don't have to be duplicating and spending that both sides of the money.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So at the Ivies, it's a little bit different. We still are doing everything on the left side of the slide but we're still receiving print and e-book approval plans and DDAs. But these are getting scrutinized more. One of the things about being at Harvard Law School is we still view ourselves as a library of record, we want the print material to come in the door for two things.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The preservation piece and also to be able to make that loanable to any of our reciprocating institutions or even through interlibrary loan to make those available to people. So we really do view ourselves as a library for people to use and then get those materials. And Harvard Library shares that same philosophy. We also collected an international scope, about 2/3 of our collection at the law school is foreign and international material.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And many times those are you can only get those in print. So that's the only stable format. So we're still print, we're going to be print for the foreseeable future, and that's how we've had to position ourselves. And many of those are monographs of nature. Jeff, can you advance? Thanks. And then I asked myself, where are we going to be in five years?
KEVIN GAREWAL: And when I really thought about this, I don't know. I think what we need to keep an eye on is we need to be partners and protect the intellectual endeavor and necessity of monograph publication. I think extremist views on both sides of completely open or completely proprietary is not a good way to have a conversation or set the perspective.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I think it's somewhere in the middle. Two critical reasons why books are still necessary, niche publications and diverse voices are critical to disseminate and preserve. University presses and small presses are really the essential lifeblood of local history, personal narratives and niche works. That's just to name a few. Internationally, the monograph is still essential.
KEVIN GAREWAL: It's really a cornerstone for some countries. One of our publishers in Eastern Europe, their main job is to print cards and invitations, and on the side of the print lab monographs. And that's the only way that we can get those materials. So that pretty much wraps up my presentation. And then I'll pass it along to Shirley and I'm not sure if Eren-- Thanks Kevin, yeah.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Eren is next. We'll move on. Thanks so much.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Hi, everyone. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. So I will be talking from my own perspective of a teacher and researcher of music theory music technology, and music composition in general. Why do I still think that books are relevant in higher education? I think they are still relevant in both the classroom and in research.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Comparing books with single journal articles and other standalone essays or reviews, et cetera, as a professor I see that the value of books lies in its wider lens and the more wholesome picture it usually provides in any given topic. Even monographs with a sharp focus will provide a more contextual and intersectional study opportunity to a student or a researcher compared to a journal article.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And while our panel today is interested in the major changes in the past five years and a possible projection of the next five years, I'd like to point out that five years is often not a long enough duration in the context of habits of teaching in departments and in classrooms to see a direct impact on practices in choosing material for syllabi. In my field that my teaching and research takes place, which is music more specifically theory technology and composition, we still use a lot of text books and monographs specifically written with the classroom in mind.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: These are published by various scholarly presses around the world. In disciplines like mine, in the arts or humanities and fields like media studies or documentary studies, still more in-depth research continues to rely on books for their all encompassing nature. Could we go to the next slide, Jeff? Thanks. Both journals and books have their place in the higher education classroom.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: However, the most observable changes I've seen in the past maybe not 5 years but 10 to 15 years, has been in the modes of access to content, especially I'd say with books with an advantage over journals. Journal entries, be print or online, have preserved their farm format, meaning that the PDF that you get of the article will almost certainly be identical to the print version.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: On the other hand, with books now we see several options. And here I am focusing a little bit on textbooks, especially because publishers have really put in the effort to reorient their content to be more web friendly in a variety of ways. With e-books, it may be as simple as just having the same content and organizational scheme of the print version. Or, it could be advanced in a way so that the book provides more detailed and immersive experiences with regards to figures, diagrams, charts and things of that nature.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: For example, in my field, hearing a recording of a notated musical example makes a world of difference for a student. In that case, maybe 10 years ago, the book would have been accompanied by a CD. But now everything is online and there's a playlist that is accessible within the main body of text or the subtitles of figures. There can also be further more detailed annotations embedded in e-book versions of textbooks as opposed to print versions.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: In the last decade, there have also been developments in the interactive web based format for textbooks. Here the focus seems to be rethinking. In rethinking, the organizational scheme of the traditional textbook format and incorporating exercises and other things of a more workbook like nature to be interspersed between the more explanatory materials for lectures.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: This has its advantages and disadvantages that are not really related with the format, but the technical problems that this kind of format presents in the online world with regards to subscriptions, browsing platforms, or connectivity. We can move on to the next slide. Yeah. And while there is significant overlap and intersections between books used in undergraduate education versus graduate education or research, in my experience, there are certain differences between the two that are inherent to the nature of the way professors teach and how students are expected to learn in these two different settings of undergrad versus graduate.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: By nature, the topics in the graduate classroom can be more sharply focused as opposed to the undergraduate classroom. However, the sharper the focus, the more context we usually need. And the advantage of the book format over standalone articles and essays is that you usually get all the context you need even in or especially in niched works. And as a bonus, you also get this huge bibliography to refer to.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: While I cannot speak for hard sciences like physics or other disciplines, which probably still rely heavily on cutting edge research found in journals, graduate students, especially in the humanities, rely heavily on print versions of books and their institutional libraries collections for research. This difference between hard sciences and humanities or social sciences may be something that could be the topic of another panel regarding books.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: It's just that us in the Arts and possibly humanities and social sciences often have a more historical logical approach to our studies, whereas studies in hard sciences may have a more forward outlook which may reduce the relevance of books in their disciplines. I'm just making an educated guess here. So we can move on to the next slide? OK. So I have kind of touched upon a lot of this during the second slide but let's see.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: These are some of my personal observations. With every year, more books which were not originally intended for scholarly audiences are being adopted in higher education syllabi. I know this because I do this and a lot of my colleagues, I see them doing this. Things like compendiums and chronicles of a journalist, et cetera. And more textbooks are being made available as web based interactive experiences, even workbook accompaniments.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And I see there is a bias towards print against interactive in the workbook format. What I mean by this is that students seem to learn better, focus better, when doing practical exercises on a piece of paper than the computer screen, especially when working with symbolic representations of abstract topics such as our work in music theory. Like marketing analytical annotations on the paper itself, it is a much more immediate and comfortable way of studying than a computer screen.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: But, of course, nowadays, tablet pens and styluses are making these things easier and we will see if the prominence of them will become more commonplace with majority of students. Only thing I would like to add here is that there is a trend going forward it seems of a more web based experience with textbooks. But I have also found myself to be using books in my syllabi which were not intended for the classroom because of the context, intersectionality, and the broad perspective books provide.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: I've also seen other colleagues take this route more often lately. And we can go to the last slide. So the main concerns regarding books as a researcher or maybe from the perspective of graduate students and also as a professor is the affordability concern which when I assign a book in my syllabus for a required reading, it's kind of hard to assume that everyone might be able to afford because books tend to be more expensive than the free journal subscriptions that students are entitled to in their institutions.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And of course, the access thing like I said. Format is not about accessibility but more like connectivity issues, online subscriptions to ebooks or web based interactive experiences where there might be some software issues on the student side. So this is my general perspective on the topic. So thank you.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Thank you so much Eren. And now we will hear from Stephanie.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Of course. Thanks for having me here. In thinking about the changes to reading and the book business over the last five years, I kind of see this last year as a sort of inflection point. So my short answer, and I think we are all in agreement to the question, does anyone read books anymore is yes. Although I come from a sales and marketing background in book publishing And so my opinion about reading practice is informed by inference about sales and interrogated through the lens of equity, justice, and inclusion.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: The good news is that the sales data supports the assertion that people are reading with vigor. And that over our year of pandemic living, the greatly feared severe drop in book sales has not materialized. According to the most recent opt in sales survey by the Association of University Presses, net sales volume for the first half of the fiscal year running from July 1 2020 to December 31 2020, was 6.3% above the total for the same period in 2019.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: 55 of the 58 participating presses reported an increase in ebook sales. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, four of the larger presses reported unexpectedly strong sales of social justice books, books that were, in most cases, backlist titles. And this particular group of presses saw the biggest net sales increase of 17%.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Because the business model for University presses has shifted over the last 30 years from heavily subvented to heavily sales dependent, University presses have many concerns relating to book sales including competition with trade houses for media coverage. But the biggest concerns accrue to the scholarly portions of our lists that are at the heart of our mission. Reductions to higher education budgets, further subsidy reductions, which of course push us to publish more and more trade books, hiring freezes and furloughs, reduction in tenure track positions which fuels scholars interest in writing books with a broad audience appeal, general undervaluing of humanities and social science scholarship which pushes presses to transfer monographs into trade books, unfunded open access mandates, and the prospect of further reductions to already shrinking library collection budgets.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And yes, this pushes prices to a trade publishing agenda. So what does all of this have to do with reading? Next slide, please. And why is the slide on the screen a report on diversity in publishing? So when I hear the question does anybody read any print books anymore, I pause to reflect on how we as publishers identify or know readers.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And how historically this is excluded large groups of people, people whose actual reading practices were therefore clandestine and unseen. The picture that emerges of the staff at publishers also shapes the picture of this invisible reader. The data before you on the slide is the University Press slice of Lee and Lo's second baseline diversity survey conducted in 2019.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Though the number of participating University presses was relatively small, 35 of 154 member presses. The data online to within a few percentage points of the broader publishing industry surveyed. For example, what these data show that is an extremely white industry segment at 81%. The University Press workforce is even wider than the full surveyed landscape at 76%.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: The University Press segment shows less gender imbalance than the full survey. Cis women make up 64% of the University Press workforce whereas the full US publishing field stands at 74%. And what I experience as a waning conversation from its height over the summer and early fall here in the US, this conversation about how diverse workplaces fuel innovation, competition, and invite new consumers, the impact of how this data functions in book publishing is on who is identified as a reader.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And thus, who is encouraged to read by the publication of compelling books and the promotion of those books for discovery by interested readers. Here's an example. Recently Wayne State University Press produced an ad promoting the four authors selected by a local history association to participate in panel discussions at their conferences.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: While consistent with previous year's representation, this ad features four cisgendered white men. Though of course these authors deserve to be noticed for their presentation, the optics are indicative of a self-propagating bias in this subject area and probably others. The society, the scholarly society that sponsors the conference, has not adopted an initiative for diversity and inclusion.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Individuals from overrepresented groups are celebrated, the visibility results in book sales, the book sales point out a path to publishers for success. So much of publishing is about relationships and visibility. Focused efforts to recruit, empower, and promote press staff for minoritized groups makes way for access to and support for reading communities that are otherwise invisible and alone there.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Thank you.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thanks a ton. Now we will go on to Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I'm thrilled to be here among such esteemed company. And I want to thank Shirley for inviting me to speak and share my experiences from a book publishing point of view. So why do books continue to be such an important part of the scholarly publishing world? Well, the truth is that from a publisher's point of view, books will continue to play a very important part as long as there's a significant number of students, faculty, researchers, and institutions who see their value.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We have seen a falloff in some book sales over the years, but I've been as surprised as anyone frankly at just how resilient the books as a format has been. Textbook sales to individual students, I think as Stephanie was saying, have held up remarkably well during the pandemic. And indeed sales of titles that allow for some special interaction with learners, like flashcards or coloring books, have even seen demand spikes.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I myself personally have worked for the last 10 years immersed in the worlds of local language and education content. And in both of these areas in particular, we've seen a very robust book market. There are many countries in the world where books are still the preferred option. India, Germany, France, Spain, and Japan all have thriving education big markets and I believe it's very important that we don't just view this question through the lens of what's happening in North America or the UK.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And thinking about education more broadly, long form content helps students get a grounding in core knowledge which they can then use to synthesize all of the other rapidly expanding information that comes at them, which is a particular issue in my field of medical education. The core grounding that a student gets from reading a print or an e-book helps build their critical thinking skills.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So while we're undoubtedly in an ongoing period of transformation in the publishing world, I believe we can still classify it as an evolution rather than a revolution with different and often complementary use cases for books and digital solutions coexisting together. If we could just move on to the next slide, please. So here you can see some of the statistics from a survey that we run every year, just with medical education students.
ELIZABETH MUNN: But you can see some of these survey results are remarkably consistent and really significant numbers. This is not indicative of a world where we see books dying. And you can also see here, the importance of different country markets as well in terms of the book program within Elsevier within the medical education world. If we go on to the next slide.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So I was asked to think a little bit about the major changes that I'd witnessed in the last five years. And then what I would think about what the next five years would hold. So a trend that I've seen for a while now but that has definitely accelerated and expanded as the growth in the number of platforms that bring digital versions of books together in one place. Augmented by other media types like video, animation, and assessment functionality.
ELIZABETH MUNN: Print on demand has also become much easier and much more affordable, allowing books to stay in print longer and generally opening up new business models for print. But to me, it's not just the medium that's changed. I would also say that publishers of content have evolved to be much better at delivering core knowledge in a more pithy way, so focusing on the essentials pedagogical features such as chapter objectives, boxes of critical information, a lot more figures for example.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And it's much less common now to expect a student or professional learner to read an enormous tome from cover to cover. So when I think about what the next five years will hold, I believe we will have a much more sophisticated view of when books and digital solutions work best for the users. And this is going to depend very much on their phase of learning, the nature of the task or the problem at hand, and the environment that they're in at that time.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We as publishers will actively have to think about how, why, and when do books and e-solutions complement each other, and how can we enhance all of those linkages between the books and the digital solutions. Many publishers like ourselves have experimented with QR codes and hyperlinks in books, but they've not really driven that integrated experience that we hoped for probably because they're ultimately quite basic and one way driven.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So we're really thinking about how we can link in multiple and meaningful ways to increasingly sophisticated solutions, like digital simulations, 3D visualizations, and technology like augmented reality or virtual reality. And having this sit alongside books will provide users with a complete learning journey that's multifaceted and reflects their complex and dynamic need for information.
ELIZABETH MUNN:
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Wonderful. Thanks, Elizabeth. Great. Now I think if we all want to turn on our videos, it's a chance for us to have sort of a conversation. And I will remind people who are attending this if you want to drop any questions into the Q&A, we'd love to hear from you. But I thought I'd maybe kick off our own conversation amongst ourselves with a question that kind of Stephanie laid out at the very beginning of her presentation.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: We did all see predictions that books publishing was, you know, and we're going to be seeing the death of the book. And we didn't see that come to pass. And so I'm wondering if people could share your thoughts on why do you think that was? Why did the book not die in the way it was predicted? Elizabeth, you want to start off answering that?
ELIZABETH MUNN: We're all being so polite.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I know.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We didn't want to interrupt each other. I mean, from my perspective I think they're still incredibly important use cases for a print book. And I think this idea of, and I think this is something that's come up in a few of the presentations, this idea either or is meaningless in the world of learning and knowledge expansion. There are some use cases where it is still better and most effective to have a book.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And then there's other use cases where it's better to have a digital solution because that provides the best and most effective route to learning in my case for education. So to me it's not if books will disappear, it's finding those use cases for books that are still very valid and we've never find a better solution for. But finding a way of working with the other types of digital solutions that they can co-exist with those.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Right. Thanks for that.
KEVIN GAREWAL: An interesting case study for me was Harvard, our libraries are closed but we have pick up. So I was running statistics on how many students are showing up or faculty are showing up. And how many materials are they checking out. So For the first semester we had about 230 users show up and check out 3,000 items. So just from 200 people there taking out an average of more than 10 items, and they're probably doing advanced papers or other things.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But like it just shows that the use cases. There's still a print demand, especially in these segmented areas. And many of these, we have duplicate electronic copies either through how do you HathiTrust or through an e-book license. And they're still choosy because I went through the list to see what they checked out. They want the print materials and it was really interesting.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I would like to add to that it was interesting to see in one of Elizabeth's slides the reading preferences of students. And I thought maybe this was field related because I talked about it in my own presentation, but it seems like 65% to 70% of students still prefer to learn on paper rather than on screen, which is interesting.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I can't recollect what the study was but there have been a few studies about information retention and the tactile sensation of an actual paper book. That is a pretty close link. But I wanted to in the last economic kind of collapse, the e-book was just becoming popular. And I see the enduring use of print books as closely aligned with access to high speed internet.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And still relatively expensive devices for reading e-books. You can drop a book in the bathtub still and you're not in a very dangerous situation.
ELIZABETH MUNN: It's very interesting though because when we did those surveys, and I'm glad that you find them insightful, you know, you're expecting certain markets where there might not be accessed at an institutional level to either the technology or stable internet connections. Those would be the countries where books would still be flourishing. But we still see enormous preprints, really, really high in the 90 percentile in Germany and Japan, hardly the bastions.
ELIZABETH MUNN: These are countries that are well known for being very technologically advanced. And this really surprised me as well, I think there's a cultural element. I mean maybe it's the tactile thing, whatever it is there's still this feeling I think about people that's very special about books that is deeply ingrained regardless of how technologically advanced that society is.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I noticed the word cloud kept growing after we stopped sharing it. But tactile came up as a word that grew after we stopped watching, which is kind of interesting. Who's got a question you'd like to pose to one of your fellow panelists?
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: I see there is a question in the Q&A if you wanted to take those.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Sure.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: There is a do you see any use of audio books for the scholarly world? Yes I do. I think that's an issue of accessibility. It's really important to have audiobook versions of textbooks and other books adapted for the classroom because students who are visually impaired or with other disabilities, it just makes the audience much larger than it is.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So yes, I do. I don't know if anyone else would like to add onto that.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I definitely think that is a big trend as well. If you look at even the success of podcasts over the past five years, audio is still incredibly popular. And I think what we need to think about is publishers though is how to make that meaningful. We could go down the Audible route of having people read them out. But I think when you're talking about scholarly publishing, there's better ways of thinking about that audio.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So I think it's got a place but I think we need to think through more about how best to augment the print experience with a compelling audio experience.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie, I wonder what your experience has been with the challenge of getting authors to publish. It if that's hard for you? Or I know when I was in my role, excuse me, I often had authors who were having to decide do I work on writing a book or do I work on writing a journal article. And that was a conversation. And I'm wondering what your perspective is.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah. Well, I mean work that we do in publishing is very collaborative with the author. And so there's often a dialogue about not only is this a journal article or is this a book? Or is it a blog? Or something, or is it a podcast? Or is it two of these things?
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: So most of the manuscripts that come to us are definitely intended and shaped as books. But the pandemic era has seen, I think, anecdotally, a number of authors really struggling with the focus required to complete a full book length manuscript. And so we're a University Press that also publishes journal articles and those submissions have gone up a little bit while our normal proposal submission has gone kind of down, it's a little slow.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Interesting. And Elizabeth, what would be your perspective on that same question?
ELIZABETH MUNN: Well. I actually think that attracting authors to write textbooks in particular it's a significant undertaking. You know, it really can be a many, many, many years of work. So that's always a really challenging thing to do. But it always amazes me how dedicated faculty are to always improving the learning process within their school.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So this is a passion for them that overcomes the time. And attracting people to write textbooks is still something that we find relatively easy to do though it is, of course, important to get the right candidates. I think where it becomes more difficult as you actually move into the world of digital solutions where I was talking about bit-sized content. So it's about creating content, small nuggets of content, that is very flexible and rich so that it can be used in lots of different formats.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And that's slightly more challenging because when people want to take that time to write, they want to write their vision, their way of thinking. And they want to be rightly credited for that. And it's very difficult in a digital platform with lots of different little pieces of content for them to know A, that they're being recognized for that work. but also to know that their work is being utilized in the way that they had envisioned it in the first place.
ELIZABETH MUNN: Got my teeth in properly.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I just want to echo something that Stephanie said earlier. At a former position, I was tenure track and with reductions in force of faculty members. And the work and the course load increase on those faculty members. They don't have time to write like they used to and they still need to check those boxes for retention and promotion. So it's easier to fire around three or four articles than to spend three years on one monograph that in those apparatus might be one check instead of three or four checks.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And that is a real motivator. And when you're teaching three or four classes a semester, trying to get something done it's got to be near impossible.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So Kevin and Eren, I think of you as being sort of interesting pair. And if we had a third person as a student, maybe thinking about the dynamic of where a professor wants students to have easy access to the content that is on the syllabus. And the librarian sometimes helps with that and sometimes doesn't. And the students just trying to find the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get the content.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: How do those considerations kind of play into the way you make decisions when you're either setting up a syllabus or deciding what to acquire? And what might each of you say to the other to kind of argue your perspective to the other professor or to the librarian.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Well, I've been lucky to have work with librarians who are really helpful. But still when I create new courses which deal with more contemporary phenomena which don't have any textbooks because there's no such course, so I adapt books that are not necessarily intended for academic use.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And many times these are quite prominent books with a hefty price tag on them. And what happens is that before I require these readings, I go online and see if there is a market for this. And you know eBay is a huge. It's a place where I mean most students buy used books on eBay. Or other auction or other bookstores, online bookstores, like that which--
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I see Stephanie nodding her head and grimacing.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Yes, yes. So this is one of the main concerns when you're choosing a book for the syllabus. So either I do that. And of course with the COVID situation it was much harder because I had students who are waking up in Korea at 6: 00 AM to attend the class.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And, you know, and when are they going to get the book? And in the past maybe they would share one book or maybe they would scan a few pages and send it to each other but that's not possible that the distance is so far. So that was a big issue. Yeah.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I think from my perspective, sort of echo Eren's experience, we call it wherever I've been, whether it's been Akron, Cleveland State, or Harvard, if we know that there is going to be a textbook that's going to be asked for, we explore all of the options to try to get it. Whether it's putting it in physical form on course reserve or exploring licensing options. I think what I've experienced is many times if we can get an e-book license, we get it, we pull the trigger on it.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Even if it costs $300 but it gives a book to 30 kids, that's a good investment from our perspective. I think what we've seen is publishers become more dialed in to even things that are in a second run. If it gets adopted by a course or a number of course, those things get pulled back into a model where we can't buy flat licenses for our campus. Or they roll out of e-book packages that come from places like EPSCO or Proquest.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So one semester they may be there for the next semester there's not. And Eren's making a reliance that it's going to be they're moving forward but it's pulled back so they can sell individual licenses. And I get it. It's like you're trying to get a profit. You have backend expenses. But then but then we're put in a position where we have to explain to academics that it was licensed content, it's not owned.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So explaining that becomes a challenge. So it it's sort of navigating my experience, we get [INAUDIBLE] with whatever we can. And we always try to do that. But there are instances where we can't. And COVID has been an experience where you're trying to do a copyright analysis on 100 pages that's asked for. Does it break copyright?
KEVIN GAREWAL: Doesn't it break copyright? Does control digital lending work? What are the criteria around controlled digital lending? So there's a myriad of these things that we've tried to tackle. And I think we've learned a lot, but there's still a lot more work to do there.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Completely agree. Yes.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So we've got some interesting questions in the chat. A cluster of them are around expounding examples of current trends and what we think the future would lead to. And I think some of that we've touched on, but maybe if people could expand a little bit more in particular print and digital complement. How they complement each other. But then also just what else we see that might be in the future of publishing industry for books and journals.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie, Elizabeth, Eren, Kevin?
ELIZABETH MUNN: I can take this one. I mean I think about this every day. So I think it's a great question. But essentially maybe some examples of how print and digital can work together are formative assessment with remediation links back into textbooks or certain areas of textbooks. We recently also acquired a 3D anatomy company which, obviously, you know, you're talking about 3D anatomy models for medical students can replace a lot of time in the anatomy lab.
ELIZABETH MUNN: But you can't take that home with you and read it on the bus, for example. And I think students are actually a lot more sophisticated in how they think about this than we are. They know when they need different types of materials for different types of issues that they see. And they're very sophisticated about listening to a podcast and then the next minute using a book or the next minute using a 3D anatomy app.
ELIZABETH MUNN: The trick for us I think is finding links, meaningful links for them that they can take from one to the other so they work better together. I think the formative assessment one that I gave is a good example. We've started to put radiology images from our books into our anatomy app, again, linking those learning types of content together. And we're constantly thinking of new ways that we can do that fairly seamlessly to improve this overall picture for students and allow them to do better what they're already doing and that's used a whole multitude of different information sources.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And Stephanie, I wonder what your thoughts are about when you're looking at monographs or deciding which monographs to publish. To what extent are you thinking about how they could be used in the classroom? Or to what extent are you kind of give the authors coaching or editorial input to try to make it more useful in a classroom?
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah. So Wayne is a little bit of a boutique among University presses in kind of the ways that we work with our general interest consumer market. And the scholarly areas in which we specialize particularly Jewish studies and fairytale studies. So there's a lot of crossover in terms of those audiences.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And we have not particularly done any work to kind of shape those monographs around classroom use because usually they're covering unique topics. I mean they're true monographs. I'm aware that it is something that, particularly in looking at hybrid modes, with their books that there's a lot of content that would better serve the classroom if it were kind of reshaped in some ways.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Thanks. And then Eren, really quickly, I'm just curious as you're the person who is looking at monographs and deciding whether or not you're going to include them in a classroom as they're just really quickly certainly things that you're looking for that make you decide, yes, I'm going to require it? Or no I'm it's too narrow or something?
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Well, yeah. I probably wouldn't ever say that a book is too narrow compared to assigning several journal articles. But the thing that we have in our writing habits in the Western academic sphere is that, especially with journal articles, you get to the point fast. You know, catch the attention of the audience in the first two paragraphs, and then you expound on the data.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: But the thing with I think students have with books they have an easier time digesting the data because the advantage of books is that you can have a much larger introduction, much larger discussion. So the interpretations and the variety of contrasting interpretations other than the author's own is more reflective. It's reflected more in books.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So if we have that kind of thing, more discussion and interpretation of data in the book so that's better for the students. And the other thing is what Elizabeth was saying about bit size, I mean of course, you're not going to have bite size nuggets of information in a book. But what you can have is more compartmentalized and thinking about indexing things and how the content is it's just about form basically what the form of the book is.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So I think that can, not the content, but just how things are compartmentalized in a book can make or break the use or in the classroom.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thanks so much to everybody, all of our presenters. I'm sharing the screen again to show the word cloud because I thought people might be interested to see how it has evolved. And we do see a few more critical, sometimes poorly written, slow, so some of the more balanced look. I think Jeff or Mary Beth, could you-- why don't you do just a little question back to you who are attending this to ask you, yourselves, to give us your thoughts on this question.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Does anyone read books anymore? And if you can do a quick vote, it's hopefully popping right up on your screen, we would love to hear your thoughts. And then, yeah, thank you very much. I think Jeff, you're going to wrap us up. I have to stop sharing my screen.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Sorry I. Hold on, I'm sorry, I can't stop sharing my screen.
JEFF LANG: While you're looking for that I just wanted to start by saying thank you to Shirley and to Kevin, Eren, Stephanie, and Elizabeth for leaving this really interesting discussion today. And thanks to everybody else for attending the webinar as well and for bringing your questions. Once again, please do take time to respond to the webinar evaluation that you'll receive over email. Your feedback really helps us to continually improve this program.
JEFF LANG: And please join us in about two weeks for ask the experts trust in science. And the next SSP webinar, which will be our Scholarly Kitchen webinar on Wednesday April 21. You can check out the website for other updates about what's going on around SSP and other education opportunities and with that we are concluded for the day. Thank you all for attending.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Thanks, everybody.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Thank you everyone.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Thank you.
Segment:0 .
JEFF LANG: Hello, and welcome to the second SSP webinar of the year. You're joining us for a discussion titled, "Does Anyone Read Books Anymore?" I'm Jeff Lang with the American Chemical Society, the Chair of the SSP Webinars Working Group, and I'm pleased that you could join us today. In a moment, we'll get started and you'll hear from our panelists. During the session, your audio will be muted automatically in consideration of our presenters and your fellow webinar participants.
JEFF LANG: Please use the Q&A feature to send in your questions. The moderator will review your questions and present them to the panelists. To help her, please specify to which presenter you'd like your question directed. Also, please send in your questions as we go. They'll be addressed after the prepared remarks. At the conclusion of today's session, you'll receive a webinar evaluation via email.
JEFF LANG: We encourage you to provide feedback so we can continually improve the SSP Webinar Program. You'll also receive a link via email to the recorded broadcast of this webinar. Our moderator today is Shirley Decker-Lucke, the content director of SSRN. She explores ways technology and content can merge in creative and useful ways. And prior to joining SSRN, she was the Publishing Director for Elsevier's Life Sciences Book Program and led projects looking for innovation in publishing approaches.
JEFF LANG: She has over 20 years of experience leading groups through change in publishing in the social sciences, humanities, and hard sciences. Over to you, Shirley.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Hi, everybody. Well, thanks so much, all of you, for joining us. We have a SSP webinar planning committee, and we were sitting around a few months ago thinking, what do we want to do a webinar on? What are people interested in? And it came up in our conversation that about 3/4 of us had had careers in book publishing, and yet none of us were currently working in book publishing, myself included. And so we thought, there's something really interesting there.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: What is that about, and what might we do to kind of construct a conversation that would be interesting about what's going on in the books world? I would hopefully ask that all of you can go to www.menti.com, log in to that. And then if you enter the code, we wanted to start-- and maybe Jeff, can you hand over the screen to me? We wanted to start by just getting a sense from you in the audience of what you thought about books publishing.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And so if you can see this, we're asking all of you to now go in-- perfect. And start entering words. You can enter in multiple words. You can enter the same word in that somebody else has. Of course, if a word is entered by more people, the word gets bigger and so it gives a visual of what people are thinking about books. And we just thought it'd be fun to see of the people attending, what are the kinds of things that people think books do or are.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So we see everything, which is kind of an interesting-- vital, educational, contextual, essential. Yeah, please just keep on entering in some words, and we'll see what people are thinking. So all positive, thus far. It's OK to put negative ones, too. This is an open conversation if-- joyful, oh, I like that one.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Really interesting different ideas, relaxing. Again, very educational. Essential is a big one. Great. OK, I think a lot of cool things. You can keep entering that in. Maybe we will have a chance at the end of the call to go back and look at that again. But Jeff, if we want to go back to the deck and then the next slide.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So I did a very, very unscientific survey earlier this month, as you can see in the upper left hand corner, where I did a Twitter survey and found that 100% of respondents, all 18 of them, did believe the answer was yes to does anyone read books anymore. And if you took a quick look just on Google, the book publishing industry is quite sizable. In the US it's a $26, $27 billion business.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: There's broadly a broad definition of the kind of books and publishing world landscape. And what I'm really excited about with this panelist, if we go on to the next slide, is that this group is going to help us really dig into specifically scholarly publishing books and the question of does anyone read books anymore. And what I've asked them each to do is to present their own unique perspective, with their own experiences and interests, but also to sort of present a persona, if you will.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And so we've got Kevin Garewal, who is the Associate Director of Collections at the Harvard Law School Library. And he's going to be presenting the persona of a librarian and helping us to think about things from the librarian's perspective. We've got Eren Gumrukcuoglu, who is a professor, Adjunct Professor of Music at Duke, and he'll be representing the teacher, the educator, the professor.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie Williams is the Director of Wayne State University Press and she's going to be helping us think about things from the university press perspective. And then finally, Elizabeth Munn, who is at Elsevier, Managing Director of Education. And she'll be taking the perspective of a bigger publisher, if you will. And so now I'll hand it over to Kevin to get us started on what this conversation might look like.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE:
KEVIN GAREWAL: Good morning. I'm Kevin Garewal. I'm the Associate Director of Collections at the Harvard Law School Library. Can you advance to the next slide, please, Jeff? I wanted to take a moment and just sort of give my background, so it'll frame my perspective on how I look at books intersecting with higher education. So I actually started my career for five years at a public library, and then went to a law school library, and also after, that a university library.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But I've also worked in two other special libraries. Folded in there, I was also an auditor and an attorney, which frames my thinking as fairly analytical. And I think while I'm fairly analytical, I also realize that the qualitative piece is lost in there. So the feedback from users and faculty members or researchers is a piece that folds into the evaluation of books and use. So when I was preparing for this, I bounced this off of a couple of people.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I got a really interesting email back from one of my friends who's a PhD candidate in philosophy. And usually, I don't like long quotes, but I thought this was useful to share.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I share your experience even over the course of my graduate studies, there has been an increasing amount of journal articles and some diminishing amount of monographs throughout. Despite this, courses and research projects still continue to rely on monos. So even though there are far less system building projects worthy of a complete monograph at work and far more articles that are focused on a very small disjointed additions to the field, monographs are still very necessary part of the research and academic studies in general.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Can you advance a slide, please? So I use people like that as a benchmark when I'm thinking about these things. So when I thought about this as, you know, where was I five years ago, or what did publishing look like five years ago? It came to me that I was at the University of Akron running the Research and Learning Services at the University library.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I was in the midst of an analysis on our print approval plan and our ebook DDA and short term loan program, we were going through a budget shrinkage and we had to do the analysis of what this looked like. So we had a pretty comprehensive approval plan. We were spending about $100,000 a year on print monographs and they would come from the publisher shipped out from the vendor shipped directly to us. So I did an analysis of use data.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And what was kind of startling was that the cost for an average checkout of those books that we received in those five years was $43 per checkout. So in a five year time period, that was about 12,000 checkouts. Even factoring in renewals of those monographs, our total cost was still above $20 per circulation even when you bundled them as one. The result of that was we turned off all approvals and relied on firm orders from our faculty librarians and bibliographer to fill those gaps.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The next piece that we had to do an analysis of was the ebook usage. We were involved with a two year pilot on short term loans and demand-driven. So short term loans were a student or a faculty member would click on a book, they would get to use it for x amount of time, and then it would return back to the hopper. And after a certain number of triggers, we would purchase the book.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So in the two years we had a cost a total of about $200,000. The average cost per download for a book was $60 per download. And then the average cost of an actual acquisition of a book was $180, but that was because of the trigger of the short term loans. So if something was checked out two times and it cost $40 per time that it was checked out and then we paid for the full price of the book that's when it would trigger at $120 or $140 or $180 per book.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The result is we turned off that DDA plan because both of those were seen as uncapped cost. We didn't have a set threshold that we would spend on those. So we decided to turn those off and then funnel the money to other places. Can you advance please? Yeah, thanks. Sort of looking at it looking at it in the current state, I do want to acknowledge that open access and OERs are part of the formula now.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But from my perspective, there's still fairly early in their development. And I think the impact from the library perspective is it's good for core support, but it's still fairly minimal in regards to budget support or how we're getting any type of return on that right now. The impact for students is highly positive but there's no relief for us for backfilling textbooks or backfilling other core support materials.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So what's going on in higher education now? Most universities and colleges are doing ebook packages for purchases because in bulk it's cheaper and it's easier to load and make those accessible. You know, I want to acknowledge a new ebook purchase model that are being explored, evidence base is one of those and those are really good. We are purchasing based on user requests, and we've always done this, but I think that we're more hypervigilant about this before.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And where we may not have seen it as mapped to the curriculum, now we're purchasing those things because we're seeing it is on demand or relying on reciprocal borrowing agreements with consortia. So you know I'm at Harvard, so we have the other Ivy's that we have books loan from. Collective collecting initiatives are starting. Schools are starting to marry up their collection development policies that we'll buy x subject area, you buy y subject area, that way we don't have to be duplicating and spending that both sides of the money.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So at the Ivies, it's a little bit different. We still are doing everything on the left side of the slide but we're still receiving print and e-book approval plans and DDAs. But these are getting scrutinized more. One of the things about being at Harvard Law School is we still view ourselves as a library of record, we want the print material to come in the door for two things.
KEVIN GAREWAL: The preservation piece and also to be able to make that loanable to any of our reciprocating institutions or even through interlibrary loan to make those available to people. So we really do view ourselves as a library for people to use and then get those materials. And Harvard Library shares that same philosophy. We also collected an international scope, about 2/3 of our collection at the law school is foreign and international material.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And many times those are you can only get those in print. So that's the only stable format. So we're still print, we're going to be print for the foreseeable future, and that's how we've had to position ourselves. And many of those are monographs of nature. Jeff, can you advance? Thanks. And then I asked myself, where are we going to be in five years?
KEVIN GAREWAL: And when I really thought about this, I don't know. I think what we need to keep an eye on is we need to be partners and protect the intellectual endeavor and necessity of monograph publication. I think extremist views on both sides of completely open or completely proprietary is not a good way to have a conversation or set the perspective.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I think it's somewhere in the middle. Two critical reasons why books are still necessary, niche publications and diverse voices are critical to disseminate and preserve. University presses and small presses are really the essential lifeblood of local history, personal narratives and niche works. That's just to name a few. Internationally, the monograph is still essential.
KEVIN GAREWAL: It's really a cornerstone for some countries. One of our publishers in Eastern Europe, their main job is to print cards and invitations, and on the side of the print lab monographs. And that's the only way that we can get those materials. So that pretty much wraps up my presentation. And then I'll pass it along to Shirley and I'm not sure if Eren-- Thanks Kevin, yeah.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Eren is next. We'll move on. Thanks so much.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Hi, everyone. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. So I will be talking from my own perspective of a teacher and researcher of music theory music technology, and music composition in general. Why do I still think that books are relevant in higher education? I think they are still relevant in both the classroom and in research.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Comparing books with single journal articles and other standalone essays or reviews, et cetera, as a professor I see that the value of books lies in its wider lens and the more wholesome picture it usually provides in any given topic. Even monographs with a sharp focus will provide a more contextual and intersectional study opportunity to a student or a researcher compared to a journal article.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And while our panel today is interested in the major changes in the past five years and a possible projection of the next five years, I'd like to point out that five years is often not a long enough duration in the context of habits of teaching in departments and in classrooms to see a direct impact on practices in choosing material for syllabi. In my field that my teaching and research takes place, which is music more specifically theory technology and composition, we still use a lot of text books and monographs specifically written with the classroom in mind.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: These are published by various scholarly presses around the world. In disciplines like mine, in the arts or humanities and fields like media studies or documentary studies, still more in-depth research continues to rely on books for their all encompassing nature. Could we go to the next slide, Jeff? Thanks. Both journals and books have their place in the higher education classroom.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: However, the most observable changes I've seen in the past maybe not 5 years but 10 to 15 years, has been in the modes of access to content, especially I'd say with books with an advantage over journals. Journal entries, be print or online, have preserved their farm format, meaning that the PDF that you get of the article will almost certainly be identical to the print version.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: On the other hand, with books now we see several options. And here I am focusing a little bit on textbooks, especially because publishers have really put in the effort to reorient their content to be more web friendly in a variety of ways. With e-books, it may be as simple as just having the same content and organizational scheme of the print version. Or, it could be advanced in a way so that the book provides more detailed and immersive experiences with regards to figures, diagrams, charts and things of that nature.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: For example, in my field, hearing a recording of a notated musical example makes a world of difference for a student. In that case, maybe 10 years ago, the book would have been accompanied by a CD. But now everything is online and there's a playlist that is accessible within the main body of text or the subtitles of figures. There can also be further more detailed annotations embedded in e-book versions of textbooks as opposed to print versions.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: In the last decade, there have also been developments in the interactive web based format for textbooks. Here the focus seems to be rethinking. In rethinking, the organizational scheme of the traditional textbook format and incorporating exercises and other things of a more workbook like nature to be interspersed between the more explanatory materials for lectures.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: This has its advantages and disadvantages that are not really related with the format, but the technical problems that this kind of format presents in the online world with regards to subscriptions, browsing platforms, or connectivity. We can move on to the next slide. Yeah. And while there is significant overlap and intersections between books used in undergraduate education versus graduate education or research, in my experience, there are certain differences between the two that are inherent to the nature of the way professors teach and how students are expected to learn in these two different settings of undergrad versus graduate.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: By nature, the topics in the graduate classroom can be more sharply focused as opposed to the undergraduate classroom. However, the sharper the focus, the more context we usually need. And the advantage of the book format over standalone articles and essays is that you usually get all the context you need even in or especially in niched works. And as a bonus, you also get this huge bibliography to refer to.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: While I cannot speak for hard sciences like physics or other disciplines, which probably still rely heavily on cutting edge research found in journals, graduate students, especially in the humanities, rely heavily on print versions of books and their institutional libraries collections for research. This difference between hard sciences and humanities or social sciences may be something that could be the topic of another panel regarding books.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: It's just that us in the Arts and possibly humanities and social sciences often have a more historical logical approach to our studies, whereas studies in hard sciences may have a more forward outlook which may reduce the relevance of books in their disciplines. I'm just making an educated guess here. So we can move on to the next slide? OK. So I have kind of touched upon a lot of this during the second slide but let's see.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: These are some of my personal observations. With every year, more books which were not originally intended for scholarly audiences are being adopted in higher education syllabi. I know this because I do this and a lot of my colleagues, I see them doing this. Things like compendiums and chronicles of a journalist, et cetera. And more textbooks are being made available as web based interactive experiences, even workbook accompaniments.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And I see there is a bias towards print against interactive in the workbook format. What I mean by this is that students seem to learn better, focus better, when doing practical exercises on a piece of paper than the computer screen, especially when working with symbolic representations of abstract topics such as our work in music theory. Like marketing analytical annotations on the paper itself, it is a much more immediate and comfortable way of studying than a computer screen.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: But, of course, nowadays, tablet pens and styluses are making these things easier and we will see if the prominence of them will become more commonplace with majority of students. Only thing I would like to add here is that there is a trend going forward it seems of a more web based experience with textbooks. But I have also found myself to be using books in my syllabi which were not intended for the classroom because of the context, intersectionality, and the broad perspective books provide.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: I've also seen other colleagues take this route more often lately. And we can go to the last slide. So the main concerns regarding books as a researcher or maybe from the perspective of graduate students and also as a professor is the affordability concern which when I assign a book in my syllabus for a required reading, it's kind of hard to assume that everyone might be able to afford because books tend to be more expensive than the free journal subscriptions that students are entitled to in their institutions.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And of course, the access thing like I said. Format is not about accessibility but more like connectivity issues, online subscriptions to ebooks or web based interactive experiences where there might be some software issues on the student side. So this is my general perspective on the topic. So thank you.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Thank you so much Eren. And now we will hear from Stephanie.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Of course. Thanks for having me here. In thinking about the changes to reading and the book business over the last five years, I kind of see this last year as a sort of inflection point. So my short answer, and I think we are all in agreement to the question, does anyone read books anymore is yes. Although I come from a sales and marketing background in book publishing And so my opinion about reading practice is informed by inference about sales and interrogated through the lens of equity, justice, and inclusion.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: The good news is that the sales data supports the assertion that people are reading with vigor. And that over our year of pandemic living, the greatly feared severe drop in book sales has not materialized. According to the most recent opt in sales survey by the Association of University Presses, net sales volume for the first half of the fiscal year running from July 1 2020 to December 31 2020, was 6.3% above the total for the same period in 2019.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: 55 of the 58 participating presses reported an increase in ebook sales. Additionally, and perhaps more significantly, four of the larger presses reported unexpectedly strong sales of social justice books, books that were, in most cases, backlist titles. And this particular group of presses saw the biggest net sales increase of 17%.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Because the business model for University presses has shifted over the last 30 years from heavily subvented to heavily sales dependent, University presses have many concerns relating to book sales including competition with trade houses for media coverage. But the biggest concerns accrue to the scholarly portions of our lists that are at the heart of our mission. Reductions to higher education budgets, further subsidy reductions, which of course push us to publish more and more trade books, hiring freezes and furloughs, reduction in tenure track positions which fuels scholars interest in writing books with a broad audience appeal, general undervaluing of humanities and social science scholarship which pushes presses to transfer monographs into trade books, unfunded open access mandates, and the prospect of further reductions to already shrinking library collection budgets.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And yes, this pushes prices to a trade publishing agenda. So what does all of this have to do with reading? Next slide, please. And why is the slide on the screen a report on diversity in publishing? So when I hear the question does anybody read any print books anymore, I pause to reflect on how we as publishers identify or know readers.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And how historically this is excluded large groups of people, people whose actual reading practices were therefore clandestine and unseen. The picture that emerges of the staff at publishers also shapes the picture of this invisible reader. The data before you on the slide is the University Press slice of Lee and Lo's second baseline diversity survey conducted in 2019.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Though the number of participating University presses was relatively small, 35 of 154 member presses. The data online to within a few percentage points of the broader publishing industry surveyed. For example, what these data show that is an extremely white industry segment at 81%. The University Press workforce is even wider than the full surveyed landscape at 76%.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: The University Press segment shows less gender imbalance than the full survey. Cis women make up 64% of the University Press workforce whereas the full US publishing field stands at 74%. And what I experience as a waning conversation from its height over the summer and early fall here in the US, this conversation about how diverse workplaces fuel innovation, competition, and invite new consumers, the impact of how this data functions in book publishing is on who is identified as a reader.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And thus, who is encouraged to read by the publication of compelling books and the promotion of those books for discovery by interested readers. Here's an example. Recently Wayne State University Press produced an ad promoting the four authors selected by a local history association to participate in panel discussions at their conferences.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: While consistent with previous year's representation, this ad features four cisgendered white men. Though of course these authors deserve to be noticed for their presentation, the optics are indicative of a self-propagating bias in this subject area and probably others. The society, the scholarly society that sponsors the conference, has not adopted an initiative for diversity and inclusion.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Individuals from overrepresented groups are celebrated, the visibility results in book sales, the book sales point out a path to publishers for success. So much of publishing is about relationships and visibility. Focused efforts to recruit, empower, and promote press staff for minoritized groups makes way for access to and support for reading communities that are otherwise invisible and alone there.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Thank you.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Thank you so much, Stephanie. Thanks a ton. Now we will go on to Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I'm thrilled to be here among such esteemed company. And I want to thank Shirley for inviting me to speak and share my experiences from a book publishing point of view. So why do books continue to be such an important part of the scholarly publishing world? Well, the truth is that from a publisher's point of view, books will continue to play a very important part as long as there's a significant number of students, faculty, researchers, and institutions who see their value.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We have seen a falloff in some book sales over the years, but I've been as surprised as anyone frankly at just how resilient the books as a format has been. Textbook sales to individual students, I think as Stephanie was saying, have held up remarkably well during the pandemic. And indeed sales of titles that allow for some special interaction with learners, like flashcards or coloring books, have even seen demand spikes.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I myself personally have worked for the last 10 years immersed in the worlds of local language and education content. And in both of these areas in particular, we've seen a very robust book market. There are many countries in the world where books are still the preferred option. India, Germany, France, Spain, and Japan all have thriving education big markets and I believe it's very important that we don't just view this question through the lens of what's happening in North America or the UK.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And thinking about education more broadly, long form content helps students get a grounding in core knowledge which they can then use to synthesize all of the other rapidly expanding information that comes at them, which is a particular issue in my field of medical education. The core grounding that a student gets from reading a print or an e-book helps build their critical thinking skills.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So while we're undoubtedly in an ongoing period of transformation in the publishing world, I believe we can still classify it as an evolution rather than a revolution with different and often complementary use cases for books and digital solutions coexisting together. If we could just move on to the next slide, please. So here you can see some of the statistics from a survey that we run every year, just with medical education students.
ELIZABETH MUNN: But you can see some of these survey results are remarkably consistent and really significant numbers. This is not indicative of a world where we see books dying. And you can also see here, the importance of different country markets as well in terms of the book program within Elsevier within the medical education world. If we go on to the next slide.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So I was asked to think a little bit about the major changes that I'd witnessed in the last five years. And then what I would think about what the next five years would hold. So a trend that I've seen for a while now but that has definitely accelerated and expanded as the growth in the number of platforms that bring digital versions of books together in one place. Augmented by other media types like video, animation, and assessment functionality.
ELIZABETH MUNN: Print on demand has also become much easier and much more affordable, allowing books to stay in print longer and generally opening up new business models for print. But to me, it's not just the medium that's changed. I would also say that publishers of content have evolved to be much better at delivering core knowledge in a more pithy way, so focusing on the essentials pedagogical features such as chapter objectives, boxes of critical information, a lot more figures for example.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And it's much less common now to expect a student or professional learner to read an enormous tome from cover to cover. So when I think about what the next five years will hold, I believe we will have a much more sophisticated view of when books and digital solutions work best for the users. And this is going to depend very much on their phase of learning, the nature of the task or the problem at hand, and the environment that they're in at that time.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We as publishers will actively have to think about how, why, and when do books and e-solutions complement each other, and how can we enhance all of those linkages between the books and the digital solutions. Many publishers like ourselves have experimented with QR codes and hyperlinks in books, but they've not really driven that integrated experience that we hoped for probably because they're ultimately quite basic and one way driven.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So we're really thinking about how we can link in multiple and meaningful ways to increasingly sophisticated solutions, like digital simulations, 3D visualizations, and technology like augmented reality or virtual reality. And having this sit alongside books will provide users with a complete learning journey that's multifaceted and reflects their complex and dynamic need for information.
ELIZABETH MUNN:
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Wonderful. Thanks, Elizabeth. Great. Now I think if we all want to turn on our videos, it's a chance for us to have sort of a conversation. And I will remind people who are attending this if you want to drop any questions into the Q&A, we'd love to hear from you. But I thought I'd maybe kick off our own conversation amongst ourselves with a question that kind of Stephanie laid out at the very beginning of her presentation.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: We did all see predictions that books publishing was, you know, and we're going to be seeing the death of the book. And we didn't see that come to pass. And so I'm wondering if people could share your thoughts on why do you think that was? Why did the book not die in the way it was predicted? Elizabeth, you want to start off answering that?
ELIZABETH MUNN: We're all being so polite.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I know.
ELIZABETH MUNN: We didn't want to interrupt each other. I mean, from my perspective I think they're still incredibly important use cases for a print book. And I think this idea of, and I think this is something that's come up in a few of the presentations, this idea either or is meaningless in the world of learning and knowledge expansion. There are some use cases where it is still better and most effective to have a book.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And then there's other use cases where it's better to have a digital solution because that provides the best and most effective route to learning in my case for education. So to me it's not if books will disappear, it's finding those use cases for books that are still very valid and we've never find a better solution for. But finding a way of working with the other types of digital solutions that they can co-exist with those.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Right. Thanks for that.
KEVIN GAREWAL: An interesting case study for me was Harvard, our libraries are closed but we have pick up. So I was running statistics on how many students are showing up or faculty are showing up. And how many materials are they checking out. So For the first semester we had about 230 users show up and check out 3,000 items. So just from 200 people there taking out an average of more than 10 items, and they're probably doing advanced papers or other things.
KEVIN GAREWAL: But like it just shows that the use cases. There's still a print demand, especially in these segmented areas. And many of these, we have duplicate electronic copies either through how do you HathiTrust or through an e-book license. And they're still choosy because I went through the list to see what they checked out. They want the print materials and it was really interesting.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I would like to add to that it was interesting to see in one of Elizabeth's slides the reading preferences of students. And I thought maybe this was field related because I talked about it in my own presentation, but it seems like 65% to 70% of students still prefer to learn on paper rather than on screen, which is interesting.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah, I can't recollect what the study was but there have been a few studies about information retention and the tactile sensation of an actual paper book. That is a pretty close link. But I wanted to in the last economic kind of collapse, the e-book was just becoming popular. And I see the enduring use of print books as closely aligned with access to high speed internet.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And still relatively expensive devices for reading e-books. You can drop a book in the bathtub still and you're not in a very dangerous situation.
ELIZABETH MUNN: It's very interesting though because when we did those surveys, and I'm glad that you find them insightful, you know, you're expecting certain markets where there might not be accessed at an institutional level to either the technology or stable internet connections. Those would be the countries where books would still be flourishing. But we still see enormous preprints, really, really high in the 90 percentile in Germany and Japan, hardly the bastions.
ELIZABETH MUNN: These are countries that are well known for being very technologically advanced. And this really surprised me as well, I think there's a cultural element. I mean maybe it's the tactile thing, whatever it is there's still this feeling I think about people that's very special about books that is deeply ingrained regardless of how technologically advanced that society is.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I noticed the word cloud kept growing after we stopped sharing it. But tactile came up as a word that grew after we stopped watching, which is kind of interesting. Who's got a question you'd like to pose to one of your fellow panelists?
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: I see there is a question in the Q&A if you wanted to take those.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Sure.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: There is a do you see any use of audio books for the scholarly world? Yes I do. I think that's an issue of accessibility. It's really important to have audiobook versions of textbooks and other books adapted for the classroom because students who are visually impaired or with other disabilities, it just makes the audience much larger than it is.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So yes, I do. I don't know if anyone else would like to add onto that.
ELIZABETH MUNN: I definitely think that is a big trend as well. If you look at even the success of podcasts over the past five years, audio is still incredibly popular. And I think what we need to think about is publishers though is how to make that meaningful. We could go down the Audible route of having people read them out. But I think when you're talking about scholarly publishing, there's better ways of thinking about that audio.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So I think it's got a place but I think we need to think through more about how best to augment the print experience with a compelling audio experience.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie, I wonder what your experience has been with the challenge of getting authors to publish. It if that's hard for you? Or I know when I was in my role, excuse me, I often had authors who were having to decide do I work on writing a book or do I work on writing a journal article. And that was a conversation. And I'm wondering what your perspective is.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah. Well, I mean work that we do in publishing is very collaborative with the author. And so there's often a dialogue about not only is this a journal article or is this a book? Or is it a blog? Or something, or is it a podcast? Or is it two of these things?
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: So most of the manuscripts that come to us are definitely intended and shaped as books. But the pandemic era has seen, I think, anecdotally, a number of authors really struggling with the focus required to complete a full book length manuscript. And so we're a University Press that also publishes journal articles and those submissions have gone up a little bit while our normal proposal submission has gone kind of down, it's a little slow.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Interesting. And Elizabeth, what would be your perspective on that same question?
ELIZABETH MUNN: Well. I actually think that attracting authors to write textbooks in particular it's a significant undertaking. You know, it really can be a many, many, many years of work. So that's always a really challenging thing to do. But it always amazes me how dedicated faculty are to always improving the learning process within their school.
ELIZABETH MUNN: So this is a passion for them that overcomes the time. And attracting people to write textbooks is still something that we find relatively easy to do though it is, of course, important to get the right candidates. I think where it becomes more difficult as you actually move into the world of digital solutions where I was talking about bit-sized content. So it's about creating content, small nuggets of content, that is very flexible and rich so that it can be used in lots of different formats.
ELIZABETH MUNN: And that's slightly more challenging because when people want to take that time to write, they want to write their vision, their way of thinking. And they want to be rightly credited for that. And it's very difficult in a digital platform with lots of different little pieces of content for them to know A, that they're being recognized for that work. but also to know that their work is being utilized in the way that they had envisioned it in the first place.
ELIZABETH MUNN: Got my teeth in properly.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And I just want to echo something that Stephanie said earlier. At a former position, I was tenure track and with reductions in force of faculty members. And the work and the course load increase on those faculty members. They don't have time to write like they used to and they still need to check those boxes for retention and promotion. So it's easier to fire around three or four articles than to spend three years on one monograph that in those apparatus might be one check instead of three or four checks.
KEVIN GAREWAL: And that is a real motivator. And when you're teaching three or four classes a semester, trying to get something done it's got to be near impossible.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So Kevin and Eren, I think of you as being sort of interesting pair. And if we had a third person as a student, maybe thinking about the dynamic of where a professor wants students to have easy access to the content that is on the syllabus. And the librarian sometimes helps with that and sometimes doesn't. And the students just trying to find the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to get the content.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: How do those considerations kind of play into the way you make decisions when you're either setting up a syllabus or deciding what to acquire? And what might each of you say to the other to kind of argue your perspective to the other professor or to the librarian.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Well, I've been lucky to have work with librarians who are really helpful. But still when I create new courses which deal with more contemporary phenomena which don't have any textbooks because there's no such course, so I adapt books that are not necessarily intended for academic use.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And many times these are quite prominent books with a hefty price tag on them. And what happens is that before I require these readings, I go online and see if there is a market for this. And you know eBay is a huge. It's a place where I mean most students buy used books on eBay. Or other auction or other bookstores, online bookstores, like that which--
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: I see Stephanie nodding her head and grimacing.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Yes, yes. So this is one of the main concerns when you're choosing a book for the syllabus. So either I do that. And of course with the COVID situation it was much harder because I had students who are waking up in Korea at 6: 00 AM to attend the class.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: And, you know, and when are they going to get the book? And in the past maybe they would share one book or maybe they would scan a few pages and send it to each other but that's not possible that the distance is so far. So that was a big issue. Yeah.
KEVIN GAREWAL: I think from my perspective, sort of echo Eren's experience, we call it wherever I've been, whether it's been Akron, Cleveland State, or Harvard, if we know that there is going to be a textbook that's going to be asked for, we explore all of the options to try to get it. Whether it's putting it in physical form on course reserve or exploring licensing options. I think what I've experienced is many times if we can get an e-book license, we get it, we pull the trigger on it.
KEVIN GAREWAL: Even if it costs $300 but it gives a book to 30 kids, that's a good investment from our perspective. I think what we've seen is publishers become more dialed in to even things that are in a second run. If it gets adopted by a course or a number of course, those things get pulled back into a model where we can't buy flat licenses for our campus. Or they roll out of e-book packages that come from places like EPSCO or Proquest.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So one semester they may be there for the next semester there's not. And Eren's making a reliance that it's going to be they're moving forward but it's pulled back so they can sell individual licenses. And I get it. It's like you're trying to get a profit. You have backend expenses. But then but then we're put in a position where we have to explain to academics that it was licensed content, it's not owned.
KEVIN GAREWAL: So explaining that becomes a challenge. So it it's sort of navigating my experience, we get [INAUDIBLE] with whatever we can. And we always try to do that. But there are instances where we can't. And COVID has been an experience where you're trying to do a copyright analysis on 100 pages that's asked for. Does it break copyright?
KEVIN GAREWAL: Doesn't it break copyright? Does control digital lending work? What are the criteria around controlled digital lending? So there's a myriad of these things that we've tried to tackle. And I think we've learned a lot, but there's still a lot more work to do there.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Completely agree. Yes.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: So we've got some interesting questions in the chat. A cluster of them are around expounding examples of current trends and what we think the future would lead to. And I think some of that we've touched on, but maybe if people could expand a little bit more in particular print and digital complement. How they complement each other. But then also just what else we see that might be in the future of publishing industry for books and journals.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Stephanie, Elizabeth, Eren, Kevin?
ELIZABETH MUNN: I can take this one. I mean I think about this every day. So I think it's a great question. But essentially maybe some examples of how print and digital can work together are formative assessment with remediation links back into textbooks or certain areas of textbooks. We recently also acquired a 3D anatomy company which, obviously, you know, you're talking about 3D anatomy models for medical students can replace a lot of time in the anatomy lab.
ELIZABETH MUNN: But you can't take that home with you and read it on the bus, for example. And I think students are actually a lot more sophisticated in how they think about this than we are. They know when they need different types of materials for different types of issues that they see. And they're very sophisticated about listening to a podcast and then the next minute using a book or the next minute using a 3D anatomy app.
ELIZABETH MUNN: The trick for us I think is finding links, meaningful links for them that they can take from one to the other so they work better together. I think the formative assessment one that I gave is a good example. We've started to put radiology images from our books into our anatomy app, again, linking those learning types of content together. And we're constantly thinking of new ways that we can do that fairly seamlessly to improve this overall picture for students and allow them to do better what they're already doing and that's used a whole multitude of different information sources.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: And Stephanie, I wonder what your thoughts are about when you're looking at monographs or deciding which monographs to publish. To what extent are you thinking about how they could be used in the classroom? Or to what extent are you kind of give the authors coaching or editorial input to try to make it more useful in a classroom?
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Yeah. So Wayne is a little bit of a boutique among University presses in kind of the ways that we work with our general interest consumer market. And the scholarly areas in which we specialize particularly Jewish studies and fairytale studies. So there's a lot of crossover in terms of those audiences.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: And we have not particularly done any work to kind of shape those monographs around classroom use because usually they're covering unique topics. I mean they're true monographs. I'm aware that it is something that, particularly in looking at hybrid modes, with their books that there's a lot of content that would better serve the classroom if it were kind of reshaped in some ways.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Thanks. And then Eren, really quickly, I'm just curious as you're the person who is looking at monographs and deciding whether or not you're going to include them in a classroom as they're just really quickly certainly things that you're looking for that make you decide, yes, I'm going to require it? Or no I'm it's too narrow or something?
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Well, yeah. I probably wouldn't ever say that a book is too narrow compared to assigning several journal articles. But the thing that we have in our writing habits in the Western academic sphere is that, especially with journal articles, you get to the point fast. You know, catch the attention of the audience in the first two paragraphs, and then you expound on the data.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: But the thing with I think students have with books they have an easier time digesting the data because the advantage of books is that you can have a much larger introduction, much larger discussion. So the interpretations and the variety of contrasting interpretations other than the author's own is more reflective. It's reflected more in books.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So if we have that kind of thing, more discussion and interpretation of data in the book so that's better for the students. And the other thing is what Elizabeth was saying about bit size, I mean of course, you're not going to have bite size nuggets of information in a book. But what you can have is more compartmentalized and thinking about indexing things and how the content is it's just about form basically what the form of the book is.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: So I think that can, not the content, but just how things are compartmentalized in a book can make or break the use or in the classroom.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Great. Well, thank you so much. Thanks so much to everybody, all of our presenters. I'm sharing the screen again to show the word cloud because I thought people might be interested to see how it has evolved. And we do see a few more critical, sometimes poorly written, slow, so some of the more balanced look. I think Jeff or Mary Beth, could you-- why don't you do just a little question back to you who are attending this to ask you, yourselves, to give us your thoughts on this question.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Does anyone read books anymore? And if you can do a quick vote, it's hopefully popping right up on your screen, we would love to hear your thoughts. And then, yeah, thank you very much. I think Jeff, you're going to wrap us up. I have to stop sharing my screen.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Sorry I. Hold on, I'm sorry, I can't stop sharing my screen.
JEFF LANG: While you're looking for that I just wanted to start by saying thank you to Shirley and to Kevin, Eren, Stephanie, and Elizabeth for leaving this really interesting discussion today. And thanks to everybody else for attending the webinar as well and for bringing your questions. Once again, please do take time to respond to the webinar evaluation that you'll receive over email. Your feedback really helps us to continually improve this program.
JEFF LANG: And please join us in about two weeks for ask the experts trust in science. And the next SSP webinar, which will be our Scholarly Kitchen webinar on Wednesday April 21. You can check out the website for other updates about what's going on around SSP and other education opportunities and with that we are concluded for the day. Thank you all for attending.
SHIRLEY DECKER-LUCKE: Thanks, everybody.
STEPHANIE WILLIAMS: Thank you everyone.
EREN GUMRUKCUOGLU: Thank you.
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Form Title Accessibility and Keyboard Shortcuts
The cadmore media player is a professional video and audio player experience designed to deliver media as well as relevant transcript, segmentation, and metadata. On the screen is a traditional html video player with buttons such as play, pause, forward, captioning, language and play speed selection and more. Adjacent to the video player are generally tabs, one of which shows a scrolling transcript of the video and the other shows any segmentation of the media, sometimes referred to as chapters. At the top of the video is a menu bar containing an Explore button and Tools button. The Explore button allows you to dig deeper into the video by opening up an explore dialog which contains tabs for a visual navigation of the video using thumbnails, an about tab which contains rich metadata about the media, a segments tab which contains further information about the video, and a related tab which contains links to other media related to this media. The tools button opens a menu with options for sharing the media on social media, creating bookmarking links, creating embed codes for your website, generating citations, and more.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts only work while you are in forms mode. By entering forms mode, you will be able to quickly access portions of the media player with single key commands.
Spacebar: Play/Pause Toggle
I: Info Menu,
O: Tools Menu
T: Transcript Tab,
S: Segments Tab
F: Forward 15,
R: Rewind 15
L: Languages,
P: Playspeed
M: Mute Toggle,
V: Volume Bar
N: Video Only Toggle,
B: Full Screen Toggle
C: Captions Toggle
Escape: Closes dialogs and menus / Exits Player
Z: Next Transcript Chapter
X: Previous Transcript Chapter
Q: Next Transcript Paragraph
W: Previous Transcript Paragraph
Entire Media
Segment(s)
Custom Clip
Start At:
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Embed Size
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You Size - Responsive
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We Size - Responsive
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Picture Overlay Popup
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400 x 225
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512 x 288
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400 x 700
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768 x 1024
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1024 x 512
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1280 x 608
Form Title Cite
No citation provided.
Info
Segments
Related
Thumbnails
Exit Clip Mode
You have requested to see a portion of the video outside of the clip.
Click OK to switch to the full video or click if you would like to stay inside the clip. You can always go back to the clip with Tools and Clip Mode