McGraw-Hill Education Announces Digital Initiative

Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/16/2009 8:04:00 AM

McGraw-Hill Education today announced the creation of its Center for Digital Innovation, a research and development center that will focus on bringing technology to elementary and secondary classrooms. The Center will be led by McGraw-Hill Education’s team of former teachers, engineers and software developers.

The Center, in Bothell, Wash., is developing digital platforms that are customized by state standards, district requirements, and individual teacher and student needs. The Center’s digital platforms will allow teachers to quickly assess a student’s proficiency level, so that teachers can alter their instruction based on the needs of each student. Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving.

Programs will address literacy, mathematics and science. Today, the Center launched two new products that will be available in August for the new school year: CINCH Project, a collection of Web 2.0 tools for collaborative learning projects, with a community-based Web site where teachers and students create digital profiles and participate in group activities; and Planet Turtle, a K-3 social network where children can interact with their peers by developing online animal-based character avatars and completing learning “challenges” that progress as their skills improve.

While college publishers are rapidly moving into digital publishing, there has been less activity at the elhi level, something MHE hopes to address with the Center. Terry McGraw, chairman, president and CEO of the McGraw-Hill Companies, said, “Our programs will be the first to create offerings based on how students use technology to bridge the gap between digital socialization and digital learning. This will help teachers, parents and students to unite around the goals of fostering growth and development; creating richer, more involved methods of learning; and more effectively addressing issues that arise.”

Books Unbound

(Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009, By Lev Grossman)

Here's a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn't get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn't get an agent. "I did what you're supposed to do," she says. "I queried literary agents. I went to writers' conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it." So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.

That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5. "So this is extreme to extreme, right?" Genova says. "This time last year, I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car."

Something has changed, and it's not just the contents of Lisa Genova's trunk. We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades."

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn't dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it's done. Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

What's the Matter with Publishing?

It isn't the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

The economy, obviously. Plenty of businesses are hurting. And it doesn't help that new media like video games (sales up 19% in 2008!) are now competing with books for our entertainment hours and dollars. But publishing has deeper, more systemic problems, like the fact that its business model evolved during an earlier fiscal era. It's an antique, a financial coelacanth that dates back to the Depression.

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn't "earn out," in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost. Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

And speaking of advances, books are also leaving behind another kind of paper: money. Those cell-phone novels are generally written by amateurs and posted on free community websites, by the hundreds of thousands, with no expectation of payment. For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They're circulating outside the economy that spawned them.

Cell-phone novels haven't caught on in the U.S.--yet--but we have something analogous: fan fiction, fan-written stories based on fictional worlds and characters borrowed from popular culture--Star Trek, Jane Austen, Twilight, you name it. There's a staggering amount of it online, enough to qualify it as a literary form in its own right. Fanfiction.net hosts 386,490 short stories, novels and novellas in its Harry Potter section alone.

No printing and shipping. No advances. Maybe publishing will survive after all! Then again, if you can have publishing without paper and without money, why not publishing without publishers?

Vanity of Vanities, All Is Vanity

When Genova had reached the end of her unsuccessful search, she told the last literary agent who rejected her, "I've had enough of this. I'm going to go self-publish it." "That was by e-mail," she says. "He picked up the phone and called me within five minutes and said, 'Don't do that. You will kill your writing career before it starts.'"

It's true: saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has become practically respectable. As the technical challenges have decreased--you can turn a Word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon's Kindle store in about five minutes--so has the stigma. Giga-selling fantasist Christopher Paolini started as a self-published author. After Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007, William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two-book deal worth $2 million. The fact that William P. Young's The Shack was initially self-published hasn't stopped it from spending 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Daniel Suarez, a software consultant in Los Angeles, sent his techno-thriller Daemon to 48 literary agents. No go. So he self-published instead. Bit by bit, bloggers got behind Daemon. Eventually Penguin noticed and bought it and a sequel for a sum in the high six figures. "I really see a future in doing that," Suarez says, "where agencies would monitor the performance of self-published books, in a sort of Darwinian selection process, and see what bubbles to the surface. I think of it as crowd-sourcing the manuscript-submission process."

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But Genova and Barry and Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

The Orchard and the Jungle

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

Not that Old Publishing will disappear--for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive--but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid. If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.

Q&A With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader

(Mac Slocum, November 26, 2008)

We've covered iPhone-based e-readers in the past, but the Classics application offers a few twists: it's not free, and the app's book content is updated along with the software itself. Classics co-creator Phill Ryu discusses the application's design and development in the following Q&A.

Why did you develop a book-centric application?

When we started comparing the iPhone to the Kindle, it was immediately clear to us that we could take advantage of the iPhone's brilliant color screen and touch capabilities to create a reading experience that would stand out from the crowd, so it began as a very, very tempting challenge almost, and eventually turned into a months-long passion project.

How many books do you offer?

We're currently offering a dozen books. They're handpicked favorites of ours, but we'll be adding more with free updates to the app.

Are these books all in the public domain?

Yeah, they are public domain. At the start, [co-creator Andrew] Kaz and I thought we could really do something radical in terms of the digital reading experience, but we couldn't start working with publishers based on the strength of some cool interface ideas, so we settled with the "Classics" name and created this as essentially the first prototype of our reading engine.

Did you consider releasing this application for free?

Yes, for a moment. Then someone knocked on my apartment door and slipped in a rent payment notice letter. The reality of the situation was, we had gone basically broke over the summer working on a pretty cool desktop app, and had to halt development on that until we could find some income. At that point, we came up with the brilliant plan to develop an iPhone app in a few weeks to generate some income, to continue the aforementioned desktop app. Classics of course ended up turning into a serious passion project lasting months of development time, and we went extra broke due to it, so going free was hardly an option. We're rather painfully aware that free apps tend to gather something like 25-50 times the downloads of similarly charting paid apps, and we'd like to reach that audience someday, but most likely it'll be with a spinoff app, and not with Classics.

Are you still developing the desktop app? Does this app also focus on books/content?

I really can't (and shouldn't) talk details, because the app might never fly depending on how talks with some content publishers go, but no, it's not book related.

You're using Apple's built-in software update process to load new books into the application. How did you come up with this idea?

For a variety of reasons. One thing that drove us toward this was gentle but insistent prodding from Apple throughout the dev process to stay away from selling books through our app. We'll be transitioning to server-hosted books later on though, once the collection has grown further.

Did Apple explicitly guide you away from selling books?

They guided us away from selling books directly through our app, which is against the terms for iPhone developers. We're hoping we can figure out an elegant workaround that they are fine with, but I want to stress that overall, they've been very supportive of this app, and have even been showing it off in the ongoing iPhone tech talks around the world.

How often will books be added?

I would expect to see several new books with each app update, the first of which should come later this month or so.

Will updates be free?

Yes. The app may become more expensive later on as it matures, but updates will remain free for all existing customers.

Since the books update along with the software, will users be able to keep/archive titles previously loaded into the application?

We have no plans to remove any books we release. Once the library size becomes prohibitive, we are planning to shift to server hosted books.

Apple requires applications to be under 10MB for download over cellular connections. Does this restriction limit the total number of books you can make available through Classics?

Not really, in that we are already pushing 20MB. We're hoping that we can eventually transition to server-hosted books while retaining the user experience though.

How many people were involved in the development of Classics?

Beyond Kaz and I, there were four designers who helped with various parts of the app (including the cover art, interface, and even processing illustrations for the books), as well as a friend and Web programmer who helped us create some in-house tools for correcting and formatting these books.

The Classics bookshelf interface has a unique look. How much effort went into this design?

Probably more than most people would think! The bookshelf interface for book management was inspired by Delicious Library's visual shelves (an app that Kaz worked on when he was 14). So starting from there, we worked with David Lanham on realizing our own flavor of bookshelf, and slowly refined the look over the next couple months, experimenting with various levels of decoration, tints, etc.

Of course, the other half of the bookshelf view are the custom book covers. As I mentioned before, Classics ended up being a passion project for all of us, and the designers really went overboard with the covers. (In a good way.) We started with the idea of procedurally generating each leatherbound book cover with different colors, sizes and such, with a unique "cover image" for each book designed to look like they were embossed on this set of leatherbound novels. Unfortunately, this ended up looking extremely bland. So after literally weeks of going back and forth on this with Dan Goffin, who was drawing concept art for book covers from the start, we settled on a much more colorful, and less restrictive style of fully illustrated covers.

I think this is the point where it gets a bit crazy. At this point, the concept books were looking much nicer, but we began to feel that the slightly simplified style made them look more like icons than real books. They looked a little fake. So the designers ended up illustrating these in high res, as if they were real books. The user for now actually never sees the vast majority of the detailing, but I think this level of detail adds a really unique level of polish to the app.

Will you port Classics to other systems, such as Android?

We haven't even investigated Android at all yet, but it's certainly a possibility. For now though, this remains an app we just personally really wanted on our iPhones!

Have you used/seen some of the other book-based iPhone applications? What's your impression of these?

Yes. And I feel like you are leading me on a bit with this question, but I'll take the bait and bite. I've tried a bunch of the other book apps out there, and frankly, the overall quality of these apps (in particular the "one-offs") horrified us, and only further motivated us to go full out with Classics. The only other book app out there worth picking up is Stanza.

How many copies of Classics have you sold? Have book publishers or others approached you about including their material in the app?

We've sold over 20,000 copies so far, though there hasn't been so much in terms of profit yet due to our initial investment in the app. We're optimistic though, and we're hoping some leads work out with publishers. There are publishers who want to work with us and sell books on the store, but the main issue for now is that there aren't many viable options for them besides selling one-off book apps, which is not ideal. If there's a nice way to do this though, we'll find it.

How Interactive?

We all know that social media has taken off like mad and it's here to stay; now it's just a matter of what will Social Media 2.0--or 3.0--entail. We've seen how social media can affect consumer purchases (my previous post on Twitter) and NYU did a talk on how social media affected the election.

Then there's interactive media, like the Kindle and interactive websites, which as of now are not social. But as Marketwire announced today, Wetpaint is going to enable users to add social content to most websites. They predict:

"The next explosive growth phase of the web will come as every website on the planet transitions to become socially published, with user-generated content existing alongside professionally authored content," said Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint. "With the power of the Wetpaint platform now embeddable for every website publisher and operator, Wetpaint will power the massive transformation of solitary sites into social sites."

Up until now, the answer to all content questions seemed to be either "xml" or "cms." While both of these will allow publishers to reuse content simultaneously and on different platforms, this only deals with the "professionally authored content" referred to above. How will publishers be able to integrate user-generated content into their workflow?

Will user-generated content be pre-vetted, and if so, by whom and with what standards? Will this be copyedited/proofread, or just published as is? Who will own the copyright for this content?

Obviously having all publishing and media become interactive and social will lead to many questions and changes, many more questions than I have mentioned here. How do you think publishers will or should deal with interactive media?

Bringing Social Media to Books

Social media is here to stay. It's so powerful, that Google is looking to get a piece of it with its soon to be launched Google Friends Connect. This will allow people to easily add social media elements to their websites to attract more traffic.

At the BISG conference I wrote about earlier, HarperCollins exec Carolyn Pittis explained how they've helped their authors set up their own websites, and how that and their "search inside" features have increased their website traffic.

So how do we bring more of this social media and marketing to the book world? I don't pretend to be a marketing expert, but one idea that came to mind was to have scheduled chats or discussion forums on the author websites a week after a new book is released. With the author involvement at a scheduled "event", readers would more likely get the book sooner and have it read in time to participate in the discussion. Authors, and publishers too, can also have more social media features on their websites to get visitors more involved and therefore more likely to return and/or stay a while.

If you are in marketing and have attempted this or something similar, please share.

Twitter and Online Branding

Twitter is all about users answering one question: What are you doing now?

I had heard about if for a while, but wasn't tempted since Facebook status updates kept me and my friends plenty informed. Then today I read an article about protecting your online brand and it suggested registering your name on several social media sites, including Twitter.

So off I went into the heretofore unchartered: Twitter, Technorati, WordPress, MyBlogLog. I found all of these interesting but nothing special.

Then tonight I saw this on one of my Google alerts:

What's more stereotypically trivial than shoe shopping? Using Twitter, of course! Online shoe retailer Zappos does shoes and social media remarkably well. Scores of bloggers, lots of video blogging and 198 employees on Twitter help keep the company's profile high and humanize the folks behind the shoe sales.

Of all the different types of social media the company uses, none are as interesting as its use of Twitter. Twitter may sound cliche, but it's not just about Twitter as one single service. Twitter is symbolic of rapid, short, synchronous and public conversations. Zappos has bitten off a big chunk of that paradigm.

This article illuminates exactly how powerful social media can be and to what extent Twitter and the others can influence not only where we spend our time, but also where we spend our money.

Social Media

Social media is no longer for the teenyboppers alone. Whether you're looking to find a new job, network, advertise, or just reconnect with friends, it's all about social media. This topic came up at the Book Business Conference last month and apparently it was discussed at the London Book Fair as well, as posted on Publishing Talk. And Jon Reed makes an interesting point: social media can be the equalizer for the small publishers, if they only dare embrace it.

I think social media also allows new writers to gain publicity without much cost. I'm on both Facebook and GoodReads, and I've been contacted on both by new writers. Blogs can also help both the writer and the small house gain presence...and get readers to feel vested by allowing them to connect and comment.

I guess, if you think of it, fanfic and TV-based forums were the precursors to this. What do you think is next?

Until next time...which unfortunately won't be before Tuesday.