Metamedia

The Privacy Tax

Erik Larson's 1992 book The Naked Consumer is one of the great classics of the the age of info slavery.

In it, Larson gives a disturbing view into the manner in which corporations are profiling your most personal information in order to leverage the techniques of applied psychology to get you to buy more and, especially, to buy specifically.

That was almost twenty years ago.

Yet, one of the basic techniques for information extraction not only remains but has grown: the "discount club" or "members only" card.

You sign up for it, give them lots of information about yourself, including information on every single purchase from them - and any company to which they wish to sell that information - you will ever make, and in return, you get a slight discount on future purchases.

This is fundamentally a privacy tax - if you give them your personal information and allow them to create a complete record of everything you ever buy from them - then, what is it worth?

They calculate to the penny what it is worth to them and then offer you less - far less - to entice you to buy.

Whatever it is worth, the rest of us, who insist on our privacy rights, pay for it. You get the cheap rate and we pay full price - that's the privacy tax.

It's a classic case of pitting one servant against another.

Want to be exploited and at the same time exploit others?

Just scan the bar code.

What Would Aragorn Do?

[UPDATE: Next day, I took the book back and after some phone calls, they found a good copy at another store & I went and picked it up. But the staff at both stores all had to come and look at the defective (or, in book trade speak, "damaged") book -- they all seemed to appreciate the irony of the low quality control by Houghton Mifflin for the most expensive special edition ever made of this book.]

Here's a short video I just made about a problem I had with an analog information source, aka, a "book."  Books, almost by definition, having bindings. How to put bindings on them is a well known technology, going back at least 500 years.

But apparently Houghton Mifflin can't do it right: they have bound this special edition real leather bound, gold double gilt edge, special 50th anniversary slipcase edition backwards. Idiots.

Oh, this video has pretty bad sound. I  made this video with a Flip Camera and uploaded directly to YouTube (usually I put them into a video editor and clean them up.)

Bad sound huh? I could take the time to convert it in a editor and fix it by hand. But why should I waste more time doing that -- isn't the Flip software supposed to work right?

Kipple.

Open Textbook Progress

I've written before about the issue of textbooks, specifically their high prices and how colleges and textbook publishers collude to keep them high.

Textbook prices are an issue almost as important as the so-called "digital divide."  The average US college student spends $900 a year on textbooks, or $3,600 over four years of college. That's twice the cost of a very good computer: lowering exorbitant textbook costs makes personal computers affordable for students who otherwise might not be able to afford them. This is especially important at community colleges.

I am glad to report that there is progress on this front, not just on the Harvard level, but at the Community College level as well: The Foothill-De Anza Community College District in California is launching an Open TextBook Project to provide free digital textbooks to all its students to replace traditional textbooks -- not just for its own students either, but for any student anywhere.

The project is being done in concert with the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) as well as others, including a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

This is good news for students everywhere, unless of course they were planning on working for an exploitive textbook publisher.

Spellings Sees Little She Can Do About Textbook Costs

Link: Spellings Sees Little She Can Do About Textbook Costs - Chronicle.com.

Students struggling with the high price of college textbooks should not expect a lot of help from the federal government.

That was the message today from U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings...

Really?

I guess she has neglected to read the report that came out last June from the The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent Federal panel that advises Congress.

They had a pretty good solution for the Federal Government back then: creating a digital repository of all texts online and make them cheap. Harvard is doing something about it.

Of course, that was before the recession and election year. After all, students don't vote, do they? 

Do students spend more per year on textbooks than they donate to political campaigns or other causes? Nine hundred dollars a year is a lot of political clout.

National Novel Writing Month Starts

Link: National Novel Writing Month

Don't know how I could have forgotten this one, but yesterday was the start of National Novel Writing Month. Sounds fun. One of my best friends is a writer and has done it several times.

I once wrote a screenplay in a month, mostly to learn more about how to do film structure analysis. But I never thought the great American novel (or any novel at all) was in me.

But with NaNoWeriMo (as it is acronymized) you are part of much larger community of writers, and gain support from them online that you would never be able to do in person the old fashioned analog way. Despite the logo with the pencil, I imagine the vast majority of this month's novels will be done digitally.

This is the test of poetry.

Reading Hans Ostrom's poems the second time, one wants to read them a third time and more. This is the test of poetry, after which no other test applies.

Karl Shapiro

Yes, that is the test of written poetry. What would be corresponding test for oral poetry?

Speaking of poetry, what happened to the public role of poetry ? An interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman asks and attempts to answer this:

Chances are, you don't read much poetry, at least not the new stuff. Don't feel bad, hardly anybody does ... In the hierarchy of cultural pursuits it sits somewhere just below classical music and just above clogging.

If poetry is dead, who killed it?

For almost everyone, it would appear, the test of poetry might simply be that it is read at all (outside of a college homework assignment.) Its place has primarily been usurped by popular song, from the highbrow "standards" of the 1920s and 30s, to Bob "Zimmerman" Dylan, to Billy Corgan, published poet.

And further, of course, reading poetry was the canary in the coal mine of the Literate way. All the signs were there. The recent angst over the demise of newspaper book reviews had its precursors as it will have its excelerating successors.

The culture of Typographical Literacy is in decline, permanent decline.

Already, the few remaining natives of that culture (i.e. those raised without television) are just as rare as the natives of true Oral cultures, and their children and children's children will slowly lose the influence of that way.

But it does not mean reading and writing will disappear, any more than the eclipse of Oral cultures by writing meant the end of speaking and hearing.

But it will be transformed fundamentally. In a hundred years, it will make just as much sense to talk about "residual literacy" as it does now to speak of "residual orality."

The Camel Book Drive

Link: Rocketboom June 13 2007: Camel Book Drive video

A terrific story from Rocketboom about the old fashioned way of spreading Literacy: distributing books by camel in Kenya.

This is how it was for us Euro-descendants too, before the advent of mass reproduction of cheap books, and especially before the Typographic revolution.

Notice how 80% of the people reached by the Camel Book Drive program can not read, so the emphasis is on reaching children who will then grow up reading.  After all, in most villages for most of literate history, only a privileged few could read, and as such, usually read aloud to groups.

(There is a great depiction of this in one of the episodes at the beginning of  Pasolini's film version of The Decameron, where an old man is reading from a book to a large group gathered around him.)

Of course, digital books won't work - yet - in such a situation. Computers are still physical objects and so are the wires needed for access.

So if Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia wants to get a free encyclopedia into the hands of every person on the planet, it means those camels will get a lightened burden, but what will they carrying into that village? Fossil fuel generators ? PCs ? Fiber ? Uplinks ?

I hope he is talking to Iqbal Qadir, but I hope they are both learning from the Appropriate Technology model. Otherwise, all we are doing it plugging them into the cult of consuming Big Science / Big Technology.

Sometimes, camels are the most appropriate technology.

Books, too.

The Serendip's Tale

Tonight I was at my local Goodwill store searching for some unnecessary plastic objects, and lo and behold in the book section I found a copy of Benson's third edition of The Riverside Chaucer. 

With no markings on it, only the first few dozen pages watermarked about the edges, it cost only $2.99. That's a 97% discount.

Sweet!

Even better, while perusing it over dinner at my local bachelor burrito place, I found this fascinating item in the preface explaining why the information in the notes of the various editions had changed over time:

The First Edition, published in 1933, had provided magisterial surveys of scholarship and criticism, including almost everything worthy of note that had been written on each subject.  By 1957, when the Second Edition appeared ... such comprehension treatments were no longer possible...

Benson then has to admit that this third edition of 1987 can only supply

the information needed to begin the study of the work and to provide references for further investigation.

Such is the evidence of the growth of information overload in a fifty year span during the mid twentieth century: a single book on one of the major authors of English literature could once contain a comprehensive survey of the scholarship on it, but no longer.

Now it is the gateway to that land, not the whole land.

And this is the result not of finding new major works or giant breakthroughs in scholarship about this author, but rather the growth of scholarship paralleled by the growth in information sharing during this time.

I used to introduce my students to Chaucer, right after reading something ribald from The Decameron, in my integrated Humanities classes. I  would always begin, before ever telling them what we were about to read, by first playing a couple of recitations and asking simply

• what language is this?
• and is it the same as this?

$tudent Textbook$ ... Told Ya So

and for all the reasons I mentioned in my post about my own experiences with textbooks.

Link: The Chronicle: Daily news: 06/06/2007 -- 05: At Hearing, Experts Cast Doubt on Feasibility of Federal Panel's Solution to High Textbook Costs.

The panelists at the hearing represented publishers, bookstores, colleges, and students. [...] But the panelists expressed varying degrees of skepticism about how feasible a comprehensive, effective tool like the national digital marketplace really was.

Notice who "the experts" are: exactly those whose way of doing business, which pressures faculty and exploits students, will be outmoded by a better more customer focused way which helps both faculty and students.

But even more fascinating is this attitude expressed by John Sargent, chief executive of Holtzbrinck Publishers:

And the philosophy behind the digital marketplace equates learning materials with basic commodities, which is unfair, he said.

Unfair ? Unfair to whom ?

Unfair to those who don't share the assumption that learning materials are and should be a basic commodity available to every human who wants to learn ?

Unfair to those who don't share America's fundamental commitment to an educated citizenhood and its two centuries old project of universal public education ?

Unfair to those who don't share the goal of education as a universal human right ? cf. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 26.1:

Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.

So, yes, learning materials are and ought to be basic commodities available widely and cheaply to anyone who wants to learn; just like any other basic commodity.

And the Net is helping to make that happen.

Like the traditional library (and record and video companies), bookstores are designed to deal with physical objects. 

And college bookstores are designed to deal with those physical objects only in the captive market of a protected monopoly.

Once, that may have been a good way -- in a world of scarce information, relatively costly physical object manufacturing processes, and an educated elite. But that world is gone, gone the way of the buggywhip.

I'd sure like to help make the exploitive college textbook business the best damn buggywhip ever.

Been There, Done That: My Digital Based Textbook Tale

Link: The Chronicle: Daily news: 06/01/2007 -- 03: Federal Panel Proposes Long-Term Solution to 'Broken' Textbook Market.

Today there's an interesting article in the Chronicle on a new report on how to fix "the textbook problem."

It's from The Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, an independent panel that advises Congress, which

proposes the creation of a "national digital marketplace" that would allow instructors to select and students to buy custom-designed texts -- a chapter from one book, a case study from another -- while protecting fair-use allowances and publishers' copyrights.

Great, but that it not news. I've been there and done that.

I used custom designed on demand published textbooks for five years while teaching at a community college. 

And, this approach worked great for students. But I got nothing but opposition from the college. 

Why?  Just follow the money.

There's been a lot of news lately about the problems with the student loan business. I say it's about time we aired out that other stinky stack of higher education dirty linen: the student-textbook-to-pocketbook game.

Here's My Story

For five years I did exactly what the panel recommends.

I started in Spring 2000, through a program from one of the big textbook publishers that allowed me to chose chapters and readings from dozens of their textbooks, all online via the web. The custom book was then published and ordered just like any other book. But it was my selection, just for my class.

And, since it has a set price per page, I knew exactly what it would cost my students. My goal was to keep every book I assigned under $20 and as close to $10 as I could.  And this was the perfect way to have the content I wanted at a very reasonable price.

The selection I had to choose from was not great, but it was more than adequate, and it was getting better every term. I could choose available articles from any discipline.

Also, it was a real book, not a course packet. It was bound, had a cover, and each version I made had its own ISBN number.

So instead of a 500 page mammoth Introduction to Philosophy or Ethics textbook, costing $50 to $80, of which I would only have them read 15% maybe 20% over a standard 10 week course, I had a slim 60 to 75  page custom reader, all of which we would read, and it cost only $9 dollars. Well, nine dollars before the bookstore markup pushed it to $12.

Aye, there's the rub: The college bookstore HATED me for using a custom published digital based book.

After all, from their point of view I was taking money out of their pockets not just once, not twice, but three times:

• Once: by having a cheap book to start with which lowered their cut because it was percentage based. The overhead is the same for ordering and stocking a ten dollar book as an eighty dollar book, but not the profit.

• Twice:  by having fewer buybacks. Since I often taught classes in alternating quarters (Fall-Spring,  Winter-Summer quarters), the bookstore would not buy back used copies from my students, since the course wasn't being taught immediately in the next term. So they were bereft of the traditional pennies-on-the-dollar buy back profits (low as they were already.) (Also, because we read the whole book, some students would mark up the whole book, lowering its resale value, whereas marking up the same 60 pages in a 500 page book doesn't look so bad.)

• Thrice: Its resale value was nil. They couldn't resell the copies to any other college bookstore, because, after all, no other course in the country would have exactly those readings. That's one of the prices of customization: no resale value.
  

Page Too

One of the great benefits of a custom online constructed reader is I could take out an article or add an article or two from class to class, and not have to worry about some arbitrary textbook author, editor, or publisher decision to delete one of the article I depended on.

(In fact, that was one of the main reasons I completely gave up standard textbooks altogether: after creating curriculum for a course based a set of readings in a the third edition of a textbook, only to find that five of those seven readings disappeared in the fourth edition; that was the final straw, er, textbook, for me.)

But to the bookstore, God forbid I change one reading -- why, that means creating a whole new book, a whole new ISBN, and a whole 'nother round of bookstore complaints. When first using the service, lots of new texts became available to choose from, so I had the opportunity to perfect my custom reader term by term, but...

Before long, I was pressured to stop using the custom book, subtly by my department chairman, and not so subtly by higher ups.

I was reminded that, technically, as an adjunct (though teaching a full time load), the full time faculty in my discipline could proscribe a required textbook and syllabus for my courses: an adjunct's ability to choose a textbook was a "privilege not a right."

The contract said so. It also said all curricular materials whatsoever had to be purchased through the college bookstore, just in case you were wondering. 

I got the message.

I stopped tweaking the custom readers every term, and used the same ones for the next three years. If I needed an extra article or two for a class, I just copied them and handed them out in class myself. 

Don't ask, don't tell. Welcome to HigherEd, Inc.

Even so, several times my custom textbooks starting having "publishing delays" -- as the bookstore politely put it -- and after the first year, they rarely if ever showed up before classes started. That wasn't the publisher's fault. 

I knew I would always start the term with the same speech about late books and adjusted my syllabus accordingly. One term, the bookstore didn't even bother to order them all: the same one I used in the same class for three years? 

And In the End...

After a couple of years of experimentation (including with copyright.com), I arrived at a happy solution of pairing inexpensive mass market paperbacks (e.g. Gaarder's Sophie's World, the Oxford Press Very Short Introduction series) with a custom published reader. 

As a result, the text book costs for most of my classes were under $30; for my intro class, as low as $12 used. And that savings meant a lot to some of those students. For some of them, a couple hundred dollars saved on textbooks meant they could pay rent.

Despite the opposition I received, I'm glad I did what I did to help my students. And I know they appreciated it, because many of them told me so.  But the college did not.

So, while I predict problems with implementing the Advisory Panel recommendations from the entrenched monetary interests, still it is a great start and a great recommendation for the inevitable way of doing thing. (How ironic one of its congressional authors is from the state where I taught.)

My own personal experience as a pioneer in the classroom taught me it works.

And my recommendation today as an Instructional Technologist to faculty is you can make it work too.

A large scale federated repository of copyright cleared and creative commons copyright texts in digital format that can be on demand custom printed (or even better SCORMed into a LMS) is the way to go.

After all, what are colleges for ?  To educate people or to sell books?