If you’ve been watching, you’ll know that EPUB 3.0 is here, the new specification for the world’s leading ebook format. The IDPF, which oversees the EPUB 3.0 spec, has announced the open-source Readium Project to get it implemented more quickly.
And goodness knows it needs acceleration. Under EPUB 2.0, even market leaders took their time implementing support for basic features.
Yay, right? Depends who you are. Continue reading
A recent discussion on the mHealth Working Group mailing list mentioned four organisations working in the area of healthcare education on smartphones and tablets. They look really interesting. Continue reading
In less than a decade MTN has taken 40% market share in Nigeria largely as a result of letting informal entrepreneurs resell its products. In a fascinating article on How We Made It In Africa, Robert Neuwirth describes how they did it. Continue reading
A massive shift has taken place in South African schoolbook publishing in the last month. We can’t predict the effects it will have, but they will be significant. The Department of Basic Education has printed open-licensed science and maths textbooks for every grade 10 learner in the country, and will follow up with grades 11 and 12 soon. I’ve heard estimates that this is around two [update: two-and-a-half] million textbooks in each grade.
Until now, textbooks have been procured by commercial means, almost all developed by commercial publishing houses. While for many years government has toyed with the idea of producing textbooks centrally, for good reasons (and not a little lobbying by the publishers’ association) it has never been done. But when offered a good, open-licensed textbook written by volunteers and developed by Siyavula (a Shuttleworth Foundation project), the DBE decided that printing and distributing these to schools countrywide could be a key part of improving science and maths education in South Africa. Continue reading
Publishers are having to take in a lot right now. They’re told to act like software businesses, innovate like startups, think like the music industry, learn from railroad and car companies, reskill, upskill, change suppliers, build distributed workflows, and reinvent their content models and revenue streams. And as they get more and more overwhelmed by all this pressure, a kind of paralysis can set in. Or an expensive kind of writhing in quicksand.
Stop a second. Publishers have wicked entrepreneurial skills. Perhaps they know everything they need to know already, and just need to recognise it. Continue reading