digscholbook
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The Digital Scholar – ebook file
I’ve been doing some writing on revisiting my 2011 book The Digital Scholar. I’ve also got a couple of presentations planned around it. But on checking I note that the imprint of Bloomsbury that published it, Bloomsbury Academic, is no longer functioning and the titles have been rolled into the main Bloomsbury catalogue. My previous links to the free version don’t work any more, and you have to dig pretty hard to find the free version on their site. I think open access publishing was something they experimented with when Frances Pinter was there, but now she has moved on to Knowledge Unlatched, they’ve quietly abandoned it. Of course, the…
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It’s kinda personal
Jim Groom and Tim Owens have been running a Domain of One's Own project at UMW. And to my delight they've kicked it off with a staff development program based around reading my book. I think all universities should do this! You can see some of the posts here. As the author it's been very interesting to see some of the reactions from what I guess are atypical readers. I think most of the people who read my book are kind of interested in the subject, so there's an element of preaching to the converted (although I try not to do any preaching). But with Jim's faculty I guess they're…
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Digital scholar book launch
For those of you who found something better to do yesterday afternoon (I can't imagine what that could be), here the webcast of my book launch can be found here. The event seemed to go ok, although I fear I was a bit rambling, and didn't really do the elevator pitch thing for the book. John Naughton said some very kind words, and then we had a good discussion with the audience and wider twitter participants. And below is my Prezi, which I still don't think I've got the hang of – I just don't think I'm a visual kinda guy. Digital Scholar – book launch on Prezi
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A digital scholar is…
Just a quick post as a reminder that my book launch is next Tuesday, 15th at 3pm – it is being streamed live and we'll be hoping for some twitter contributions. We have a prize of a signed (or, even better, unsigned) copy of the book, which we've simplified. Just do a tweet completing the sentence 'A digital scholar is…' and tag it #digitalscholar and I'll pick one winner on the day. I've been doing some Despair.Inc posters for my talk on the day, so thought I'd share this one:
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A simple open vs closed tale
Science in the Sands reports how a US Professor, Dianne O'Leary, wrote to the publisher, Springer, asking for a PDF of her own paper. They refused and as her university doesn't subscribe to the journal, because it is prohibitively expensive, she couldn't get a final copy of her own article. A later update reveals that, she could get the copy, but you have to ask the right person. This is something I have often encountered – getting the definitive copy, as quite often the last version you hold on your machine is not one that has been through final edits. So even when she could get the copy, it took…
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Book launch – YOU are invited
<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/bayasaa/2693171833/> The good people at IET have offered to do a launch of my book, and Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Rebecca Ferguson have done a great job in organising it. Details are here in Cloudworks, the important details are below (one of them is not true, guess which one): When: Tues 15 November 2011, 3-4pm Where if you're OU based: Ambient Lab, ground floor of the Jennie Lee Building) Where if you're online: Live streamed here: http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1769&s=31&ran=1641022548&state=1 Twitter hashtag: #digitalscholar Competition: YES! Win a free copy of the book. To enter the competition, please show or tell us what you consider to be "a digital scholar". Entries can take the form of an image, audio clip,…
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Open as in… doors, arms, ended?
With a fanfare and much waving of pompoms, I can announce that the open access version of my book is now online, via the good people at Bloomsbury Academic. It is available online in plain HTML format, broken down by chapters. I'm excited about this because now I can point people at it and pass it around freely. A couple of people have requested other formats, eg epub, pdf, etc. I could do these, but my feeling is that what's significant is the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence. If anyone wants to take the HTML version and create an Egyptian hieroglyphics version delivered via 1988 version of HyperCard – well, they…
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Kindle pricing – an apology
In my last post I mentioned that the Kindle price for my book was listed as £42 in the UK, and I was bemoaning this. It has since come down to a more reasonable £11.42 (although the US is still showing the higher price). I thought this was a result of some strange pricing policy from my publishers, Bloomsbury Academic, but it turns out the problem was with Amazon. Bloomsbury list their Kindle price as 20% below the paperback standard price. Amazon had mistakenly taken the hardback price and reduced from there, hence the ludicrously high price. So, a fullsome apology to Bloomsbury, who are operating a sensible Kindle pricing…
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Would you buy a book from this man?
My book, The Digital Scholar, has finally come out. When I was looking round for a publisher year ago, it was an absolute requirement that they do open access (at least one chapter of the book is a rant against academic publishing models). Bloomsbury Academic offered this and are also a reputable publisher and handled the process very well. In a rare demonstration of putting my money where my mouth is, going for an open access publisher means the royalty is much reduced from previous publishers, so it's not a path to riches, but I accepted long ago that writing academic books was somewhere on a par with flying kites…
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Views on a book
I have been completing the index for my digital scholarship book and thought I'd share some thoughts on different views of the book. I put the entire text through Wordle to produce the following tag cloud: I then restricted this view to only 50 words: And by way of comparison, here is a draft of the index in Scribd: The Digital Scholar – Index Two questions arise for me: do these representations reveal anything to me, as author? And do any of them provide useful insight or make you as potential reader, interested? The word clouds contain some pretty obvious terms (if digital, open or scholarship weren't in big letters,…
