Last night at the
AHEAD conference in San Diego, the
AHEAD E-Text Solutions Group hosted an open forum for attendees. As such, I did my best to take notes and keep up with the back and forth of the conversation. The following notes are mine are incomplete and have been edited - but I believe there is some important stuff here. Outside of the panel members I am not including names as I did not manage to catch most of them.
Q: Will we [DSS offices] ever be out of the scanning business?A: Ron says "no". The goals is to alleviate some 80% of the scanning currently being done by DSS offices but there will likely always be a need for in-house scanning due to handouts, legacy items, gap filling while awaiting content from other sources, etc.
Q: Publishers are concerned about the abuse of digital materials via copying, trading, sharing, etc. Has anyone actually resorted such abuse?
A: Ed talked about AAP studies of peer-to-peer networks such as
Grokster,
eDonkey and others where they have seen illegal trading of digital forms of textbooks. But to date there has been no sign of books scanned for students with disabilities showing up on these same sites. However, the visceral (and understandable) preemptive reaction of publishers is to be defensive and expect it is only a matter of time before such materials make it onto the web.
Q: Can the publishers create a standardized request form?A: The AAP is working towards its members using if not standardized, at least similar forms. This is a two-way street, however, as publishers are requesting that DSS has a standardized format or language for making requests. Ed McCoyd announced the soon to be launched
Publisher Look-Up Service [beta].
Q: In the conversation it became understood that 6-7 publishing houses control some 85% of the Higher Ed textbook market. An attendee asked if these half-dozen publishers could simply hire staff and create in-house processes to create DAISY versions of their books.
A: There are several parts to this answer. It is important to understand that each of these publishing houses encompasses many smaller print houses under each of their umbrellas. However - the publishers are moving forward on this [behind the scenes] and working with organizations such as Bookshare.org and RFB&D on their DAISY projects. Ron reminds us that DAISY is an emergent technology and like any for-profit entity, the publishers are understandably hesitant to invest in and embrace it fully until it has proven its worth in the marketplace.
Q: Why aren't the publishers more fully using RFB&D and Bookshare?
A: There cannot be a single broker (or even a couple) because there are simply too many titles and too much work for one entity to handle.
Q: There were several questions and a conversation about NIMAS and how this fits into the puzzle.A: NIMAS will be part of the solution but it is not as important at the postsecondary level as in K-12. As students are introduced to the ease of getting materials because of NIMAS, they will enter higher ed and expect a certain level of quality and access. Ultimately, students and their requests (demands) will drive the end-user format.
That's the gist of last night's conversation - there was more but I cannot read my chicken-scratch or make sense of my shorthand. Look for updates to the E-Text solutions group website coming soon.
Labels: ATHEN, E-text, higher-ed, NIMAS, publishers
