I continue to be astonished by how efficient the used textbook market has become. This week, at the end of the spring quarter at Ohio State University, a drive-thru textbook buy-back service popped up on the site of a long-closed gas station. It is a tent on a parking lot that truly does allow someone to drive through to drop off books (see the third image down). The operation is run by Budgetext, a national textbook wholesaler from Fayetteville, AR. I spoke with company representative Jerry Mohr about the service.

Images here link to larger versions in Flickr

Budgetext is partnered with Student Book Exchange (SBX) to bring this first-in-Columbus service to Ohio State. Budgetext services the textbook wholesaling needs of SBX. Since Budgetex has the list of textbooks through SBX that are needed for the next school term, it can more intelligently buy back the books that will be needed. Jerry said that most of the books bought back through the drive thru service will stay in the area, with the remainder wholesaled through their national network.

It is hard to beat the convenience. One literally drives up, hands the books over, and gets the cash back (or the book back if it is not needed by Budgetext). On a day like today in Columbus — with the downpour this morning and this afternoon — that process certainly seems to beat lugging the books to a desk inside a bookstore.

Although this is the first drive-through in central Ohio, it is not the first such setup in the state. A drive-through program was set up at Owens Community College in northwest Ohio two years ago. Jerry told me that in its first 4 1/2 days of operation, 500 cars came through. The following term 1,500 cars came through. All kinds of people come through — parents with kids, handicapped individuals, even multiple students in one car. Jerry said that one car last year had three students: one each from Owens Community College, the University of Toledo, and Bowling Green State University. It is still too early to tell how well the service will do in this location.

The impact of these improved efficiencies in the used textbook market makes the textbook ecosystem even more complicated. It is capitalism at its finest, but I’m not sure this present trajectory is sustainable.

This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title “Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?” that links to a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking about a strikingly similar topic at lunch yesterday: not just that advertisements could pay for new technology but that ads could pay for content in the libraries. I felt strangely uncomfortable with the concept, and I still do, so (in jester fashion) what better way to explore the discomfort than in a posting here on DLTJ.

The second paragraph of Martin’s blog posting is this:

I think we should be clear that any Vice Chancellor will already tell you that education is a business. Even if students don’t actually pay themselves and are funded by government, freedom of choice as to where they go, effectively creates a market. Lecturers, administrative staff and librarians don’t work for free and buildings don’t build themselves. Universities are therefore competing for students, and so will offer courses they think are attractive, facilities that are appealing and trade on a brand name. To this extent education is already ‘for sale’, and it is difficult to see how within current society it will change.

He goes on to describe the economic forces putting pressure on higher education in the U.K., and it is a list that will certainly be familiar to those here in Ohio, too. Martin arrives at the thesis that a “pragmatic response” is needed for these pressures — one where the term “business model” is not foreign to those of us in higher education.

The Wired Campus blog entry brings the concept even closer to home. It leads off with this paragraph: This might upset you: You log onto your university library Web site to research a history assignment, and alongside the literature citations there is an ad for Dell computers or Microsoft Office or several books from university presses. The colleague, who may wish to remain nameless or who may identify him-/herself, was thinking through the consequences of publishers paying libraries to promote content from disaggregated textbooks.

Let me back up — the concept of the “disaggregated textbook” assumes that a textbook can be broken up into discrete chunks of content. These chunks (sometimes referred to as “learning objects” when they take a digital form) represent a unit of knowledge that a student is seeking to understand. The chunks are tied to some learning objective or outcome, and as I understand the concept, chunks that target the same learning objective are somewhat interchangeable. The chunks may vary by learning style (visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic), amount of detail, assumed level of background understanding. By breaking the textbook up into these chunks, it becomes possible to remix and substitute content to meet the particular learning objectives of a student or the style of an instructor. It also becomes easier to insert non-textbook content into the syllabus as learning objects. Content such as, say, a journal article or book chapter or video clip that a library has acquired through its traditional, non-textbook channels.

Which brings us to the discussion at lunch yesterday. What makes a plain-old-digital-object a learning object is tying it to learning objectives. In other words, adding a little bit of metadata to it that makes it discoverable by learning objective criteria. What if libraries remix their existing article, book, and multimedia content into learning objects and put it in the same search interface as the disaggregated textbook chunks? My colleague proposed that a textbook publisher (or “learning object publisher”) may want to pay the library to give preferential placement to its content. In fact, the business model might be such that the publisher of things formerly known as textbooks may want to “give away” the digital text form of the content with the expectation that money will be made by selling students other forms of the content — MP3 downloads, videos of instructors explaining the content, study guides, printed forms, etc.

All of this still leaves my vaguely uncomfortable, and I’m not yet sure why. (Writing it all down in this posting hasn’t helped.) It would be one thing if “preferential placement” meant “invisibly raising the relevance of such content” in the search results list. That clearly would seem to be out of bounds: invisible mucking with search results placement leads to distrust of the underlying service. Google has shown us, though, that it is possible to sell conspicuously marked advertisements on search results pages and make billions doing it. Could the same thing work for libraries selling conspicuously marked, relevant results that could lead users to an e-commerce transaction at a publisher site? Is the value libraries (and our users) could receive in exchange for such placement the free access to the digital form of the content?

The “about” page for this blog says, At times, ideas and concepts are offered as straw-men — to be ripped apart and dismissed as fantasy or a hoax. This is one of those times. What do you think?

The text was modified to update a link from http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3053/ to http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/should-colleges-sell-ads-to-pay-for-new-technology/3985 on January 20th, 2011.

Why settle for mere digital copies of books (a la the Google Book Search project and the Open Content Alliance) when you can have an edition printed, bound and sent to you in the mail? That’s the twist behind a recent partnership announced by Amazon.com, Kirtas Technologies, Emory University, University of Maine, Toronto Public Library, and the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County.

More information via C|Net News, The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), and Inside Higher Ed. I’m putting this in the “Disruption in Libraries” category because it is an example of using a technical innovation to serve an un-served or under-served population — not only the digitization of books but also the ability to deliver a physical reproduction to the user. That aspect makes this program distinct from the others, and it is the first time that we’ve seen a glimpse of a reasonable business model: costs recovered and profits made that go back into the digitization program for new books. Since this is a non-exclusive agreement that puts the libraries in control, the texts can be made available freely online or available at a nominal cost to the user in a physical form.

[Update 20070704T0904 : Ack! I linked to the wrong Chronicle of Higher Ed article. Fixed now -- thanks Jodi.]

I will never fly U.S. Airways again, if I have a choice. A competing airline’s ticket is going to have to be substantially more expensive for me to even consider U.S. Airways as an alternative.

This all started with a trip to Ithaca two months ago. There was a substantial weather system that move through the eastern seaboard area that screwed up traffic for a number of carriers. From my vantage point on the ground — watching the FAA’s National Airspace System Status Summary as well as various flight tracking services — everything seemed to be on time for a flight from Syracuse through Washington-Regan to Columbus. Washington-Regan was spared the brunt of the storm and was not having to de-ice aircraft, as I recall. Other major airports had closed various runways and were reducing traffic with ground-stop programs, but as the afternoon wore on the system was improving. The only abnormality was an odd message on the National Airspace System Status Summary was a message that the Philadelphia airport was closed to U.S. Airways traffic at the request of the airline due to “lack of ramp space.” The U.S. Airways website continued to show an on-time departure, so I figured the aircraft for my flight from Syracuse to Washington-Regan was coming from Washington-Regan or somewhere else that was not affected by the Philadelphia airline-requested ground stop. I headed to the Syracuse airport…

…where I found all hell had broken loose. In the 75 minutes it took me to drive from Ithaca to Syracuse, U.S. Airways canceled what looked to be all of their operations in the northeast. Based on past travel experience, I’ve found that it is often better to call the airline’s central toll-free number rather than wait in a customer service line at the airport. Wrong choice. U.S. Airways’ phone system had basically melted down. It took 23 dialing attempts just to get in the queue of people “waiting for the next available agent” and after 90 minutes on hold I hung up and got in line. The guy that got in line behind me said he held on the phone for five hours at his house before hanging up and driving to the airport, thinking that the service had to be better than that at the airport. Right?

Wrong. An hour and a half later plus two television reporters on a remote for the evening news talking about the long lines of customers in front of the U.S. Airways ticket counter at the Syracuse Airport, I finally got to the head of the line. The best the agent could offer was a flight 49 hours later. I asked about compensation based on the problems in Philadelphia. She said the problem was the FAA closing airports due to the weather. I told her about the message from the FAA’s status page about the problem only affecting U.S. Airways flights in Philadelphia. She told me she knew nothing about it, but that if I wasn’t on the flight 49 hours later that I could apply for a refund for the unused portion of the ticket.

So I rented a car and booked a hotel room for the night (neither of which U.S. Airways would pay for). After a good nights sleep I drove home and picked up my car from the airport parking lot 27 hours before any possibility that U.S. Airways could get me there.

In the middle of the following week, I submitted my request for a refund via some automated automated telephone system that no longer exists (800-363-2542 — it now gets routed to the “customer relations system” at 866-523-5333, but more on that in a minute). A week later I called a separate number (480-693-6735, as documented on the U.S. Airways Ticket Refund website) and keyed my ticket number into the automated system; it wasn’t found. So I faxed a copy of everything to the number suggested (800-892-3447). A week later I checked the automated system; nothing. So I sent a copy in the mail to the 4000 East Sky Harbor, Pheonix, AZ address. I just checked the automated system again; nothing.

So I’ve had it with the automated systems and I try to get someone on the line. I call the “Customer Relations” number (866-523-5333); option #2 is for ticket refunds and such. The recorded message tells me that to serve me better I should hang up and dial a 480-693-6735. Yes, if you’re keeping track, we’ve seen that number before. It is the automated check-the-status-of-your-request number. The voice prompts don’t give you a way to talk to a human, but after hitting enough garbage into the system you get routed to what the system claims to be is the queue of people waiting for the next available agent. I only spend 25 minutes on hold here before giving up — it’s my dime paying for the call, after all. Next I call the central number for U.S. Airways where an agent gives me all of the phone numbers I’ve already tried and says that is all she can do for me.

Here’s the real kicker — U.S. Airways is acting like it doesn’t care what you think. As a last resort, I call the “Customer Relations” number once more and pick option #3 — for a “complement or concern” — and after a few rings I am offered an apology for not being “personally available to take your call now…” (no queue of people on this option). Boy, it is a good thing I didn’t have a complement for the airline, right?

Now, I never expected it to be easy to get a refund for my ticket (it is, after all, money that they would want to keep for not doing any real work), but I do expect it to be possible. So, U.S. Airways, as your pilots say when we land, I do have an option in air carriers when I fly, and from now on I won’t be choosing U.S. Airways.

Update (20070601T0956): The New York Times has an article about the overbooking practice by airlines, focusing on U.S. Airways. A part: “Overbooking is one of many airline practices that are complicated by crowded planes. Airlines are running closer to capacity than at any point during the jet age — an expected 85 percent or so full this summer, which means all the seats on popular routes will be taken.”

Recent posts by Richard Wallis and Paul Miller, both of Talis (a 40-year-old company in the U.K. specializing in information and metadata management), question a perceived division of library automation vendor technical staff with that of open source solution technical staff. I wasn’t at Code4Lib this year (I’m going to try to get there next year), but from the context of the blog postings and comments it seems like the Talis developers were showing some really cool stuff and concern was expressed by participants that they don’t want to see Code4Lib turned into a vendor forum.

I’m taking two paragraphs of Richard’s post out of order. The first of these out-of-order pieces is this one:

I know this is a very broad-brush picture of the world we operate in, but I believe that most vendor employees will recognise the caricature of the librarian who has no concept of the commercial realities of life; and most librarians will recognise the caricature of the evil vendor squeezing every possible cent from library budgets for the benefit of their shareholders.

At a gut level — stereotypically-speaking — I think that is a piece of what is going on. In my position, when I wake up in the morning I think about the code that I will write that day (on a good day I’ll write code, that is) that will be of direct benefit to the higher education community in the State of Ohio. Richard and Paul, when you get up in the morning, I’d wager that the code you write will factor into some commercial/business goal of Talis. I’ll further wager that few of us are employed for purely altruistic purposes for writing code for libraries. (If such jobs exist, I’d like one, please.) The issue runs much deeper, though, I think.

Somewhere, many years ago, I ran into the notion that stereotyping is a necessity for humans as beings that are undergoing constant stimulation.

Categorization serves several useful functions for us. Most obviously, we can simplify our environment by categorizing objects. Second, categorization enables us to generate expectations about the properties of those objects. These expectations, in turn, guide our behavior toward the objects. A third consequence of categorization is that it permits us to consider a greater amount of information at any one time. ¹

The summarized version of this that I try to keep in mind is: “Put simply, individuals need categorization to understand and make sense of their environment, both physical and social. Social categorization or stereotyping, according to this view, is a cognitive necessity.” ² In a certain sense, it goes back to primal instincts to be able to look at an object coming towards one and decide whether or not it is a threat. (Big, furry, with claws? Threat. Run. — Furry, long ears, hops? Catch. Eat. ³)

So that said — this tension between a for-profit company and a community-oriented organization — anything that fuels animosity between the two sides is bound to cause friction. This comes to a head with a second paragraph (again, taken out of order) from Richard’s post:

There has always been a traditional, and probably healthy, tension in the Library Systems market between libraries that need Library Systems to support their operations, and the vendors who build, sell, and support them. This tension is no doubt fuelled by the cultural differences between the profit based commercial business environment that vendor staff operate within, and the institutionally funded public/academic community supporting ethos driven world of the librarians.

Therein lies the rub. Perhaps it is cultural or geographic, but I would not characterize the relationship between the library automation vendors and their customers as “healthy tension” — particular with the subset of that community that has an open source leaning. I have had direct or close indirect dealings with three major automation vendors (and many more smaller ones) in my 16-year ⁴ career as a library technologist. And I can say, categorically, that I have little faith and trust that the library automation vendors can innovate us to a level that our patrons are increasingly expecting (and/or seeking elsewhere). A recent meeting with a sales representative from one of these companies hammered that point home with a demonstration of a product that had caught up to where the state of web innovation was, well, about three years ago. When pressed on issues of currency when dealing with the web (microformats and other semantic web technologies, rich RSS feeds, strong REST or SOAP APIs ⁵ to the internals of the system) the response was, as I interpreted it, defensive and patronizing.

That said, to its credit (in my opinion) Talis seems to be a different breed of vendor and one that is more in tune with a collaborative, open development process. Although we have not had any direct interaction, the mere fact that this is being discussed on a company sanctioned blog already speaks volumes. Please do realize, though, that as an “evil vendor” you have a great deal of built-up resistance to overcome. At least, stereotypically-speaking again, in the North American higher education marketplace.

This discussion is most welcome. Thank you for bringing it up.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.r375.cgi/785 to http://blogs.talis.com/panlibus/archives/2007/03/sticking_my_hea.php on January 19th, 2011.

The text was modified to update a link from http://www.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.r375.cgi/786 to http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.talis.com%2Fpanlibus%2Farchives%2F2007%2F03%2Fcontinuing_rich.php&rct=j&q=%22Continuing%20Richard%27s%20line%20of%20thought%22&ei=oVA3TavJE8P98AaL04SiBA&usg=AFQjCNHbmzzLIEbqKMmIpzuGVt2nhos6Ag&cad=rja on January 19th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. Wilder, David. A. 1981. Perceiving Persons as a Group: Categorization and Intergroup Relations. In Cognitive Processes in Stereotyping and Intergroup Behavior, ed. David. L. Hamilton, 213-257. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates. p. 213.
2. Ottati, Victor, and Yueh-Ting Lee. 1995. Accuracy: A Neglected Component of Stereotype Research. In Stereotype accuracy: Toward appreciating group differences, ed. Yueh-Ting Lee, Lee J. Jussim, and Clark R. McCauley, 29-59. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. pp. 40-41.
3. With apologies to the sensibilities of those viewers/listeners who are vegetarians.
4. good heavens — has it really been that long?!?
5. no, I didn’t actually use the terms REST and SOAP with the sales representative