I discuss our move to our new premises after 47 years on Wynford Drive. At last—high speed Internet access!

The bard may be immortal, but how do you make Shakespeare relevant—or for that matter understandable—for today’s students? A new series from our School Division provides an answer, and I discuss it in the latest installment of my video blog:

In the (unlikely!) event that loyal readers can’t get enough of either Oxford or me in print, you may want to visit my video blog. In the first installment, I talk a bit about OUP’s history, as well as the future of ebooks and of publishing in general. Here’s the Video—

Isaac Asimov is best-known as a science fiction writer—I understand his Foundation series is to be filmed by Roland Emmerich—but the majority of his more than 500 books were actually nonfiction. Indeed, from the 1950s through the end of the ’80s, Asimov was virtually a one-man Book of the Month Club, issuing well-regarded tomes on everything from subatomic physics to Shakespeare.

Some of those books remain in print, but many have gone by the wayside. I’d particularly like to see Asimov’s science essays brought back into print. Carl Sagan once called Asimov “the greatest explainer of the age,” and Asimov’s series of essays originally written for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and later reprinted in a couple of dozen volumes by Doubleday & Co. are masterpieces of the science writer’s craft.

Of course, some of those essays are dated now, but the step-by-step historical approach Asimov took to explaining scientific subjects means that many are just as valid now as when they were written 40 years ago.

Take, for instance, his 1971 collection of F&SF essays, The Stars in Their Courses, which I recently re-read. Asimov’s discussions of Newton’s laws of motion and how the mass of the earth was first measured are models of how to explain difficult concepts simply and engagingly. The book also includes a couple of insightful essays on the sociology of science (“The Fateful Lightning,” on Ben Franklin and the lightning rod; and “The Sin of the Scientist,” where Asimov argues that the development of poison gas warfare during World War I permanently altered social attitudes toward science for the worse).

These essays (and hundreds more that he wrote during a career spanning half-a-century) deserve a new lease on life. Asimov’s ability to render even difficult concepts easy—indeed, deceptively easy—to understand remains, in my opinion, unmatched by any other popularizer of science.

The other day at work, a colleague asked me if I’d read any good books lately. I bumbled around and managed to come up with an answer of sorts, but the truth is, the question caught me flat-footed. –Not because I don’t read books (I do), but because I don’t tend to think of the concepts of “reading books” and “work” as having much to do with each other.

Given that I work in book publishing, that sounds odd, I admit; but while I do a lot of reading at work virtually none of it involves books. I read reports, memos, spreadsheets, and emails by the thousand. Once in a while I read a manuscript, which is kind of, but not quite, a book. But actual books? Not during working hours!

Nonetheless, I have read some books recently which I recommend to you – for instance, Bruce Hutchison’s The Fraser. Hutchison was perhaps the preeminent Canadian journalist of the twentieth century. His career spanned seven decades and apart from his newspaper work, he also published a couple of dozen books, three of which won the Governor General’s Award for creative nonfiction.

The Fraser was part of a long-running series called “Rivers of America.” It was first published in the US and W.H. Clarke, who around mid-century ran the Canadian branch of Oxford University Press as a de facto imprint of his own firm of Clarke, Irwin, secured the Canadian rights.

The reissue includes a new introduction by noted journalist Vaughn Palmer. It’s a great book and I recommend it highly. Hutchison was a terrific writer and his account of the exploration of the Fraser River valley and the settlement of British Columbia is enormously entertaining. Pierre Berton later acknowledged the influence Hutchison had on Berton’s own bestselling popular histories, and if you enjoyed The National Dream or The Last Spike, you’ll enjoy The Fraser.

As has been noted elsewhere in the blogosphere, if you think you’ve heard of something like the iPad before … well, you have. Forty-two years ago, in his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, legendary science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke described a device virtually identical to the iPad. He called it the “newspad,” and here’s how he described it:

“When he was tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, [Heywood Floyd] would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart … He would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him [which he would expand] until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort.”

The newspad makes an appearance in the movie 2001 as well: if I recall correctly, you see one of the astronauts aboard the spacecraft Discovery en route to Jupiter reading it while eating breakfast.

Not only did Clarke guess right about the i/news Pad, he also guessed right about its contents. Again from the novel: “There was another thought which a scanning of those tiny electronic headlines often invoked. The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.”

Amen to that.

I talked not long ago to a reporter for the CBC’s website about how various slang expressions enter (and sometimes exit) the language. You can find the story here.

A friend later remarked that it was the first time she’d ever come across the words “Oxford” and “bootylicious” in the same story. But further research shows it has happened at least once before: when “bootylicious” was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Linguist Elizabeth Pyatt has written an entertaining blog entry about that momentous occasion.

The inspiration for the story was a US poll asking people what words annoyed them most. Now, it seems to me that with all the troubles in this old world of ours, one’s ire can likely find a more appropriate target than indiscriminate use of ”whatever” or “bootylicious.” As I said to the reporter, “Annoyance is in the ear of the beholder. Repetition can make a phrase annoying but it also makes for a liveliness in everyday life. And you always have the option — if it’s annoying just ignore it.”

Now there’s a thought. –Whatever, as the saying goes . . .

Earlier this year, OUP began working with a Toronto-based company called Symtext to digitize some of the content from our textbooks for specific adoption situations. Symtext’s unique proprietary technology delivers content from OUP (and other participating publishers) as so-called ”Liquid Textbooks,” which offer various functionalities including the capacity for instructors and students to enter comments and questions. Symtext launched Liquid Textbooks this Fall, and recently I had the chance to chat (by email) with Symtext president Ian Barker about where the digital revolution is taking us. 

You can visit the Symtext site at http://www.symtext.com/ and if you’d like to contact Ian directly, his email is ian@symtext.com.

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Ian Barker: What sort of shift in the market toward demand for digital content are you seeing? Is this shift changing (increasing, decreasing) and can you comment on the pace of the change?
David Stover: There’s definitely a shift and it’s definitely gaining momentum. That’s not to say that I expect to see the printed book disappear next week or next year or even next decade. If anything, the availability of digital options seems to be increasing the total size of the market, because there are some kinds of content (or some audiences for content) where digital opens up possibilities that simply didn’t exist in print.

IB: As a company, is OUP Canada seeing demand from professors/schools for alternatives to print, and how has this impacted your strategic planning?
DS: Most important for us is the ability to “hold” content in forms that can be distributed through a variety of channels and methods — as traditional printed books, as digital files, and so on. In most cases so far where instructors want an alternative to print, it’s because what they were trying to do was not very well suited to print. Print lends itself to narrative, and while there are segments of educational publishing that are very narrative-based, there are other segments that really involve the delivery of discrete “chunks” of information in a way akin to encyclopedias and databases. So a big part of our strategic planning is making sure we can deliver content in different ways, and trying to anticipate in what form the market will want content delivered to them.

IB: Where do companies like Symtext and products like Liquid Textbooks fit into the publishing landscape?
DS: My view is that what the digital world has lacked until now is an effective delivery channel. After all, publishers never (or at least very rarely) delivered content directly to customers. We utilize intermediaries — bookstores, of course! Companies like Symtext open a new channel to end-users. How a sales channel is configured inevitably affects how a product looks, so one would expect a product that’s delivered digitally — the Liquid Textbook — to look and feel different than a traditional book.

IB: It’s early days yet, but having made the decision to utilize a digital publishing platform, what would you share with other publishers as they assess the market and their position within it?
DS: I think publishers need to keep the needs of end-users in mind and not get swept away by the enthusiasms of the moment. Something big is going on, but publishing has been through big changes before, and one would hope that coming out the other side of the current transitional period we would see an era in which more information is available in more formats more readily to more people. Incidentally, that’s a much different thing from everything being free! As Dr Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote but for money,” and the same applies to editors and publishers. So there has to be a commercial (or at least a cost recovery) mechanism that supports the distribution of information in digital as well as traditional print forms. That’s one of the appealing things about Symtext’s model — it provides content affordably to end-users while still compensating content creators.

I know I’m showing my age when I admit the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “tweet” is the incredibly annoying yellow bird from the old Warner Bros. cartoons. (A point worthy of Trivial Pursuit: did you know Tweety Bird is male?)

But now of course “tweet” is what you do on Twitter (come to think of it, a perfect medium for Tweety Bird: presumably Sylvester would be his #1 follower) and not to be left behind, Oxford is there.

First of all, our lexicographers monitor Twitter for new words and usages, as this recent blog posting explains:

http://blog.oup.com/2009/06/oxford-twitter/

Second, OUP Canada itself is on Twitter. You can sign up to receive our tweets right here:

http://twitter.com/oupcanada

I don’t know if they’ll be of the same compulsive interest that Tweety Bird was to Sylvester, but sign up and see!

Tim McCleary, our national sales manager in Higher Ed, reports happily that his son Brayden has returned home safe and sound from his tour of duty in Afghanistan. (See posting below.) We wish Tim, Brayden, and all their family the very best, and are delighted he is back home.