Jon Udell: This is Jon Udell. For today's podcast, I got together with CJ Rayhill. She's the CIO of O'Reilly and Associates and is one of the people spearheading a new project called SafariU. We talked about how SafariU enables college professors to create custom books online for their computer science students, and then have those books printed out on demand. We also talked more broadly about the educational possibilities of search, and of multimedia technologies like podcasting and screencasting.
CJ: Good to hear your voice again.
Jon: Likewise. I wanted to, first of all, talk through what your experience has been with SafariU. And I'll just mention here that, at one time, I had a consulting relationship with O'Reilly, in the beginning of the Safari project. But I'm not now involved with it and haven't been for, what is it, about four years or so?
CJ: Right.
Jon: But in that time, you've spearheaded the SafariU project, which is, briefly, educational print-on-demand combined with Safari-like online access to books.
CJ: What happened was, I actually came into O'Reilly at the end of 2000, and they were just getting ready to launch the Safari books online service and that was the project you had worked on and where you and I met each other.
Jon: That's right.
CJ: And that's been our fastest growing product since then. If I could put things in perspective, I would ask the listeners to think of a two-axis graph. One axis is...call it free-to-paid. And the other axis is packaged-to-atomic. When you think about publishers today, especially publishers in a niche like O'Reilly is in, where folks are more and more looking to Google for answers, we really have a lot of concerns about what the future holds for us. And when you look at the world in terms of those two axes, it's pushing us as publishers, especially as reference and technology publishers, down to the lower quadrant, which is basically free and atomic.
The challenge for us is figuring out what kinds of business models can we survive with in the future, and are there other ways or other business models that can fit into those other quadrants? Are there different ways of repackaging what we do and reusing what we do to provide value-added services? So about three years ago, there was a big downturn and we still hadn't hit bottom yet. We noticed that the other publishers who were much larger than we were got nice little bumps twice a year when the school year started. And we had traditionally not looked at the academic market...
Jon: Which I think surprises a lot of people, because that would seem like a natural fit for computer-science. Obviously people are using your books anyway.
CJ: Yeah, they do, but here's what we found out. As you well know Jon, our books are very practical. So when it comes to the tech schools or the JCs or community colleges, where they're teaching very practical technology courses, our books were adopted more readily, and adopted more readily as primary texts.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: But in four-year colleges, they teach a lot of theory and our books and content aren't really about theory. They're about the practical applications of theory, although they do cover it.
Jon: I'm not sure that speaks well for those universities...
CJ: I somewhat agree, but I think once folks get the theory, the schools kind of leave it up to the students to look at ways to apply it. Or they do it more in experiential teaching -- give them a project where they have to apply it.
Jon: That's a serious question, as a matter of fact. I have a friend, Greg Wilson, and he's been very concerned about the fact that people are going through these computer science curricula without absorbing all sorts of basic skills that have to do with being competent in the software realm: understanding CVS or Subversion, or project management, or the social aspects of negotiating a specification, or the general and very real problem of how you dive into a code base that's new to you and learn your way around and get competent working in it.CJ: Which usually happens on your first job, right? You're thrown into a system that already exists and you're told you're going to do maintenance work in it.
Jon: Yes.
CJ: And most of these folks coming out of university are used to just building their own thing from the ground up and looking at their own code. Yeah, absolutely. The perfect example I would give you is my nephew. About three years ago, he graduated from the SUNY system. He was a computer science major, and after his second year I brought him out here. I was affiliated with a start-up and I had him intern there. After his summer of interning with the company, he came back to me and said the biggest gap that he saw in his education, up to that point -- mind you he's halfway through his higher education -- was the database aspect. There wasn't any focus on it in his curriculum, and yet 95 percentof the work that he did in a business environment had to do with information and data. The gap between what he was learning theoretically and what he really needed to know to get work done in a business environment was huge.
Jon: Yeah. Werner Vogels, who's the CTO of Amazon, made the same point recently. He was interviewed in ACM Queue, interviewed by Jim Gray, actually, the Microsoft researcher, and it's a fascinating piece. Among other things, Werner talks about how people come out of colleges with a theoretical background, but that there are no colleges that have infrastructures that resemble Amazon or its peers. So in terms of learning to deal with galactic scaling issues in the real world, there's no other way than to be in the environment.
CJ: Well, that's why I think interning and mentoring are so critical.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: But anyway, Tim asked for a volunteer to look at how we as a publisher might more consciously and strategically approach the academic market. It was one of those situations where everybody else stepped backwards and I was the last one standing. But I volunteered, and Allen Noren -- who had just come back from a leave of absence -- agreed to dive in with me and figure out what we might be able to do. Using the typical O'Reilly approach, we got in contact with hundreds of what we called FOOs -- Friends of O'Reilly -- who were in the academic setting. Everything from four-year universities to community colleges, and from adjunct faculty to corporate trainers.
We said, you know who we are, you know what our content is like, you know that our brand recognition isn't what we'd like it to be in the higher education market, and for that matter, sometimes in the corporate training market. So what can we do as a publisher to help you? And after compiling all of the interview results, it was very clear to us that there were three or four very common themes that were coming back. One was that educators wanted a one-stop shop, didn't want to go to multiple places, didn't want to deal with copyright hassles from multiple publishers or have to go to a copyright clearance center for one thing and directly to the publisher for another.
Jon: They wanted it to come through the college bookstore, like they're used to.
CJ: Yeah. The bottom line is, they wanted it to be somebody else's problem.
The second thing they told us, which was a bit surprising, was that they wanted the ability to mix and match that content in their own pedagogical way and deliver that to students, but do it in either or both of print and online formats. We were thinking, these are computer science information tech instructors, they'll want everything online. But a recent survey by the National Association for College Bookstores found that over eighty percent of students still preferred print, which was surprising to me.
Jon: There are really two different modes for absorbing information. One is search, tactically. The other is to step back strategically and take in a chunk of stuff. And In the latter mode I think most people would rather read print.
CJ: I know that I do, but the more and more I watch my nieces and nephews and the younger folks interact with each other, I was just surprised to hear that. It's encouraging to us, as a publisher, but nonetheless we didn't feel like we can just go forward with some kind of online solution. We felt like we needed to incorporate a print component.
And then the third thing we heard was that they spent a lot of time and effort in putting together their own materials for teaching. And the ability to incorporate those in their compilations is critical. Don't forget that people are teaching in all kinds of different time frames, so the way I might approach an introduction to Java programming for a summer course, would be very different from how I'd approach a full semester course.
Jon: So most of them were in a pretty good position to put their own stuff online and make it available to people, but probably not in a good position to have that stuff flow out in the print-on-demand fashion, never mind combined with other more conventional print materials.
CJ: Right. In many cases we found they were linking to things and telling students to print for themselves, which really did not address their needs. They also said that the ability to share their, for lack of a better term, playlists, with other educators, in some kind of social network, would be an advantage as well.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: So we took all that feedback and we looked around for you what assets we had in the company, and of course we had been running Safari for about four years. So we said, we already have our content on line, is there a way to leverage this platform? types of services to folks?
In our original beta version, we took the web 2.0 adage -- small pieces loosely joined -- and we pieced together three different platforms. One was Safari Books Online, the second was a print-on-demand platform with a manufacturing partner, and the third was all the rest of the stuff that we had to build ourselves. We hooked them all together with web services, and we rolled that out in January of 2005.
We got four or five months of feedback under our belts, and realized that the user interface could be confusing. So we started to build version 2, and just launched our V2 version at the end of March of this year.
Jon: So the partner relationships are quite interesting here. Are you able to say who they are?
CJ: Absolutely. It may be confusing, because we are all using the term Safari as well, but first of all it's not Apple's browser. Second, Safari Books Online is actually a separate company. It's a joint venture between ourselves and Pearson, and there are two products that have recently been spun off from that joint venture. One is SafariU, as I just mentioned, in which we really are the lead here at O'Reilly, but Pearson is participating.
And then SafariX is Pearson's product that they are taking the lead on, in which we are participating. SafariX is a different library. It's Pearson's textbooks, and they allow subscriptions to a single book for half the retail price.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: But they're all based on that same model of the electronic book, and access to it.
Jon: And then who is the partner that handles the print-on-demand, and has the relationships with the college bookstores?
CJ: Originally our print on demand partner was Ames On-Demand.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: However with the version two, we've taken all the components we used in terms of their platform, and rebuilt them ourselves in a very integrated fashion. So what we have in V2 is an extremely integrated product. There is a single window for getting access to all of the services and products. And it's built on a product called Mark Logic, which is the XML database engine that is underneath it all.
Jon: Yeah I got very interested in that product, and did a bit of development with it about a year or so ago. I was quite impressed. Jon: So who's owning the relationships to the bookstores now, because that was Ames originally, right?
CJ: No actually we did all that. From the beginning we handled all the customer service and order entry and processing. We used some of their systems to do that. We now handle all that in-house ourselves. So we interact directly with the bookstores. They place their orders with us. We fulfill those orders.
Jon: Oh. Ok.
CJ: Now we do use a POD manufacturer, who does the actual printing and delivery.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: But we manage the process here and it's all integrated into our systems at this point.
Jon: And what's been your experience working with the bookstores, in terms of the level of web services relationships?
CJ: Wow. The are really two worlds when it comes to bookstores. There are those bookstores that universities and schools have given over to retail players to manage...
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: ..and so they have pretty wide networks and pretty good technological capabilities. And then there are those that are still school-sponsored.
Jon: Right.
CJ: And don't forget that schools actually get a pretty large dollar amount from sales at their bookstores.
Jon: Oh yeah.
CJ: which is one of the reasons why they still want to flow a lot of things through there, and not cut out that middle man. will.
Jon: Yep.
CJ: So we took the approach that we wanted to work with the bookstores, we didn't necessarily want to cut them out of the picture. And they have been very responsive to us. The only sticky point is that we are talking about custom books. The industry standard in terms of returns on custom books is around 10 percent. So what happens is either a) they are very conservative about ordering or b) they jack up the price quite heavily. So those are two drawbacks when you go through them. We are also looking at direct delivery options in the future, but we decided out the gate that we really wanted to treat them more as partners than adversaries.
Jon: Let's talk through the scenario then. I'm Professor so-and-so and I'm doing CS 101 at some school and I decide that I want to combine selections from three or four different O'Reilly and/or Pearson books in a custom offering that I'm going to require the students to read. So it's going to show up at the bookstore as part of CS 101's syllabus?
CJ: Right.
Jon: So I make the selections online through your application. And then the order flows to to...
CJ: What happens is that they complete their project online and it gets assigned an ISBN...
Jon: Oh it does?
CJ: ...and we are notified that the instructor has completed a project and placed an order.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: We hold that order on our end until we see the purchase order come
through from the bookstore. And because we also know the first date of the class, we monitor all that on behalf of the instructor. Which they see as a real service and benefit to them, because often something drops through the cracks and it isn't until the first day of class when they realize their students don't have the books.Jon: So the PO is actually coming to you from the bookstore?
CJ: Yes. They can email that to their bookstore or just print it out and hand it to them.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: And then the order comes from the bookstore, and we track all of that and make sure that it can come in on time.
Jon: And the ways that those orders come from bookstores to you vary from faxes to phone calls to electronic transfers?
CJ: Absolutely.
Jon: Ok. So it's...
CJ: Still today, yes.
Jon: Yep. Yep. Yep.
CJ: And we're amazed at how many still really come through fax.
Jon: Are any coming through formalized web services of any kind?
CJ: Not directly to us, but possibly through Ingram.
on: Ok. So now you've got the order from the store.
CJ: Right.
Jon: And you pull the materials together out of the Safari database?
CJ: Right. Actually out of the system itself, as part of the process that the instructor goes through online. When they compile their selections, we produce the PDF and they can review it online.
Jon: OK.
CJ: And then they finalize the order, and the PDF is sent to the printer for printing and distribution.
Jon: What's their turnaround on that?
CJ: Five to ten business days. In peak periods, maybe fifteen or twenty, right before a Fall semester, but so far we've been pretty good at meeting that turnaround.
Jon: You said it has an ISBN number, it's a book like any other, it could be that the student this year would turn around and sell it back to the used book market for use by a kid next year.
CJ: Yes, it does. But tis is a fast-changing area, right? They're doing instruction in applications that come out with new versions a year later. So we make it easy to copy that book project, delete sections they don't want out, add others, and then republish with a new ISBN for the following semester.
Jon: OK. So in this model it's going to be somewhat less likely that a lot of stuff will flow through the used book channel.
CJ: And we hope that, because these compilations are customized, students will find them valuable. We interviewed students as well, and they said "Look, I had to buy this whole textbook because I needed to read three chapters."
Jon: Yep.
CJ: That's not going to occupy a place on my bookshelf.
Jon: Right.
CJ: But if you're compiling all of this stuff, every piece of which is relevant to what they're being taught, you have a much better chance for it finding a place on the reference shelf of folks who are going to get jobs in this area.
Jon: What's my access online to this custom book?
CJ: There are two ways that you can create projects on the SafariU service. One is a print textbook. The other is what we call an online syllabus. There you link to content from up to 10 titles, as well as any of the articles on our sites like Perl.com and XML.com. We sell that to students directly, via credit card, very similar to Safari Books Online, for timed access. So anywhere from two to five months, figure $10 a month, a dollar a book per month. So $19.99 to $49.99 for five months.
Jon: Ok.
CJ: We're really trying to bring some good value to the students, who are paying an average of $130 for a textbook.Jon: Yep.
CJ: So what instructors do is create a 150- or 200-page required-reading print book. That's what they want the students to walk away with and keep on their reference shelves.
Jon: And there won't necessarily be parallel access to that two hundred and fifty pages online?
CJ: Exactly. Then they'll create a syllabus for all the recommended reading. and their can be a thousand pages of stuff in the syllabus piece, because it's timed access.
Jon: But if I want to use the online search as a way of locating something in the print book, I can do that, right?
I would so love to be a college student today, with the tools and the technologies that are available.
CJ: You know my nephew said that to me, when he graduated, he looked at me and said how did you ever go through school without the Internet?
Jon: I've been doing a bit of a refresher on populations genetics, because there are a number of lectures that are coming online now from places like Stanford and Berkeley.
CJ: Right.
Jon: And it's causing me to rethink a whole bunch of things. For example, the notion of being in class for fifty minutes to absorb this lecture, when I could be out on my bicycle absorbing that same lecture. Not as a substitute for the class time. But wouldn't I rather have heard the lecture and then shown up in class for the thing that face-to-face interaction with other people and the professor really ought to be about? which is given that the content has been delivered and I've thought about it, now I've got these questions. Let'sdrill down on the points that I didn't understand so well, or let's have a follow-on conversation...CJ: Right, or the instructor questioning the students, to see if they've comprehended it or not.
Jon: Exactly. Exactly.
CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
Jon: This is going to trigger a sea change, and it's also going to be incredibly threatening to a lot of people who are teaching now. I saw a little bit of this a couple of weeks ago when I gave a talk to a group of instructional technologists and faculty. You can see them starting to grapple with the idea that, wow, there really are better ways for me to use my face time with students than what we have been doing for all these years.
CJ: And here's the real challenge that I've seen. Think about the generation that's teaching our students. These are not people who have traditionally been comfortable with technology. How do you get these folks to adopt these things? We're trying to go in and change the habits of computer science and information technology folks. You'd think those would be the easiest folks to transition. And yet I've seen unbelievable things where they've said, , I'm searching for this and I can't find anything. And you look at how they're searching, you would think is something that they'd be a bit more literate about....
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: And it's amazing to me...
Jon: There's also a tendency to assume that anyone over the age of such-and-such just naturally groks all of this, and that's not true. There are a whole lot that kids, high school and college age and beyond, who don't know about how to make the most effective use of the Internet. How to search intelligently, how to operate effectively online. There are strategies that aren't being taught, because the people who are doing the teaching aren't aware of those strategies. It's not only that the students are ahead of their teachers in some ways, but that there's no one to take them farther than where they are.
CJ: Right.
Jon: And they need to be taken farther than where they are, in a lot of ways. At the place I visited recently, it was quite interesting to see that they're starting to deploy Wikis as classroom tools. But I asked the question: "For how many of the kids in your class was this a new experience?" and they said "Well, most of them."
CJ: Wow.
Jon: They have a certain range of experience around IM and MySpace and Facebook, but people tend to look at that and generalize it to, well, they're all completely "computer literate", and my observation is that it's true in relatively narrow ways. They're not being taught communication strategies, data management strategies, a whole lot of things that they ought to know.
CJ: Well, you know, it's interesting. If I had a kid that was in middle school to high school range right now, I would love love to see three things absolutely required before they graduate from high school. One is typing.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: Touch-typing.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: Back when I was in school, of course, women just took typing, while the guys took industrial arts. But I have to say, looking back, that was the best thing I could have done.
Jon: Me too. We did it in junior high school.
CJ: Right. And then the second thing is search.
Jon: Yep.
CJ: Learning how I can find information on my own, because that is the best way to self-educate.
Jon: Yes.
CJ: Equipping them before they get out of high school to know how to find information, and to be the best searchers out there.
Jon: Yes.
CJ: And then the third is personal finance.
Jon: Oh God yeah.
CJ: The fact that we don't have that as a
primary component of our education system is just sad to me.Jon: It's actually scandalous. You're right on all counts. And on the second one, a friend of mine here in New Hampshire, who runs a software company, just hired a new programmer. He said "I don't care if he 'knows' Java, or this or that operating system, or this or that database product. What I care about is that he can learn those things quickly on demand."
CJ: It's the "how do you teach yourself to do those other things?" that I think is critical to education.
Jon: Exactly. I also wanted to talk a little bit about other modes of education, other modes of publishing, other modes of information transfer. As you know, I've been playing around with this screencast idea and it's turned into a really interesting way to convey understanding about software products technologies.
CJ: I'm a huge fan of it and mainly because I'm a visual learner.
Jon: You mentioned Mark Logic. The way that I had got going with Mark Logic was that I did an interview with Jason Hunter.
CJ: Oh, Jason Hunter. Yeah.
Jon: He did a screencast demonstration of Mark Logic with me, and a couple of weeks later I got hold of the product and was starting to learn how to program in XQuery for the first time. I went back to that screencast again and again, and it was a fascinating thing. He had done a mixture of demos and then flipping from the demo to a screen full of code that was behind the demo. So when I got to a place where I needed a function that did something with an HTTP header, I knew that I'd seen a demo that must have used that function, and right after that I'd seen the code, so I went to that place and there it was. It was amazing.
CJ: I'm a very big fan of Lynda.com.
Jon: You should say what that is because not everybody will have heard of it.
CJ: Lynda.com is site that's broken down all the content of books into short video snippets. You can subscribe to this library of videocasts.
Jon: Right.
CJ: And where I find it most useful is -- you know, I've become quite the prosumer, in terms of putting movies together and doing digital photography. And when I go to manipulate photos -- let's say I scanned in an old photo of a family member and it has a crease in it or some kind of aberration I want to fix.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: I know that it can be fixed.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: But I don't necessarily remember all the PhotoShop commands to do it. So I search their library, and I get the three minute vcast.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: Call it just in time learning. I view that, and I apply that learning, and I fix the photo, and because we have to remember so much else these days -- and God knows the older I get the more I forget -- I can then just dump it off my stack.
Jon: Yep.
CJ: I've done it. I've performed the task. I know where to go back and get the information.
Jon: Exactly.
CJ: I don't need to retain that information any more.
Jon: Exactly. Exactly.
CJ: And it's fabulous. I find myself being able to do so much more. People are amazed. "Oh how did you know how to do that?" Well, honestly I didn't. I just found out just in time how to do it.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: I applied it and then I dumped it.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah. Another formative experience along these lines for me was I had an old HP printer. A LaserJet Plus I think actually and.
CJ: Oh my.
Jon: A really ancient thing, and they never die, they just sometimes get sick. I figured I'd just toss the thin,g but I looked around and it turned out the parts kit was cheap. It was a roller, but I knew there was no way that I was I going to be able to execute the repair procedure. But I went to a site called fixyourownprinter.com...
CJ: Oh really?
Jon: And they sell the parts kit with a video? I had to totally disassemble the printer. It was complex, and there's just absolutely no way that I would have been able to follow written instructions. But I had the scrubber on the video, and I just went back and forth, and I did the repair, and I'll be damned, it worked. It was remarkable.
CJ: Well, I'm sure you're familiar with our new magazine, Make Magazine.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: That's the whole premise. It's like you know Popular Science for the 21st Century. They're starting to vcast some stuff. When someone says hack on your TiVo, I'm not the geekiest hardware person in the world but if somebody can show me a little vcast or give me a step-by-step instruction, hell yeah, I'll take the cover off. I'll give it a try. Especially if it's something that I really want to have happen.
Jon: So how do you see that getting woven together with the book stuff at some point?
CJ: Oh I think multimedia is where the world is going. And it has everything to do with learning styles.
Jon: Yeah.
CJ: To be able to customize my learning in the way that fits my style, that's the ultimate for me. So if I'm a visual learner, and I can choose between reading text or looking at pictures to show me how to do something, or watching a video that shows me how to do something, I can choose the style that's right for me. I definitely think vcasts are the next podcasts. Especially with video iPods and those kinds of players out there. Look at iTunes U. More and more of that is coming to the forefront, and the benefit to us as consumers of that is we get to choose what's best for our learning style.
Jon: I suppose a lot of the bottleneck now is on the production side. If the stuff were available people would be snapping it up. Take our situation. It's obvious at this point that an InfoWorld review of a software product should be demonstrating it with a screencast and an audio voiceover of the highlights. But outside of what I've done that's yet to happen, and there are a variety of reasons for that. One of them is that I've spent quite a lot of time getting to the point where I am able to do that stuff competently and reasonably efficiently in terms of time.
CJ: Well what creates the tipping point are business models around increasing our motivation to do so, right?
Jon: Right.
CJ: Right and I think that's the challenge. We're all struggling with different business models that would allow us to put the resources and put the effort and put the time towards creating those kind of archives, and that's no small task.
Jon: No, it isn't.
CJ: Much as you can do it with nice little software and easy things on your Mac these days, it still takes time and effort and that's really the limiting part of the equation.
Jon: There was a story in the New York Times a while ago. The title was "Is Cinema studies the new MBA?" And the idea was that the use of multimedia communication tools is something that is moving out of the purely creative world and is moving into the business world. It will increasingly be considered just a normal mode of communication, along with what we've historically used to tell each other stories and to make presentations and to get our messages across to one another. This is a set of skills that right now people like you and I will self-motivate and learn, but that we should probably expect to be part of the three R's.
CJ: Right. A lot to think about, that's for sure, when we're sitting in our rocking chairs in the old age home. (laughter).
Jon: This was really fun!
CJ: It was great to catch up with you again Jon.
Jon: Yeah. Thanks for doing this.