Free Education, Anyone? Yes, Please!

If the thought of mandatory advanced mathematics or science courses in your degree plan have you terrified, you can take a prep course for free. Yes, FREE. Some of our nation’s top universities offer no- (or low-, as in $25.00) cost courses as preparation for more difficult classes, additional help with current classes, or a deeper dive into a particular subject.

Some of the websites are affiliated with the brick-and-mortar schools and universities, whether as a part of the school’s home site, or as a link. Others are hosted by foundations established to make education attainable for all. For upcoming freshmen, taking the introductory classes before taking CLEP tests can save money one would have spent on freshman class tuition. There is the potential of CLEPing out of many freshman courses in this manner, depending on the CLEPs taken and school requirements. It can definitely save at least some money.

If you have finished your degree and are working in the business arena, there are many free online classes that can enhance skills needed in the business world. Need more computer knowledge? It’s there. Management skills? They are there as well. Some of the courses can provide a certificate for a small fee if that is needed.

For the simply curious, who want to know more about a particular subject, there are classes that delve deeply into singular subjects. If home-schooling programs for children are lacking, or if a preparatory class would be beneficial for them, many universities and foundations have created (expressly because of COVID-19 situations) specially designed enhancement classes and seminar programs for school-age children, their parents, and teachers. Again, many of these are free or charge a nominal fee for membership or access.

Here is a closer look at some of the schools’ free courses:

AMSER

AMSER, the Applied Math and Science Education Repository, offers many free courses to boost knowledge in the everchanging world of STEM. It is a portal built specifically for those in Community and Technical Colleges, but are free for anyone to use. It is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library.

Need a refresher before taking that physics class? Choose from one of AMSER’s whopping 4,431 offerings in the physics category. Some classes are video series from the likes of the BBC, lectures from Tulane professors, and lectures and presented papers from the likes of U of Maryland and Stanford. Even those individuals who want more information on a particular subject will find this website a virtual treasure chest. Home-school parents and teachers will find it invaluable. For more information, go to www.amser.org .

Brigham Young University

This well-regarded Utah university offers both free academic courses as well as self-enrichment classes. Under its heading of free courses, one will find 31 currently available free classes from World History, to the Old Testament, to Introduction to Print Publishing. In their words, “So, whether you’re looking to better understand personal finance, learn how to build your family tree, or just try out our site before enrolling, our free courses are a valuable resource.” Visit them at: www.is.byu.edu/catalog/free-courses.

Open Learning Initiative

OLI, whose mission is to “transform higher education through the science of learning,” has a variety of subject classes to enhance college courses or for self-enrichment purposes. The course catalog includes offers classes in the arts and humanities, business, computer science and programming, data science and causal reasoning, language and speech, life sciences, physical sciences, and math and technology. OLI is affiliated with the renowned Carnegie Mellon University. While there are no free courses at OLI, most have small fees, starting at $25.00. Find them at: www.oli.cmu.edu/courses.

EDX

Harvard University has partnered with MIT for this amazing site for free learning, which is a platform and provider of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course). EDX has collected courses and programs from partner universities including Harvard and MIT, of course, but also Berkeley, U of California, and the U of Texas system to provide higher education to students globally. According to EDX, it is a “cutting-edge platform filled with the latest college courses.” A sample free course: Excel for Everyone: Core Foundations, offered by the University of British Columbia. If a Verified Certificate is needed, for an employer as proof of completion, the fee is $149.00. Find the perfect course at: www.edx.org .

TED-Ed

And, finally, for those who can’t get enough TED talks, TED’s established an award-winning education extension “to share and spread ideas from teachers and students.” This global network boasts more than 250,000 teachers to help students learn a myriad of subjects, including a platform for those teachers to create interactive lessons. Here’s a sample of their free classes and videos: Underwater Farms vs. Climate Change, Think Like a Coder, Superhero Science, and oodles more at : www.ed.ted.com .

Understanding Digital Analytics and Its Value in Digital Publishing

“Digital analytics” is one of those shadowy web terms that sounds intimidating. The truth is much more comfortable to the trained writer, who is taught from her first composition class to know and write to her audience.

What Digital Analytics Means

Analytics is simply the process of examining data and using that analysis to make future decisions. Digital Management Encyclopedia Ryte Wiki notes that digital analytics is a marketing practice used to determine whether audience targeting measures are performing as expected and how to change messaging to target specific groups in the future. For writers, this means that the audience can often be predicted in particular detail before the first outline is drafted.

The most challenging part of understanding digital analytics is breaking through the marketing industry-specific jargon. Nabeena Mali created an excellent guide for newcomers, explaining key acronyms like CTR (click-thru rate) and CRO (conversion rate optimization). Understanding these terms helps writers find out exactly why and where their content may be failing to execute the desired goal–whether that be sales, audience building, or inspiring action. When that information is available, writers are able to target their future writing in order to reach a better ROI (return on investment).

How to Use Analytics in Digital Publishing

An understanding of analytics is helpful to writers in any digital publishing sphere. In an interview with community manager Molly Buccini, advertising content writer John King notes that developing an understanding of analytics led him to understand “what turns an excellent blog post into a solid marketing tool.” Likewise, technical writer Robert Desprez notes that analytics is essential to technical writers so that they can find out whether their content is informing the consumer and meeting his needs. In both of these situations, the writers describe a dynamic relationship between the writer and consumer. The writer’s content is shaped by what inspires the consumer to seek them out and respond to their content.

In a sense, every writer is a copywriter in the digital age. Writers must understand digital analytics because these metrics determine any product’s success or failure on the internet. The more training in analytics that a writer has, the more prepared she will be to succeed in the competitive digital publishing sphere.

How to Get Analytics Training

The most popular analytics program on the web is Google Analytics. Google offers a comprehensive Academy for training customers to use their Analytics program, ranging from the navigation of the dashboard to maximization of program benefits. Adding Google Analytics to a website is as simple as copying and pasting some code.

Even if the analytics program a writer uses is not Google Analytics, their Academy is the most comprehensive background training available and should translate well. After completing Google Academy, a writer may choose to pursue further site-specific certifications such as Facebook Blueprint and Twitter Flight School. Each of these social platforms uses unique algorithms. Writing platform-specific content with an understanding of what those algorithms value will help a writer’s digital publishing career to flourish.

E-books: A Psychological Effect in all Aspects of Our Life

Willie Olsen
Nov 10, 2019
Nov 10 at 10:51pm

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E-books: A Psychological Effect in all Aspects of Our Life
E-books have become an essential yet damaging part of our lives. Not
only do they provide countless hours of recreation and entertainment
for people of all ages, but they have also become impactful in our
professional lives as well.

Employment- It is a realistic assumption that most professional fields in
existence have been affected by e-readers. White collar jobs like
doctors keep notes in surgery about the patient and the procedure for
quick access. Lawyers have access to an unlimited amount of past cases
to quote during trial. Bankers and loan officers have instant access to
resources like Kelly Blue Book
(Links to an external site.)
and mortgage rates. Blue Collar job’s
such as HVAC
(Links to an external site.)
(Heating and Air Conditioning) technicians use e-
readers to keep a track of jobs and materials, as well as invoicing.
Landscapers have access to resources like SLP (setting of landscape
plants), which is a state required course for a license. Repair
technicians make utilize e-book type touch screens to navigate very
complex commands, for instance, technicians who repair highly
specialized medical equipment. Even mechanics require the use of e-
readers because companies such as SnapOn
(Links to an external site.)
use a form of e-reader as
their diagnostic computer to ascertain vehicle codes needed for
repairs.

Many companies have made the switch to a digital version of company
manuals and policy handbooks. They now also offer training through e-
books, making it easier than ever for employees to work on
professional development. In today’s world, employees simply don’t
have the time for training and studying of materials. In an article by
Thomas Madsen
(Links to an external site.)
, a study was sited that showed “employees can only
spare about 1% of their weekly time – on professional development.
That amounts to about 24 minutes a week”. Training through e-books
gives the employees flexibility to allow for training whenever they can.

Education- E-books simplify and enhance the overall learning
experience and has had a positive impact on the quality of education.
E-books make the learning process more interactive and engaging.
Digital learning content is some of the most exciting and potentially
impactful content to date. By utilizing the multi-faceted abilities of the
internet, the student working to earn a degree has more technology at
their disposal than ever before. From researching paper topics to
taking notes in class, e-books can successfully perform a plethora of
tasks which formerly required the student to spend unlimited hours at
the university library and manually taking notes. One of the most
engaging features for students is that e-books give the ease of
highlighting, annotating, and sharing notes with friends, tutors or study
groups.

Although e-books seem to have greatly enhanced our lives by making
our education and jobs easier, they have proven to be equally as
damaging.

Digital Dementia – ‘Dementia’ is a term sadly all too familiar these days,
as instances soar of Alzheimer’s disease and other comparable
conditions all characterized by confusion, disorientation, and impaired
memory—literally a ‘loss of mind.’ However, the notion that an
analogous state might be linked to the screen lifestyle is as
controversial as it is potentially troubling.
“Digital Dementia” is a term coined by neuroscientist Manfred Spitzer
to describe an overuse of digital technology resulting in the breakdown
of cognitive abilities.1 Spitzer proposes that short-term memory
pathways will start to deteriorate from underuse if we overuse
technology. Although, in this blog, we have recently explored
outsourcing your memory to smartphones, these two concepts are
different—the mental disarray within the brain implied by the term
‘dementia’ is far more basic and complete. An under-practiced memory
process is far from being comparable to the wider cognitive
devastation that is dementia. (Susan Greenfield)
Loss of social skills – Children’s social skills may be declining as they have
less time for face-to-face interaction due to their increased use of digital
media, according to a UCLA psychology study. UCLA scientists found
that sixth graders who went five days without even glancing at a
smartphone, television or other digital screen did substantially better
at reading human emotions than sixth-graders from the same school
who continued to spend hours each day looking at their electronic
devices.

“Many people are looking at the benefits of digital media in education,
and not many are looking at the costs,” said Patricia Greenfield, a
distinguished professor of psychology in the UCLA College and senior
author of the study. “Decreased sensitivity to emotional cues — losing
the ability to understand the emotions of other people — is one of the
costs. The displacement of in-person social interaction by screen
interaction seems to be reducing social skills.” (Stewart Wolpert)

Social Isolation- What are the repercussions of social isolation in
teens? Research has shown that verbal conversations and face-to-face
communications decrease stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental
health issues. Connecting with others through social media is not as
rewarding. Kids that feel socially isolated already may be more drawn
to social media, while also being more emotionally vulnerable to the
risks. An unbalanced portion of time online may contribute to:

Higher mortality rates. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh
report that kids that feel socially isolated have a higher rate of
mortality.

Distractions. The frequent interruptions from pings and notifications
keeps teens engaged (or addicted) on social media sites, and distracts
teenagers (and adults) from being fully engaged in the present
moment.

Social comparison. Research suggests that using Facebook frequently
can increase the likelihood of unrealistic social comparisons and
depression.

Lack of sleep, anxiety, depression, self-esteem. The University of
Glasgow researched the potential influence of nighttime use of
technology on teenage sleep, anxiety, depression, and self-esteem. The
study concluded that the nighttime use of social networking increased
the incidences of depression and anxiety.

Failing grades. Sleep disruption contributes to failing grades.

The list continues to grow as science and research reveals more and
more effects of the use of e-books on our psychological states. All of
these negative effects that have been revealed thus far beg the
question – How do we cope with the damaging effects of e-books,
whilst benefitting from the technological advantages?

Content Wars: Rise of the Podcast

People prefer to receive their daily news in different ways. From radio to television, print to Facebook, news stories fill almost every platform. More and more traditional sources are turning to podcasts, the most recent trend in digital news publishing.

Podcasts: New or Old?

Though David Winer developed the medium, and Adam Curry popularized it, Ben Hammersley coined the actual term “podcast” in 2004. In an article for The Guardian, Hammersley “rattled off possible names for this booming new medium, the ‘pod‘ of podcast is borrowed from Apple’s ‘iPod‘ digital media player; and the ‘cast‘ portion of podcast is taken from Radio’s ‘broadcast‘ term.” The name and the concept took off.

According to International Podcast Day, a site dedicated to the celebration of podcasts,

“A ‘podcast’ is sort of difficult to explain because there really isn’t anything else like it — but rather, many things that are kind of like it. A good starting point, is to think of a podcast as ‘Internet Radio On-Demand.’ It’s similar in that you can usually listen to it on your computer — but it’s more than that. [However, and not to confuse the issue, podcasting isn’t confined to just audio but can be video as well].”

While podcasting shares many similarities with traditional radio broadcasting, two media’s differences allow podcasts to pave their own way in the digital media world. Contrary to conventional radio, podcasts offer on-demand content that users can access any place, any time. They also have the advantage of being “narrowcast” based on individual, specified content for an identifiable audience.

The New York Times and Podcasting

The New York Times, a newspaper founded in 1851, is known worldwide for its readership and prestige. With over 150 years in the field of journalism, the Times attributes its continued success to its ability to meet readers in their everyday lives. I cover more of the changes it has undergone in “Changing with the Times.”

With the emergence of podcasts, writers at the Times saw a chance to reach readers in a new and more individualized way. According to Ken Doctor, when the Times released its first podcast in 2006, “only 11 percent of U.S. adults listened to any podcast and only 22 percent had even heard the term.”

The New York Times uses the advantage of the medium’s niche nature to its advantage, and its shows branch into topics that may not have made it to print before. With series varying from book reviews to pop culture, even love and sex, the Times has truly embraced the culture of podcasts.

“The Daily,” one of the most popular series in the Times’ repertoire, touts the motto “this is how the news should sound. Twenty minutes a day, five days a week.” Hosted by political journalist Michael Barbaro, “The Daily” began in early 2017 and became a hit within a few short months.

“The Daily” had reached over 100 million downloads by October of the same year. Sam Dolnick, Barbaro’s assistant, says, “we’ve built a flexible enough frame that I think lots and lots of different things can fit inside of it.”

The New Yorker, a fellow New York-based news company, sent its praises to “The Daily” in an article dedicated to the success of the podcast series. New Yorker journalist Rebecca Mead writes that, through “The Daily,” The New York Times “becomes conversational and intimate, instead of inky and cumbersome. It’s a twenty-minute update murmured in your ear by a well-informed, sensitive, funny, modest friend.”

As of 2018, “The Daily” continued to receive over 1.1 million downloads each weekday. Advertisements pay for the episodes, so listeners get access to the show for free, with new podcasts released every weekday.

The New York Times has another major podcast success under its belt: “Caliphate” the company’s series “following Rukmini Callimachi as she reports on the Islamic State and the fall of Mosul.” Its first narrative nonfiction podcast, “Caliphate” takes a look at the War on Terror and asks, “who are we really fighting?” Listeners can find the podcast, along with its transcripts, on the Times’ site.

The Podcast Craze

The Times isn’t the only one impressed with podcasts: Hannah King describes the attraction of podcasting in the Trojan Digital Review. Versatility defines the beauty of podcasts; anyone can make one anywhere. In her article “Have We Hit Peak Podcast?” New York Times journalist Jennifer Miller addresses the idea easy entrance to the medium might be what leads to its ultimate downfall.

“Like the blogs of yore, podcasts — with their combination of sleek high tech and cozy, retro low — are today’s de rigueur medium, seemingly adopted by every entrepreneur, freelancer, self-proclaimed marketing guru and even corporation,” Miller writes. She quotes host Jordan Harbinger of “The Jordan Harbinger Show” saying, “I love podcasting, and the more shows in the mix the better, as long as they’re done by someone who actually cares and isn’t just trying to get a piece of pie.”

Harbinger goes on to say that the world of podcasting needs “a real conversation that will benefit the audience, not the host.” Through this logic, the Times’ position in podcasting culture will not fizzle out anytime soon. The New York Times has a great tradition of journalistic excellence, and through branching out into the realm of podcasting, it once again secured its spot among the most read, and now listened to, news companies in the world.

Traversing the E-book Subscription Frontier

In a world of subscription services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, and Apple Music, e-book distributors are attempting to explore this new frontier by offering subscription services for e-books, audiobooks, magazines, and more.

Why Subscribe to Books?

With the prevalence of streaming services, it makes a lot of sense that electronic book distributors would attempt to get in on the on-demand game in order to better ensure the security of their books. After all, e-book piracy is just as common as movie or music piracy. It isn’t hard to find a digital copy of a book and just put it up on a file-sharing website – or worse, someone may go to the effort to photocopy a physical copy of a book and upload that file. Even Google cannot escape issues of Fair Use and copyright when it comes to digitally distributing books.

As a way of stopping piracy, groups looking to distribute books are now offering a subscription to the very books people are stealing. This way, those who would pirate the books out of convenience have ease and accessibility to books that they want, and distributors have a legal subscription model that covers their backs in the copyright issues.

Top E-book Subscription Contenders

For readers unsure of what subscription service to use, Make Use Of mentions six services that are going strong, and Book Riot has a list of 17 options available in 2019. Between these and other articles, two names rise to the top.

Scribd, an organization started in 2009, launched their subscription in 2013 and have had a fair amount of success at their price of $8.99/month. They offer over 500,000 books, as well as plenty of audiobooks, articles, documents, and magazines, at a rate that is lower than much of the competition. They were the quasi-pioneers in this world of e-book subscription services.

The other popular option is Kindle Unlimited (KU). Amazon’s own service is priced at $9.99/month or $59.99/six-months with frequent “50% off for six months” deals. Like Scribd, Kindle Unlimited also offers audiobooks and magazines.

With both services, you can listen to or read as much diverse content as you could realistically want or hope to consume in a reasonable amount of time. The difference, then, comes down to convenience and exclusive content.

The price for KU is not particularly competitive unless you snag the 50% off deal, but you can, however, use your Kindle – and, considering Kindle products make up three of 2019’s top five e-readers, Kindle Unlimited already has a large install base of people committed to reading e-books. All those readers have to do is click a button and they’re in the service. It’s quick and easy, and suddenly over 1 million books are available.

Book Riot points out that Amazon does not have an unlimited deal with every publisher that they have on the main website: thus while it has more books in general, it doesn’t stand out in its list of best sellers. You’ll still find yourself paying for some more recent and popular books. Furthermore, Amazon only offers 61 magazines. That’s enough to keep anyone busy, but a quick glance through the cheaper service, Scribd, and its selection shows significantly more magazines than that (in addition to individually searchable articles and documents). Ultimately, it’s clear that Scribd can fill more specific magazine niches.

Niche Services

For readers looking for something other than e-books, some more audience-specific services do exist. Marvel Unlimited allows unparalleled access to over 25,000 Marvel comics anywhere you want for only $9.99/Month, and Amazon has a service called ComiXology that has 20,000 “comics and manga from DC, Marvel, Dark Horse, and other publishers.” ComiXology Unlimited is free to subscribers for the first 30 days, but is then $5.99/month. Unlimited offers exclusive members discounts and unlimited reading anywhere.

Epic! has unlimited access to 35,000 books, videos, and quizzes aimed at children 12 years of age and younger. Due to the increasingly expanding nature of digital publishing, readers have a lot of unique options for subscription services.

Is an E-book Subscription Worthwhile?

Subscription reading services are cool on the surface, but you may be wondering if it’s really worth it. Subscription services for movies or TV shows makes sense: we can pay $109.99 for all of Breaking Bad by itself. Or, we can watch the whole thing on Netflix in a few months, watch a two-hour movie every night of the month, and the occasional documentary while only paying $12.99/month.

Not to mention, new Blu-Ray discs of movies can cost anywhere from $5.00 to $30.00 on Amazon. As such, watching two new movies on Netflix, or three to four older movies, could make the cost of the service for the month in the span of a couple days. And Hulu (with ads) is cheaper than Netflix, making it easier to make up the cost if you so desire.

For e-book subscriptions, a reader can order the entire hardback Harry Potter series for $122.99 from Walmart, or they can read the entire series on Kindle Unlimited for $9.99 a month.

So, what kind of reading do you need to do to make up the cost of a subscription e-book service? Apparently, $3.99 is the sweet spot for selling e-books. So, a service that costs $8.99-$9.99 means you’re going to have to read at least two, maybe three e-books to validate the cost.

When Kindle Unlimited launched, most titles were only worth $0.99 to $4.99. Sure, it has gotten better as time goes on, but most book services will run into this same issue. You would have to read about five to ten books to make that cost back, and many of them are probably books you haven’t heard of. And books can be long — significantly longer than movies and TV shows.

If you look at the length of audiobooks, it’s not entirely uncommon to have an audiobook listening time of more than 24 hours total for the same price as a Blu Ray disc. Some books are significantly longer, like Stephen King’s It, which has a listening time of almost 45 hours. You’re getting a lot of time out of that book, certainly, but that’s just one book. It may be better for certain readers to just buy that one book than to subscribe to a service where they will only read it once.

You have to be an incredibly voracious reader to get an appropriate amount of value out of a subscription reading service. Basically, if you read two books a month, then it may be more cost effective to buy them outright.

Also, the unlimited e-book subscription services are still figuring some details out regarding royalties. Written Word Media mentions some interesting things about Kindle Unlimited, for example. While it used to be that someone adding the book to their library by buying it was enough to get the author paid, now people have to physically enter and read the book for the author to see a cent of payment. Not to mention, Scribd has changed their plan from unlimited downloads, to limited, to unlimited a few times, causing distrust with its subscriber base.

While the niche services seem like a good idea as well, their contracts don’t seem to include a free range of books – rather, they offer discounts to members for comics and figurines. This lack of contract clarity can be confusing for new subscribers.

The world of subscription e-book services is a real frontier’s frontier. It adds the debate about the viability of subscription services to the already fluid world of digital publishing. The royalty model, in addition to the low average price of books in the services, indicates that e-book subscription services may not be worth it for the average reader or the author. However, the world of subscription e-book services, like any digitally published form of entertainment, is constantly evolving, growing, failing, and triumphing anew. It’s up to individual readers like us to decide when to move out west.

Creative Writing in Video Games

I first started experimenting with creative writing by inviting a few friends over for a creative writing session. The results of our writings led me to believe our method of writing can be capitalized on by video games. Furthermore, the video game medium has many more creative writing applications that encourage writing and may make the writing process more fun for those not particularly driven to write.

What my friends and I did was to have someone come up with a writing prompt. Then, we all took about 10 minutes to write on whatever the person’s idea was. Finally, we arranged everyone’s work together and read our disparate writings as one continuous story. We would come up with transition phrases between our individual pieces to make things flow, or we started with an idea that allowed the pieces to maintain relative cohesion with one another.

Hilarity ensued as our works coincided in the worst ways possible. Video games can cultivate and allow for similar group creative writing processes. The game, Storium, entails a narrator creating an overarching story and guiding players through the scenes. However, players also contribute to the writing and direction of the story.

The tutorial of Storium showcases how the narrator writes out a scene, and the players are then forced to respond. Each player’s character has specific traits and abilities that guide the writing. For example, in the tutorial you are ambushed by wolves. The other players all perform badly due to their character flaws, but your character finds a solution to the situation due to their quick thinking and survival experience. Since you caused a good outcome to occur, you get to write what happens next while also getting to include a positive benefit for your team. Furthermore, each other player’s responses were entirely written out by the players themselves as the situation progressed. The narrator then responds to the player’s decision making and continues to guide the story along.

Storium is an excellent example of how video games can operate as a platform for creative writing that brings people together in a fun and collaborative writing experience. Once the story is done, you and your friends have a complete story made from scratch.

The video game, NieR: Automata^TM developed by Square Enix, PlatinumGames Inc., also provides an example of how games can encourage and provide a space for creative writing. In NieR: Automata^TM you play as an android, and whenever you die your identity can live on by placing you into a different body; however, your dead body is still on the Earth. Upon death, the game allows you to leave a message on your corpse by stringing together a few catalogued words and phrases into an intelligible message.

If you are playing while connected to the internet, then other players online can find and utilize your corpse for loot; furthermore, they also get to read your message which can be quite poetic. For example, one possible death message is: “A vengeful girl was distracted by a flower on a tower smiled upon by angels.” Sometimes, the meanings have absolutely no context, but nonetheless encourage creative thought and poetic writing.

NieR: Automata^TM’s death messages exemplify how video games can operate as a forum, platform, or medium through which players can publish their creative writing online. Furthermore, the creative writing experience of Storium and NieR: Automata^TM always entails a community participating in the creation of your writing or interacting with it in a fun and unique way.

Perhaps the most fun writing experiences I had in video games were through MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games); in particular, World of Warcraft developed by Blizzard Entertainment and Mabinogi developed by NEXON Korea Corps. My experiences in World of Warcraft can hardly be considered writing, but the fun of playing on a role-playing server with a guild full of people resulted in some of the most fantastic and fun to play through stories I have participated in. Games like World of Warcraft that allow players a lot of creative freedom can cultivate a lot of interesting creative writing stories that are fun to play through.

Mabinogi affords players the experience of being able to compose and play music through the video game. I didn’t understand how to utilize this feature to create my own works, but I could copy-paste other people’s compositions from other websites into my in-game scroll and then play music on whatever instrument my character could get their hands on. Oftentimes, I would end up having a group of fellow players with all our various instruments showing off anime soundtracks we had recreated in the video game. I was always impressed when someone had created their own music.

Experiences like the ones offered in Mabinogi allow players to literally play through the creative writing process, and then share their creations with other people in group sessions where everyone’s avatar gathers, reads, and recites. Oftentimes, MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) games can function as forums for the avatars to meet in and discuss their writing among themselves.

My first experience with creative writing in a video game was not from within a game that allowed me to share my work with other players though. I remember playing my Pokémon Sapphire Version – developed by Game Freak – on my Game Boy Advance SP and being prompted to write a short statement by a news crew. After giving them a statement, I could then interact with a T.V. in game where a reporter would regurgitate my lines back at me like I was a celebrity. The ability to modify a game through creative writing was amazing.

I believe that video games that incorporate creative writing in interesting ways can inspire, cultivate, and allow players to even publish their creative works online. Furthermore, video games are a prime medium through which community writing can be experienced. I have not seen many video games that incorporate creative writing by the player’s in-game, but when I do, they’re a blast! There’s nothing like looting an android corpse and being rewarded with a hilarious quote written by a fellow player.

Sell Yourself First

Self-publishing digital content can grow to be an incredibly lucrative business. Although individuals might feel like it is easier to publish their work, rather than dealing with big businesses and the possibility of rejection letters, that means the work falls on the writer’s shoulders.

But the work of self-publishing does not have to be daunting. With proper preparation, publishing the individual’s work can be incredibly rewarding. Self-publishers have to consider everything that any company would when marketing a book or any other content.

Authors who make content that might not be picked up by larger publishers can find an income from self-publishing and marketing themselves and their writing. The author can find an alternate route, through digital publishing, that is not readily available to print publishers.

Effective self-publishers should begin marketing their content before the content is even complete. At this point, they are marketing themselves, and perhaps some previous writing they have done. For those without previous writing, they are marketing themselves as an author.

YouTube has become one of the tools of marketing. A community of “BookTubers” exists on YouTube that discusses books with their fans, and some are currently working on projects.

Popular “BookTuber” Savannah Brown, with roughly half a million subscribers, recently posted a video about how her self-published book of poetry sold 20,000 copies. For the past five years, on and off, she has been able to posts poetry videos. Then for two years, she has been posting various snippets of the writing process and has accumulated a following that would go on to purchase her books. Although she did not digitally publish, she self-published to Amazon through their print on demand service (copies of her book are printed only when they are bought).

The service she uses for print on demand is Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows anyone to publish their book with Amazon freely. Writers can “earn up to 70% royalty on Kindle eBook and 60% on paperback sales.”

Brown talks openly about pricing, especially regarding her first attempt to publish her book of poetry with a small publishing company that she worked directly with, and it adds up to roughly $1,000. However, through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, the fees are minimal until they take a 30% royalty fee.

However, there are plenty of platforms to self-publish on. Brown talks about building an audience so that new writers are not throwing a book into the void of these platforms.

She expresses how she had garnered a following through YouTube long before she ever published her first book. She states how people can develop a following on Instagram. With social media, a single author can reach millions of people and is the most effective way to build an audience when self-publishing.

Building an audience is slow-going, even with an interesting novel idea. In some cases, it requires that the author goes viral in some meaningful way so that an influx of people go to their social media.

Digital publishing expert David Gaughran talks about:”

a completely different approach to marketing is emerging, based on a constant drip approach, heavy on email marketing, big on lead-gen ads, adopting a ‘micro-targeting’ approach to finding readers.

Email marketing allows authors to develop a loyal audience. Emails go directly to the audience, rather than posting exclusively on social media and hoping they will come across it. Blogging can be another effective way of garnering an audience, especially because your readers already enjoy reading lengthy posts. Typically, bloggers will have a pop-up on their website, inviting people to sign up for their email subscription.

Perhaps the most important part of social media marketing is engaging with your audience. Depending on the author and the genre, they will have to create an audience that is most likely to be drawn to their writing. For young adult novelists, their audience might be found more on Instagram or Snapchat. Something more niche, like magical realism, might find an audience in blogging and advertising on all social media, including Facebook pages.

Advertising is another important step in marketing. Advertisements cost per day, and the cost increases based on how long it will run and how many users the ad will reach — all of the marketing for a novel starts with the individual advertising themselves and their social media. Facebook or Instagram are payable platforms to broadcast a post or photograph to the rest of its users.

Once an author has developed a loyal audience self-publishing a book does not seem nearly as daunting. If Properly done, the audience will enjoy the author and the work they have previously read and more than willing to buy the book.

Many of these steps can be repeated and continued to grow a larger following and sell more books after you have already published your book. With curating a following on social media comes more opportunities for cash flow, more eyes on the individual and their work. The possibilities are endless, and, with self-publishing, they are all in your hands.

Interactive E-Books: Where Did They Come From, and Where Are They Going

Interactive e-books are taking the digital world by storm. However, while recent developments in electronic texts are exciting, the revolutionizing of book interaction is not new. Publish Drive explains,

Even if we don’t count coloring books, pop-ups and all kinds of hands-on books for kids, traditional printed books that allow the readers to interact or change the story some way or another have been around for a while now.

Interactive e-books are mimicking innovations made in interactive print publishing while also creating new features unique to the digital medium.

The new features of e-books increase audience engagement by including media that the reader can play with. Publish Drive continues, “Interactive ebooks come in two major forms: apps and enhanced ebooks.” Essentially the e-books are made for browsing through an app on the web, on a mobile device, or on a desktop, and the app supports the media.

The other option involves creating an ePub file that internally supports all the different media. “Books made this way are called enhanced ebooks, and offer a significant level of customizability. This includes easy to enlarge pictures, embedded video and audio, and excellent accessibility.”

Features of Enhanced E-books

Authors have a vast array of features they can choose to utilize in their interactive e-books. Videos, animations, and voice-overs are popular inclusions. For visual aids, companies like Pearson use interactive diagrams with pop-up labels and definitions, changing infographics, responsive maps, calculators, and other activities that promote visual learning and engagement.

The most salient features though, include supported activities that can usually be found in print books as well. Features such as quizzes, word searches, comprehension activities, and checklists that e-books can generate and check. No more looking up the answers in a guide or waiting for class reviews; the books can do it all on their own.

Two main factors limit the types and volume of additional media that the author can put in their e-books: copyright restrictions and file size restrictions. If copyright prevents the inclusion of videos and other media, then try embedding them. If they block embedding, then link.

Amazon charges a “delivery fee” for some sales based on the size of the e-book, so authors working with them should be aware of that. As Kotobee says, “Otherwise, the main concern with a large file size is happy readers.” Audiences will tolerate large file, i.e. time consuming, downloads for important texts like academic textbooks much more than pleasure texts like novels.

Examples of Enhanced E-books

The interactive e-books on the market typically fall into three categories: academic texts, adult texts, and children’s books.

According to Iltifat Husain, MD, the most interactive textbook on the market is Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology. The book features pop-up definitions, interactive label diagrams, surgery videos, and extensive annotation capabilities. Pearson’s Biology and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Modern Chemistry also rank pretty high for number of downloads but lack elegance, says Alex Reinhart.

The adult-oriented interactive e-books fit several different genres; novels like The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins and Do or Die by Clark Kokich do well on the market. The most promising entertainment genre though appears to be cookbooks. For example, Look&Cook is an interactive cookbook that includes the usual step-by-step instructions along with voiceover instructions, built-in timers for recipe steps, video tutorials, and emailed shopping lists.

Children’s books typically feature animations and background music like the ones in Two Worlds, One Child’s Heart by Vered Kaminsky and Sparklify the Earth by Sandra Rose Gunn, which Publish Drive’s blog promotes.

Platforms for the Creation and Distribution of Interactive E-Books

Not all interactive e-books have to be coded by hand though. Kotobee offers a platform specifically geared to enhanced text creation through widgets. Flip PDF does the same thing and enables PDF-usable for the initial upload. Apple’s iBook Author, Aquafadas, PubCoder, Atavist, Calibre, and Sigil all offer the same capabilities. Most platforms that facilitate e-book creation will enable enhanced e-books. Platforms for distribution are a different story, though.

Two things determine access to interactive e-books: the device and the distributor. For example, Amazon supports enhanced texts, but their Kindles do not. Kobo tablets support enhanced texts, but leave their apps and other devices lacking. Google Play Books does not support interactive e-books, but Apple iBooks does. Consequently, authors and publishers bear the responsibility of knowing what platform the audience will use.

Success for Interactive Iterations of E-Books

Interactive texts continue to climb the ranks for B2B publishers, students, and casual readers. Map Systems India explains that for students an enhanced e-book “helps them to participate in the learning process, increasing their activities on the platform. For instance, you need not explain them the procedure of completing a task.”

Kitaboo published an article that details all the ways interactive texts surpass regular e-books such as being easier to update and revise. Furthermore, interactive texts provide: more accessibility to readers who may struggle to read a standard e-book; the ability to “link content to additional resources;” and, “Content creators/publishers/institutes/enterprises can set up an assessment for post learning evaluation and even need analysis.”

Kitaboo also claims,

Through the functionalities of interactive eBooks, creators can embed multimedia which makes the content contextually relevant and easier to relate with. Integrating technologies give students an opportunity to learn by viewing 3D models. This adds a layer of information over reality to enhance the learning experience.

Implications for the Industry

Enhanced e-books appear to be here to stay. Snap App says, “This sustained popularity means static ebooks are only going to become more saturated, and readers more numb to them.” Only recently have companies begun to understand how important their digital content is. Reinhart complained about the sloppiness of the e-books publishers are putting out when he stated:

It seems that textbook publishers are only willing to invest effort in multimedia, animations, and interactivity for big intro books—books which will sell tens of thousands of copies to bored students who will generally avoid reading them.

Consequently, good interactive e-books may be far and few between for now, but the ones coming in the future should be truly revolutionary.

Data Analysis for the Publishing World

The digital publishing environment has transformed into a business that requires authors and publishers to explore data capture tools to stay relevant. Kevin Petrie, Dan Potter, and Itamar Ankorion, authors of the free e-book Streaming Change Data Capture: A Foundation for Modern Date Architectures found on Qlik write:

Data is creating massive waves of change and giving rise to a new data-driven economy that is only beginning. Organizations in all industries are changing their business models to monetize data, understanding that doing so is critical to competition and even survival.

A good bit of the data analysis explored in this text focuses on big businesses, such as Ford or Fanatics. But digital publishing is a business in and of itself.

The data collected by big business matters for the small business entrepreneur as well; they need the same information to intelligently navigate the field. Although curated analyses such as these are difficult to access for the average Joe, one could take a single Google search and transform it into usable data easily.

Publishing Parameters

The content authors release should fill spaces that are most likely to host the author’s target audience; whether the author writes textbooks on Medieval literature or high fantasy fiction novels, each topic requires its own audience.

The audience’s age, profession, education, and interests form the foundations of publishers’ data analysis. All of these factors contribute to what each reader wants and where they will retrieve the content from. An academic audience might be less likely to search for textbooks for an e-reader but would rather search on Chegg Books, whereas high fantasy seekers might search Amazon or Barnes and Noble for these novels.

Keep in mind that publishing for specific e-readers (like the Kindle) isn’t smart either, though, seeing as “sales of e-reader devices are falling rapidly.” However, Amazon provides a free Kindle app for smartphones, and according to Derek Haines people are using their cell phones to read e-books more than ever. While e-reader sales decline, e-books continue to rise in popularity for this reason. Amazon’s e-reader might not be declining, but their free app is readily available for the few who might loyally continue using the device.

The Methods of Data Collection

Most publishing services provide a dashboard for screening published material’s visitors. Adobe’s Audience Manager also offers a popular data management service. Otherwise, a tracking pixel, or a graphic that tracks user behavior and other information, can be activated on the publisher’s website to gather this sort of data. Facebook also provides a way to create a pixel to add to the publisher’s website.

Minute details such as how the audience will read their e-books are important factors of data analysis. Given these findings, the author must consider font, type size, and other features that they otherwise would not have because their audience is more likely to be reading on a smartphone.

Uses for Data in Digital Publishing

In an interview between the head of Global Automated Monetization at Watson Advertising and eMarketer’s Ross Benes, they discussed how “few publishers have created new revenue lines out of their data, even though the digital publishing industry is struggling during a time when data is alleged to be the new oil” Rather than just selling the information to publisher’s advertising clients, as many already do, it should be used to strengthen their own business

SailThru provides guidance on how to use the 1^st party data that comes from the audience to create a better publishing business.

Develop ownership of an audience
Personalize content that people will pay for
Sell a better audience to advertisers
Use a subscription model

All of these ideas can be implemented at the self-publishing level and higher.

The collection of data is also beneficial for the consumer because the content they will receive will be more tailored to their interests. Consuming this content will be more worthwhile, worthy of precious time and money: both publisher and consumer benefit from this collection of data.

Proceeding with Data Incorporation

With Facebook’s recent data breach breaking headlines, it is in the user’s best interest to carefully vet the institutions privy to the collected materials. Along the lines of best practices, usually, publishers decide what to do with the data they receive from their audience.

They can easily put the information out onto the internet for any advertiser to purchase, but they should be selective with who the information is shared with and who it is purchased by so that the audience does not end up finding out that their information was spread on the internet and feel betrayed.

With these best practices and publishers can make data analysis into an incredible tool for identifying the biggest source of income. People want to feel like their money is serving them well, and investing it into a business that prioritizes things that interest them will make people feel better about spending their money on the publisher’s product and content.

The Fleeting Nature of Technology

The internet and technology are either extremely permanent or uniquely fleeting. Your Facebook post from that cute diner a week ago is still there, but the odds of anyone ever needing or wanting to find it again are practically zero. However, efforts like Project Gutenberg strive to preserve literature in a digital format so that generations will have access to it without having to worry about the physical decay of printed books.

Nonetheless, technologies are always fighting each other for dominance. If someone said the greatest movie in the entire world was only available on HD DVD, and I would probably never make any effort to see it. Blu-ray won the race and proved to be the dominant format. It would be inconvenient to find, buy, and set up an entire piece of technology just for the sake of one movie. Any HD DVD specific art films are lost to the annals of obsolescence and the impermanence of digital content. The world of digital publishing has been and certainly will be affected by the obsolescence of technology: for every preservation project, there’s an art form lost.

Lost Formats

Adobe Flash Player has been a staple of internet playback since its release in 1996. It helped revolutionize the way we view content online. It opened up a whole world of games, animation, and multimedia content that has become a staple of the internet. In its early days, YouTube used Flash Player to display videos. As such, it was a safe bet to use Flash Player to create content. Things like “Faith” require Flash to display the E-Poetry, which is fine in a world where Flash player is everywhere. However, time marches on, and technology changes at a rapid pace. CNN Business states the following:

But the software has been plagued with bugs and security vulnerabilities in recent years. Modern browsers support open web standards like HTML5, allowing developers to embed content directly onto webpages. This has made add-on extensions like Flash mostly useless.

Flash player is being phased out. Its whole deal, as an add-on extension, is becoming obsolete. YouTube moved off of Flash in 2015. HTML5 is simply better than Flash for the purpose that it serves. However, things get lost in the transition. What happens to “Faith” when Flash disappears in 2020? Unless the author/artist or someone else takes the opportunity to recreate, port, or record it, it’s just gone. E-Poetry commonly uses Flash. Some interesting poems are going to simply disappear as a result. It’s not worth it to resurrect a buggy, and vulnerable software just to read/watch avant-garde poetry.

E-poetry like “Girl’s Day Out” and “Pentametron” bring other interesting questions into play. They are files that can be downloaded. However, they only have versions tailored to Mac or Windows operating systems. That’s completely fine, for the most part, but what about other operating systems? For example, 30 million students and educators use Chromebooks as of January 2019. These files will not run on Chrome OS.

Most e-poetry does not have the cultural impact of William Shakespeare or Shel Silverstein, but they will be lost to the annals of obsolescence if Mac and Windows go the way of the MS-DOS. Many books are available as PDFs, as well, but we are not guaranteed that PDF will be the primary file type forever. What happens if PDFs disappear? Digital publishing inevitably loses some interesting comics, articles, books, etc. when new technology takes over. Your favorite e-book may be unreadable on your computer ten years from now.

Corporate Issues

Planned obsolescence is another tactic that has companies like Apple dodging lawsuits: “Italy’s antitrust organisation is also investigating both Apple and Samsung for the same issue.” The biggest tech companies that make most of the market share’s worth of smartphones no doubt operate like businesses with a bottom line rather than preservation efforts. Tech marches on organically like in the case of the swap from Flash to HTML5, but it also happens when companies need to meet deadlines.

Entire marketplaces may become obsolete in the future. It has already happened as Rachel Ward points out:

Microsoft’s discontinuation of their e-bookstore means that consumers will no longer be able to access and view Microsoft’s e-books. Customers who purchased the right to view the e-books within the past two years from the company are now unable to read them.

Microsoft created the store and limited it to the Edge browser to try and boost its use in the market. It didn’t garner enough traction, and now the store disappeared. With no physical trace, the entire store simply disappears. If you don’t get to your library in time for whatever reason, those books are gone.

The only thing that Microsoft offered was a full refund and an extra $25 if you added annotations according to Brian Barrett. He goes on to point out the cold reality: “And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse.” The books are gone.

While things like Project Gutenberg release books freely to download forever, the big companies like Amazon are tied to digital rights management. You simply license books from Amazon’s digital marketplace in the same way that you did from Microsoft. If those stores become obsolete, you’ll likely lose access to any purchases that you’ve made past a certain point.

Amazon has quietly removed books from libraries before. They were missing the proper rights to a version of George Orwell’s 1984, so therefore, readers were missing the proper rights, as well. It was removed from the store without fanfare. The interesting thing is that it wasn’t only removed from the store—it was deleted from readers’ devices.

Consumers are inextricable from the services they use. This connectedness is useful and handy so long as the services continue to operate. In the case of e-readers, we have instant access to thousands upon thousands of books. However, this necessitates that consumers are left crippled if the service is discontinued. We’ve seen it in the case of Microsoft discontinuing their store, and one day, Amazon’s library may be removed, as well. It will have been obsolete for a long time, by then, but many books are published only through Amazon—they will be gone.

Technology is a business, primarily. Consumers, readers in particular, depend on this technology to consume art old and new. Due to the evolution of technology, companies pushing new products, and the fact that digital rights do not physically exist, obsolescence has been and will be a permanent problem in the world of digital publishing.