A couple days I received an e-mail from Lina Lipscombe, director of the bookstore, computer store, and digital store at Concordia University in Montreal. I have long respected what a number of the Canadians are doing, and Lina is no exception. I asked if I could share her message, as I think it is a great example of what stores can do if they embrace this concept of communicating and educating the campus community:
Mark,
Last summer you shared with me the draft document re digital content. Included was the importance of communicating and educating the campus community. We signed with Jumpbooks this summer and started including e-books to our course list as an option for students. I took your advice and sought ways to communicate this to our community. Well one little article led to many other opportunities. Here are a few,
I contacted the editor of the Concordia faculty and staff paper and the following article appeared in the first week of classes
http://cjournal.concordia.ca/archives/20080911/door_opens_for_digital_textbooks.php
this article was then picked up by a student newspaper and they wrote the following
http://thelinknewspaper.ca/articles/153
The Quill and Quire national publisher magazine also contacted me and asked questions about digital (have not seen article yet) and finally the local television news company came in a did a video (I am not exactly star quality, but I think the message got through)
http://montreal.ctv.ca/cfcf/news/cfcf#news_25867Thought you might be interested how some schools are trying to bring attention to this new content delivery.
It started with a simple outreach to the campus faculty/staff newsletter, and resulted in national and local media coverage. The media is interested in what stores are doing digitally. It can be a great selling point on the value of the college store. Do others out there have stories about how they have communicated with their campus community around their use of digital? This is information and knowledge we should be sharing!
