What College Students Think

Coming up in February the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will be hosting a half-day conference in NYC entitled What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing. The focus will be on the changing needs of college students around course materials.

Julie Traylor (who leads OnCampus Research for NACS) and I will be presenting. However, in addition to speakers, the event will feature an exclusive preview into the findings from BISG's recent student survey: Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. The survey provides a new look into how students currently enrolled in 2-year, 4-year and for-profit institutions perceive and use different types of educational materials in their course of study.

Kelly Gallagher, Vice President of Publishing Services for Bowker commented that "The timeliness of this event, and the relevance of the data presented, will help academic publishers walk away with tangible insights into these areas." The same is likely true for those of us working in the college store industry, or using textbooks in the classroom.

I hope to see some of you there, and we will report back.

Upcoming at CAMEX

Next week one of the biggest NACS event of the year begins -- CAMEX. There will be plenty there to whet your digital appetite.

There will be a great catalyst session on Friday morning with Michael Wesch. Michael is an Anthropology professor in Kansas. He has become well known in the Internet/YouTube world for his videos on students and technology. Check out some of his videos: The Machine is Us/ing Us, Information R/evolution, and A Vision of Students Today. Along related lines, also check out Academia 2.0 and the "are we relevant" videos.

I will have the digital update session: Fighting Fire With Fire: Understanding Opportunities for College Stores in the New Digital Landscape. The title was set about a year ago and many things have happened since, but it should be a lively session this time. Among discussing some important new developments, we will also be laying out some of the elements and proposals put forth by the Digital Content Strategic Planning Taskforce, which will be discussed by the NACS Board the day before. Some of you have seen earlier drafts of that report, but we have some new action items in response to developments within the past two weeks.

At the same time as my session, the NACS General Business Meeting will take place. The general meeting is expected to run longer to allow for questions and recent developments are sure to engender some discussion.

On Saturday morning Todd Anderson will be giving a presentation on Print-on-demand (POD) entitled Espresso Books: Print-on-demand in the College Store . This should be a great session and one I hope many stores will attend. POD will be a big part of our strategy for stores this year, so here is an opportunity to learn from one of the most innovative stores in North America.

On Saturday afternoon there will be the E-books, Custom Books, and Print-on-demand - Idea Exchange . I am scheduled to be on a panel for health science stores at that time, but I am looking to hear what comes out of the discussion. I will be attempting to sit in for part of the discussion.

Of course there are many other sessions that are covering digital and retail technologies. I plan to make my CAMEX talk a bit different from earlier talks, and also different from the talks for PSG and LSG coming up in April. There always needs to be a bit of overlap, but I will do my best to provide new content -- this time around that should be easy as there are many new things to discuss.

Hope to see many of you at CAMEX!