Frank van Amerongen (1950) is managing director and publisher at ThiemeMeulenhoff, one of the mayor educational publishing houses in the Netherlands. In his early professional years he was a teacher in primary education and also an author for textbooks and translator of non-fiction reference books for young children. In the early eighties he started his career as a publisher. He was a nonfiction publisher at Tirion publishers for a short time, but his roots are deep into the educational publishing field, both for the primary and de secondary school market. Frank is the concept engineer behind many well known teaching methods published by amongst others Malmberg, where he worked for almost 10 years, and ThiemeMeulenhoff.

Frank van Amerongen @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

The gap between the teachers and pupils
One of the main topics of this talk by Frank van Amerong was about the gap between teachers and pupils when it comes to using Information and Communication Technology. The world of the teachers and pupils is totally different. This can not only be attributed to the way in which both use technology but this gap exists also because the educational system itself is changing. He stresses that this gap is only increasing in the future.

The main issues with the educational system
He went on to outline the main issues with the Dutch educational system and innovation, which are as follows. First of all, the results are not as good as they used to be, the skills that we use in the 21st century are not fully integrated in the educational system yet. The delivered content in the book is not as good as discovering or experiencing the content itself. Additionally, research has shown that boys and girls are different, their learning skills and the way that they obtain knowledge is inherently different. Van Amerongen states that our educational system is not addressing this difference. The educational system is based primarily on text but the pupils today no longer read. Van Amerongen states that another issues is that we know a lot about our brain and how we learn but not all of this knowledge is applied in education. Other issues in the Dutch educational system are that in the future there will be a lack of teachers and that there is no urge to pay more for education.

The future of educational publishing
To make the problems even bigger, new internet possibilities are increasing by the day. The educational publishers still publish books because that is what the teachers want. But what we need to do is gather information about who is using our content, it is all about profiling, sharable content and it is also about the delivering device itself. This device, according to van Amerong, will be different in the future. School book content can be distributed in whatever way that is demanded. Frank van Amerong stressed here that the content of the book is not confined to the book itself, something that was addressed multiple times at this conference. What he sees as schoolbooks are also, for instance, a smartboard with the learning material displayed on it (a picture, video or text). Or possibly Augmented Reality in the near future, that can be seen as a school book as well. Furthermore, Frank van Amerong, stressed that the publishing industry will not be the basic content providers in the future.

The publishing industry is not going to be a major content source for learners, but will be the broker and system integrator between teachers, students and content.

To conclude: from content supplier to service provider
To conclude, a shift can be seen from content supplier to service provider when it comes to educational publishers. The digital revolution, according to Frank van Amerong, is really about shift from providing content to providing a service. Van Amerong stated that “the publishing industry is not going to be a major content source for learners, but will be the broker and system integrator between teachers, students and content”. In the future, the books are no longer the issue, but the learning management systems are. The gap between the teachers and the learners will continue to grow and how are we going to deal with this issue? He concluded with the statement that educational publishing will be an industry that is oriented towards providing a service. The publishers as well as the teachers should “support learning environments to help the community of learners to communicate, create, publish, collaborate, teach and learn from each other.”

PDF of presentation available here: Reinventing Educational Publishing 

I met with Joost Kircz, the main organizer of the Unbound Book conference and director of research of Electronic Publishing at the Domain Media, Creation and Information of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. We spoke about the conference, the e-boekenstad project and about the still-elusive future of educational ebooks.  

SS: What are the primary goals of the e-boekenstad project? And how does the conference relate to this project?

JK: The goal of the e-boekenstad project is trying to understand the relationship between electronic versions of educational material and the changing book chain. It is a collaborative effort of publishers, distributors, libraries and companies working on electronic material in general as well as the HvA as an educational institute. The point is that creating electronic educational material is not just making a photograph of an oil painting and selling it as a postcard, it is trying to find out how changing substrates of messages are influencing the way material is written, read and understood.

The relationship with the conference is that for most people it is clear that for educational material e-learning will become important because people are struggling with a greater number of books (and in an electronic environment also with books formally known as ‘out of print’), working from various places or even travelling long distances. However for educational materials the reason for e-learning is clear but the implementation of new educational material has a very long way to go. At the conference we try to tackle problems such as what is the book as an object, and how should a book be edited and structured? The real thread in the conference is the educational material because there it becomes clear what can be changed. We don’t know yet what the effect will be of the changes. 

SS: How does the ideal educational ebook look?

JK: Honestly I don’t know, and even the educational publishers don’t know yet. The point is that for some parts of an electronic educational book you need text to make it understandable, explanatory text. Other parts can be much better explained in pictures, film or sound. This is the difference between an illustration and an explanation. You can illustrate reasoning in a picture; say the movement of tectonic plates. On the other end of the scale pictures are the primary information such as the picture of a wound or a tire imprint in mud as forensic evidence. Here it is the text that explicates what we see, and after that explication we will always immediately be able to recognize. In the case of a wound colour is essential.

There is always a balance between a picture as illustration to make the reasoning better understandable and primary information, which has other demands. The quality of colour is not important when it is to illustrate, like a graph of a company’s turnover. On the other hand it you want to describe a flower, something from nature, the quality of the colour is essential. The technical requirements depend on the type of information, the genres and on the type of understanding. The balance for educational books is: where do you need text, where do you need pictures, where do you need sound. Plus, this is very important, how do you build different stages, different levels in a modular approach, that is now part of research.

The handling of material becomes something new. We solved the problem of handling a pile of books. Now it is possible to do comparative research on another level, since we have material in digital form to compare, to refer back to, or to make annotations of in the text. So, now I can do different kinds of study, which means I have different demands on my electronic equipment. When I, for example, do a comparable research of paintings, I want to have a picture manipulator like Corel or Photoshop. We don’t yet have a clear understanding of the methodology. It is very new.

An electronic educational book should enable students from various backgrounds, cultural as well as intellectually, to achieve a similar end. Now educational books start on a certain level, but not all students have the same level when they start. My hope is that an educational book will be able to have different entries. The electronic book will then be able to have a variety of educational lines within the same channel from first year student to graduation. There is not one didactical way to end up at the finishing point. Electronic educational works will enable you to implement different ways of coming to the same goal that can be much more student- and cultural-dependent.

SS: When do you expect ebooks will be used in education?

JK: Ebooks will be used when the business model is set; it is not only an intellectual exercise. Economically it is extremely important because the way we write and produce books is new. The once in a lifetime event of buying a particular book is over. For example it might become possible that together with your diploma you will get a lifelong licence of educational material. It is a completely new economic model. New material needs a completely new way of manufacturing. At the graveyard, there are stones, we only know for sure that if you want to be remembered you use stone, that’s it, there is no floppy disk on the graveyard. There is something in the human culture that if you want to have something that has stability, we use materials that have proven stability. And electronic memory is not yet proven to be stable, because they change every couple of years. People don’t feel certain of new materials. So they will not transfer lock, stock and barrel to electronic environments and put all their chips on that before there is some security of eternity. 

SS: There are many forms of ebooks, such as ebooks for the mobile phone. What is your opinion of ebooks for the mobile phone?

JK: It failed because they didn’t make an investigation of what reading is. You have to find out what the mental activity of reading is and what you need. Technologists have not invented the size of the book but it is formed by usage. For reading you need a certain size and overview. Will you read from a phone if you have a paperback? Why was the paperback so successful? Because it reads very nicely and you can take it with you. A telephone doesn’t read very nice, but you can take it with you. Of course you can eat peas with chopsticks and you can read a book on your telephone that is about the same. But why would you?

SS: What will be the future of ebooks for education?

JK: In the future education won’t be entirely digital. Education is also not on paper completely. You have to make a distinction between a storage medium and a presentation medium. The output technology will change, which can be screen, paper, or wall. If we have a flexible screen with a resolution as good as paper, there will be a day that you roll it up, and away with the codex. But we have a long way to go. So everything will be stored electronically, but the output, the presentation device is not necessarily an electronic screen. Simply because you might read in an environment where there is no electricity.

The development of ebooks, and then I don’t mean the electronic reproduction of a paper book, will be dynamic but it will be reasonably slow. We have to develop new methodologies, new ways of writing, new ways of editing, and that will take one or two generations. Two barriers have already been solved: logistics and memory. We now face the next barrier, how to read and how to compose because it is not just making a copy of a paper book. I truly hope that one of the outcomes of the conference is that we create a research platform on all aspects of ebooks that goes beyond the gadget.

SS: What are your other expectations of the conference?

JK: My expectation is first that there is a better understanding of the fact that now the barriers of logistics, memory and bandwidth have been solved and that we only start now to define the research and routine for, say, hypertext environments. The barriers have been solved technically but now we don’t know how to handle it. So there is a lot of experimenting going on and that will be presented. I hope we get a better understanding of how to make educated guesses, to do control tests with publishers, with libraries, with authors to find out what really are the novel aspects of electronic publishing. Hence, you have to define what is the message between the author and the reader and what technology fits best to cater for the conveying of that message. I like the word ‘message’ more than ‘content’ because content is one of these undefined notions in this world, which are most often used as a measure for charging users of electronic networks. A message can be a full book but also a telephone number that you are looking for.