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Carla: Hi, everybody. Welcome. Can you believe we are at our last meeting? In a way, it seems like we started months and months ago. In a way, it feels like yesterday. But this has been a wonderful journey and it has been so great to be on it with all of you. My name is Carla Myers. I'm the Coordinator of Scholarly Communications for Miami University in Ohio, not Florida. I'm going to be your host and facilitator today. Soon, I'm going to be handing things off to Kevin Hawkins, who's the Assistant Dean of Scholarly Communications for the University of North Texas Libraries.
First though, we have a few housekeeping things to take care of. This webinar is being recorded. It will be added to the YouTube Pub101 Spring '22 playlist. So, if you do have to pop out for a moment, you can go back and catch up on what has been discussed. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everybody aligned with our Community Norms, which I will share the chat to that. And I will share that link to the Community Norms in the chat in a second. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space and review those Norms when you get a chance.
Before we get started, we are going to do a little wrap-up from us, your leaders, Amanda, Karen, and I. So, welcome to the end. We made it. We hope you've all learned as much as we have from our presenters as we've gone along. Karen, if we can go to the next slide, please. So, today, before we bring Kevin on to speak, we're going to reflect a little bit on where we got started. We're going to discuss options for continued support. We want your feedback, and we are going to share a link where you can provide that to us. And then we will bring in Kevin Hawkins to talk about printing, sharing, and selling open textbooks. So, I'm going to hand things off to Amanda.
Amanda: Hi, everybody. It's me, again, Amanda Larson, the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State University and Co-Chair of the Pub101 Committee. And I think what we're going to talk about right now is just the scene that we have established so far in Pub101. So, we have talked about how publishing is integral to open education. It allows for more voices and perspectives to be a part of a textbook and a classroom. It allows folks to localize and indigenize textbooks to reflect their local context. And it also allows folks to update texts to reflect the moment.
So, in a lot of disciplines, there are case studies and stories and interviews with multimedia and data that change pretty rapidly, and OER gives them an opportunity to add those things as they come out. And also, it provides an opportunity and space where students can actually be authors of their own content and create content that contributes to the scholarly conversation in that class.
Go ahead to the next slide. We've also learned that publishing can mean many things. So, it could mean that there's an author who is creating and writing and making from scratch some sort of textbook or learning resource. It also can mean that they are adapting, editing, modifying, remixing. And also, that it could be a post or archive of information and that it also provides space for open pedagogy, which is, again, students helping to create the text. And it can also be a solo or collaborative process and support what you folks might be interested in providing. Can take many different forms. It can take time and expertise, but it also might be picking and choosing from a programmatic buffet. So, I only want to support this thing and this thing, and then you might need external support for the next thing.
Next slide, please. Pub101 Memories. This was your orientation to publishing, and we suggest that it's best to prioritize accessibility and inclusion from the start of your program, that you should build your program by defining and communicating parameters. So, thinking about what you can and can't support. Anticipate what you can and accept that there will be surprises along the way. I don't think I've ever not been surprised by something that's cropped up. And that you can work with authors strategically and openly.
Next slide, please. So, what we would like to do is just take a few minutes and chat and have you share what you'll remember from the Pub101 sessions that you have participated in so far. Cheryl says that, "Emily's advice was really helpful." Carlos says that, "I'm not alone when it comes to doing this work." Karen's going to remember how chatty y'all were. Ooh, these are coming in fast now. "Tools, example program calls, proposal, award agreements, and just the supports available." "The session on accessibility and DEI were extremely helpful and applicable to the strategic plan." "I appreciate that the ideas are flexible, i.e. the buffet." "We don't have to do it all, especially with no budget."
"The importance of clear expectations and descriptions of what the author and we will do." "So relieved to find out that all the resources that are available has increased my confidence that we can do this." I love to hear that. "I will remember the advice to set parameters with authors before starting projects, i.e. MOUs." "I appreciate the call for proposal examples and how it changed over the years." "I like that this is an OER movement and not just a project."
Those are all really fantastic and just make my heart so happy that those are the takeaways that you had from Pub101 so far. I just want to remind you that you're not alone. The community is here to help. You have this wonderful community of people who you have gone through Pub101 with. You have me and Karen and Carla, and all of the presenters who are part of that community as well. And if we don't know the answer, we can probably connect you to somebody who might know the answer. I know I'm always happy to help brainstorm things or talk through things, so please don't hesitate to use the community that you've built here. Resources abound. Please make sure that you check out all of the resources that are in your class notes, that the presenters have shared.
And remember that the templates that have been shared can be modified, so you don't have to start from scratch. And then most importantly, is that this work can be very isolating and lonely, but it doesn't have to be. Again, take advantage of the community. And remember that taking care of yourself is an important aspect of doing this work. You can't serve people if the well is empty. And it's really important to set yourself up for success by building in that self-care from the beginning, by making sure that you're setting clear expectations with your authors, and make sure that you take time for reflection to figure out what is and what isn't working, and how the work that you're doing could serve you better. So, with that note, I am happy to turn this over to Karen.
Karen: Thank you, Amanda, and thank you, Carla, and thank you everyone who has joined us on the 2022 Spring Pub101 journey. I would love to stay on that path with all of you. As Amanda was just talking about, there is an incredible community of people to support you in the work you're doing, and the OEN also offers ongoing support.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about ongoing support and some options that are available. As you know, throughout our Pub101 eight sessions together, we were in what we like to call a one-stop doc or our orientation syllabus, if you will. All of the slides should be linked from that syllabus. I'll take a look after today's session to make sure that's the case. So, if you want to revisit anything, you can go back to that document.
We also had class notes, which are linked from the orientation document. There were some additional resources that were shared, particularly in the earlier Pub101 sessions, so you can always go back to that. And then, for the first time ever, this year we started sharing the transcripts and chat transcripts and video links on our blog. So, if you ever want to look at things holistically, you can go to our blog, which is listed there.
In addition, if you are the OEN contact for your institution, you have access to a dashboard that looks something like this. It's called the Community Hub. So, if you are the person with that access, you can also find a lot of the templates and resources that we talked about in Pub101 under the Publishing Support tab. If you do not have access to the Community Hub, you can also find almost all of these same resources in the canvas curriculum that we've been using every step of the way during Pub101.
You are also welcome to join the Publishing Cooperative. This is for institutional, allied or consortial OEN members. And what is the co-op? Really simply, it's a community of people who are publishing or who are interested in publishing open textbooks. Together, we're growing open textbook publishing expertise and capacity in higher education by figuring out how to do this thing, sometimes through trial and error, often by learning from one another. And so, the co-op is really a community of people to support one another in that process.
Here, at a glance are some of the institutions that are represented by people in the co-op, and it really is grounded in community and support. And I know that some of the Pub101 participants who are here today also participate in the co-op already, and so there's a lot of great overlap, and it's a really nice opportunity to get to know people in your community. Also part of the co-op, we have a monthly Tea Time session, very informal. It's unstructured. It's a drop-in time for all of you to really drive the agenda. And so, people come ask questions, troubleshoot, and support one another. We also have a Google Group for the publishing co-op. And so, if you were to join, I would be happy to add you to that.
And here is just a recap, a table of some of the publishing support that is offered through the Open Education Network. I have color-coded this, just to show you at a glance some of the different areas that we are working to support you. So, that includes through professional development, opportunities like these, through community and support, like the co-op which we just talked about, and also through tools and resources. And we've been investing a lot of our focus and energy in this tools and resources section lately, because there are more coming soon. You may have heard, we just launched a Manifold pilot. There are some people in this Pub101 group who are participating in that pilot. Again, really awesome to have that overlap.
We are also going to be looking at providing Editoria, which is another publishing platform tool. And soon at Summit in July, you will hear about the Textbook Builder, which is a tool we've been working on with the Editoria team through an IMLS-funded grant to provide authors with the opportunity to structure their textbooks before they start writing, and to give them some structure and support in making consistent books.
Okay. So, that is the OEN community support at a glance. Now let's take just three to five minutes for a survey. Carla, Amanda, and I, and the whole Pub101 Committee would really like to hear your feedback. As we mentioned in the beginning of this eight weeks together, this is the first time that we have provided Pub101 in this more committee-informed way. We just got started with the committee recently. We just took our first look at the curriculum, and this summer we're going to be doing a lot more revisions. And so, please help us. Let us know what worked and didn't work for you and provide feedback both on this live experience, and also on the curriculum experience. So, Amanda just dropped the link to the survey form into chat. I will set my timer and go ahead and give you three to five minutes.
After you have completed the survey, if you just want to... Uh-oh. Beth says it's not loading for her. We will look into that, Beth. Thanks for letting us know. Anyone else having trouble? Slowly. Maybe it's because I selected a really cute header image. Worked for... Okay. It might be based on your connection. Okay, great. Beth is in. Okay. Well, as all of you get started, I will stop talking so that you can focus. Thanks, Beth, for letting us know it might be your browser. So, if you're having any trouble, please try another browser. Once you've had a chance to do the survey, please just let us know in the chat, and that'll give us a little clue to resume talking. But for now, I will pause and give you a few minutes. Thank you.
Carla: So, I want to go ahead and turn things over to our presenter today. Kevin Hawkins is Assistant Dean of Scholarly Communications for the University of North Texas Libraries. I am so excited to welcome him to talk with us today about printing, sharing, and selling open textbooks. If you have questions, please share those in the chat. I will keep an eye on those and track those to share with Kevin at the conclusion of his presentation.
Kevin: Great. Thanks, Carla. Hello, everyone. I'm very glad to be here. Kevin Hawkins from the University of North Texas Libraries. I was asked to speak to you today about your options for selling and distributing print versions of open textbooks and other OER. So, as you know, OER is always freely available online to access. So, if you have an internet connection and can reach a website, then you, of course, can get to the OER online. And many times, the OER is available for you to download. So, maybe it's a PDF or ebook format or something. So, you could download it and use it offline. But some users would like a print version of that work, because they prefer reading the print. They would like to easily annotate. Maybe they have some connectivity issues or don't have the right devices for other formats and things like that. And so, it's something that you may want to be able to offer as part of your open textbook formats.
So, I want to talk through a little bit about this world and how it works. In brief, there's some good news here. Printing is much more accessible than it used to be. We've had a lot of advances in the technology. We are far past the world of printing things with printing presses in a traditional model here, which really only ever worked at scale. So, we can do a lot of digital printing these days, at much smaller scales, in niche situations here. And it allows you to print in very small quantities, or sometimes even one copy at a time. And we'll talk a little bit about how this world works.
First though, I do want to go over a few terms, and I don't want to get too far into the world of jargon here and the world of how the printing industry works, but you do need have a little bit of understanding of a few things. So, I'm going to try to give a high-level picture. So, in the conventional world of printing and distribution, you have print runs. So, when you are going to print a book, you print a certain number of hundreds of thousands of copies at a time, and those are all identical. And that is a print run.
So, when something is first published, you have an initial print run, and then later you reprint as needed, based on how many copies you sell. So, you print in these kind of increments, and then sell them. As I said earlier, there are some options that don't involve... But in this conventional world, you print a bunch of copies, and you need distributors who store those in a warehouse and receive orders and ship them out. And there in turn, they may be shipping directly to customers, but they often are shipping to wholesalers and regular bookstores that are going to turn around and sell them.
In general, the traditional model is to sell on consignment, so at a discount from the retail price. So, the bookstores are acquiring a whole set of copies that they are going to put on the shelf or maybe set up a little display inside of a bookstore, like a big release. And they acquire them all at a discount. That's how they can make a profit. But there's always this option to return their unsold inventory. So, if they don't sell the copies, it's okay. They can get their money back. So, they would ship those copies back to the distributor, or in certain cases, especially the paperback books, sometimes they would actually instead tear off the covers, ship just the covers back, but otherwise pulp the books. That's not.... So, this is this conventional model.
Now, in this new world of digital printing, that broadly speaking includes two subcategories: short-run printing, printing in very small quantities, one at a time, and print-on-demand. In this kind of world, you can replenish your inventory in small increments. So, it allows you to publish niche titles that aren't going to sell many copies, because it's affordable to do that. You're not having to commit to publish, to printing hundreds of thousands of copies, which costs a lot. So, this is really facilitating this long tale of publishing.
This technology for digital printing is available in the supply chain. And so, publishing houses, publishers and OER publishing operations can get access to these things in the world of book publishing. And some of these services are available for direct to consumer services. So, some of you may have bought a photo book from Lulu, or made one yourself, and so you know that you can set it up directly through a website, set up the book, and then you can even purchase copies right through there or send them to your friends and family to purchase their own copies. So, all of this has become much more accessible than it ever used to be.
So, that's a quick background on this. And then, I also, another caveat before I really get to the meat here, so please bear with me. I want to talk a little bit about versions of open books. The versioning and all of this is important. In the world of OER, we often use tools like Pressbooks that allow you to make the work available online and provide an interface where you can instantly edit the work, where you can improve it or make changes right online, and it's instantly available to your users' network.
So, even though we have tools that let you update a book instantly, and maybe even regenerate the, let's say, PDF version of that book, there really aren't workflows where a reader could order a print version of that book on demand from the latest version from the website. So, of course, they can download the PDF and print it on a home printer, but there isn't a way to get that PDF directly into the major printing services, digital printing services, so that when someone buys a book, that printing service goes out to the Pressbooks site and downloads the very latest version. So, that's something that isn't possible in the world today.
But I don't think that's such a bad thing, because I actually think it's confusing for readers of a book if there's this continual updating and then the product they buy is a snapshot at any point, and it's not really clear which version this is. In general, it's bad practice to update an open textbook mid-semester anyway, because your students and others out there who may be using it, the sand shifts under their feet. And so, it's good to save your updates and do them between semesters, in a time of year like January or August or something.
And so, similarly, it's good if your print versions are also tied to clear versions, because readers come to expect that all copies of an edition will be identical. But if you are going to make some more significant changes to your online book, which then..., you would in general, and this is the way it works in publishing, you would create a new edition of the book. You would clearly label that on the title page, Second Edition, Third Edition, whatever. You would assign a new ISBN number, because its a new distinct product. People who order it want to know which version they're getting and if they're going to order by ISBN, then they should know which one they're getting.
And you may want to stop selling the old edition of that. It's outdated, and people might not want to get that accidentally. On the other hand, maybe you do want to.... Okay. Let's really get now into the things you would be considering here if you decide that you want to support the selling and distribution of the print version of your open textbook. To me, the first question you want to ask is, whether you're going to be selling these print copies of books at cost, where you're aiming to generate revenue. Okay.
If you're selling at cost, and here, by at cost I mean the author and the institution aren't making any money. Of course your printer and distributor need to make money, so they're going to take their cut. But I mean, no one else is going to make money. You're otherwise going to sell at the cost that it costs you to set up this book. So, if you do that, there are no income tax implications for the author or the institution. So, it's just a lot easier in terms of official accounting.
There's also no ethical implications here about profiting from selling copies to students. So, if an instructor writes their own OER and lets their students use it, then offers a print version for sale, and they're going to get a little of the revenue for the print sales, we're getting into some slightly shady territory. So, it's kind of nice and clean if you plan to sell things at cost.
But if you do want to generate revenue because you're trying to recover some of the costs of operating your publishing program, you need to think about whether this revenue is going to go to the author, or to the institution, or split between the two. Or maybe flowed through the institution to the author. Maybe the institution is involved in setting up the print versions, but then they're going to be in turn giving revenue to the author.
But you might need to step back from that question and say, "If this OER was developed with institutional resources, perhaps an internal grant funding program using special resources, then the author may not actually even have any right to it." The copyright may belong to the institution anyway, according to institutional policy. And so, technically it's up to the institution to decide whether to share that revenue, and it may not even be your decision personally, it may be the decision of another office on campus.
There are, of course, some accounting and tax implications. And so, if this is coming to the institution and the institution's receiving revenue, there's usually quite a number of things that would need to be handled for that to happen. Institutions have ways of doing this. It is possible for example, for US-based not-for-profit organizations and universities to receive some income, but they have to account for it in very specific ways. And again, as I mentioned before, there's kind of ethical and policy issues about instructors assigning their own books to their own students, and then having them buy copies and potentially profit.
The next question would be whether you would do print runs of the books, even small, short runs. So, small digital print runs, a couple dozen copies, but whether you're going to do pure print-on-demand, where there are no copies printed in advance, and instead they're only copied when someone orders, that they're only printed when someone orders a copy. One order comes in, one copy is printed and shipped. All right. So, if you do a print run, this requires an upfront investment. Someone has to be willing to pay for that print run, that 50, 100, 200 copies. But you print a whole bunch of copies at once. And so, your unit cost is lower. Each copy costs less to print. Though, again, you're putting a lot of money in, and you need to store those copies until you sell them.
As I mentioned before, there are options for distribution and fulfillment in the book supply chain. And so, you could make an arrangement with one of these, or if this is a much smaller scale operation, if you're basically looking to just make print copies available to the students in your own institution, you could try to run this locally. You could have a closet where you store these copies and students walk in and hand a check to someone and they get handed a copy. But all of that needs to be accounted for, and institutions tend to have lots of rules about things like receiving payment, whether by check or credit card or whatever, accounting for inventory.
If you're looking to make this available for anyone to buy online, again, you're going to probably need a professional distribution option that can handle these orders, take credit card payments, potentially handle shipping, wherever this is going to go. So, professional distributors in the book industry do all of these things and they charge you to store copies. So, this is a disincentive for you to print too many copies up front and eat up their warehouse space.
On the other hand, with print-on-demand, there's no upfront investment. You are just setting it up, but then there's no cost to you at all here, until the book is ordered. And even in that case, you're receiving money from a customer, the POD printers handle the order fulfillment for you. So, that's great. You can just use one of these and they can handle the credit card orders. But one problem with print-on-demand is that bookstores tend not to stock copies of print-on-demand books, because they can't return the unsold inventory through the consignment model, actually. So, why does this matter?
These OER are unlikely to be bestsellers. They're not going to have a whole display in a conventional bookstore. But it may matter because most campuses and other institutions have some sort of campus bookstore for textbooks, and students are used to going there and want to be able to buy their books from there. And so, now you've got to make sure that that bookstore can in fact get copies of this book. Maybe they won't stock it. Maybe they will simply order copies when a student walks in and says, "Yes, I want that copy." And the bookstore will say, "We will order it for you, but it's not refundable."
So, as soon as you buy it, that's it. Or you have to prepay. Maybe that's okay, but you would need to make that arrangement. And this can be especially important because sometimes financial aid and scholarships are tied to using the campus bookstore. The students can only spend the textbook money at the campus bookstore. So, they're not going to want to go off to some other place, some other print-on-demand service to buy it. And you may actually have a policy at your institution that basically says university employees can only refer students to the campus bookstore. They're not allowed to send them to the competing one down the street or to Amazon or anywhere. Students can do that. But by policy, employees may not be allowed to refer students.
Color printing is also a tricky issue in all of this. Covers are always in color. So, that's not an issue, but it's the interior of the book. If you print the interior in grayscale, it's much cheaper to print. It works very well with print-on-demand. But if you have a textbook with color diagrams, where the color is essential, then you may need to be able to print the interior in color. This is more expensive. And in the world of print-on-demand printing, in most cases, you have to choose whether to print the whole interior in gray scale or color. You can't say, "Just print pages 33 and 69 in color." And so, it makes the whole book much more expensive to produce. And so, it makes print-on-demand less economically feasible, to sell it at a higher price.
A bar chart with some colors, that's easy. You can do it basically on standard paper. But if you've got photographs, and you need photo quality paper, that kind of glossy sort of thing, or thicker paper, because you have reproductions of art or whatever, that's even more expensive and really hard to do. I mentioned before that your covers are always in color. So, you could have a regular kind of paperback binding, no problem. Full color cover is just always included in the base price. If you really wanted to sell in hardcover, that's going to be more expensive, whether you're doing print-on-demand or not. If you do case binding, it's common for textbooks, actually. It's the kind of book where there's like images printed right on the hardcover. Or cloth binding, sort of a traditional thing used in scholarly monographs, it has a dust jacket. That's all much more expensive than paper.
From experience I can tell you, you can't print less than 500 copies at a time with a color interior and do hardcover binding and sell it for a reasonable price. You would have to sell it, individual copies at such a high price to recover your investment, that it will look crazy to anyone buying. They'll say, "But I can get an equivalent book, similar number of pages and in color, I'm used to being able to buy such things for $25." Whatever. Well, yes, because the publisher printed 10,000 copies.
You need to think about where your customers are. I alluded to this a little bit before. There are lots of options. If you are going to just distribute them locally, or even just to customers within your own country. Lots of printers will be able to ship within your country. Shipping abroad gets much more complicated. If it's important to you to be able to support readers abroad, lots of extra complications here. Distributors in general will only ship overseas with traceable shipping, where they can track what happens to it. And that's much more expensive. And so, that fee to ship is an extra cost that the customer ultimately would need to absorb.
Some print-on-demand printers, the largest ones have locations in multiple places, but still, if you're trying to ship to developing countries it can get really tricky. Amazon will ship to many places, even to some developing countries, and they do it cheaply because they send it sort of ordinary service through the postal service. And if a copy gets lost, they just eat the cost and ship another one. And distributors are rarely willing to take quite that risk. They're just not big enough.
So, that's something to think about. If you are trying to support online students who are in many countries taking courses at your institution, it may not be feasible for them to buy a print copy. So, just keep that in mind. If you were doing this to try to support your own students and assume that they could all do this, it might not be feasible. I will say that even if you were developing open textbooks where the print version is designed less for your own students at your own institution and more for users in a particular region of the world with poor connectivity, you see this as an alternative for them because it's about a topic that relates to that country or the region, you might try to have the book printed there rather than shipping it from here. It's almost certainly going to be cheaper to print, and not involved by shipping costs, and may give you more options in terms of shipping through a postal service.
But in all of this, because it's probably sounding a bit intimidating, I would strongly urge you to look into any distribution options that have a connection to your institution. There may be some options here that will save you from establishing all of these relationships. Your campus bookstore may in fact have a relationship with a printing service, even something like print-on-demand. And of course, can distribute because they're used to accepting orders. These bookstores are often part of larger chains and they have access to some of these things, and they may be used to running things like essentially course back services, that would reduce essentially custom works and sell them to students. So, they may be well set up to handle this for you.
And you may have access to a university press. Your campus may not have one, but perhaps you are, say at a public institution in North Carolina or Kansas, are just two states that come to mind, that have a press that serves the whole public university system in the state. The press may be able to help you out with all of this. They have these established relationships with printers and distributors, and may be able to handle all of this for you. They're not going to do it for free, because it's going to eat up some of their staff time and they're trying to recover costs, but it may be a mutually beneficial relationship.
And these two entities that come to mind, bookstores and presses, may be willing to work directly with your authors. If your authors are in fact going to keep all revenue from sales, if that's the arrangement that you would make, it's allowable under the policy, if that's what want to do, then you could let them work directly with these parties, and you, running an OER service don't need to be in the middle.
Basically, if the author owns the copyright and is going to receive all revenue, let them set this up directly. It could have been with that campus bookstore. It could be with a press, but it could also be directly with a print-on-demand service. They can go to Lulu, they can go to IngramSpark, Kindle Direct Publishing, many other options out there. And just take the final PDF or the interior PDF with the cover that meets that printer's specifications, and set it up and give the tax information so that they get to receive the royalty checks, and you're just out the picture. It's going to be easier all the way around.
So, that's what I've got. We have lots of time here for questions. I see there's a number of things in the chat, but I will let our moderators feed the questions to me.
Carla: Thank you so much for all that fantastic information, Kevin. So many different things to think about. And I think everybody really loved your quote on trusting you about printing books. So, we do have some questions. Let me go to my list. The first is, "I was at a conference where a librarian was reporting that she had to avoid adopting any OERs that had any kind of non-commercial CC license, because she knew she had to have the campus bookstore print copies. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by non-commercial licenses. Is that true?"
Kevin: I don't believe so, under US Copyright law. So, what I do know is that there was a court case about an educational institution working with... Carla, you will know this as well. Was it Kinko's or a similar service for printing? I think it was Kinko's, right?
Carla: It was. Yeah.
Kevin: And to print the copies to make available for use in the course stack, essentially make them available for use in the classroom. And even though Kinko's is a commercial operation, the ultimate use of the work is non-commercial. And so, that was ruled to be allowed under the CC non-commercial license. This situation was slightly different. So, sorry. Can you reframe it for me one more time? It was...
Carla: Sure. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by non-commercial licenses. Is that true?
Kevin: Right. Right. I don't think so. That's essentially what happened in this case, the instructor, the institution were not profiting. Right? They went to Kinko's and said, "Please print us 20 copies or whatever, for our students. Charge what you charge, but then otherwise, we're good." So, I think you're okay with that, but I'm not an attorney, and I'm not your attorney, in any case. So, it would certainly be worth having one verify this, or talking to your institution's counsel.
Carla: Great. Thank you so much. So, the next question is, "Only a campus store could handle billing students directly, which could be dealt with by loans. Correct? So, there is perhaps an incentive since campus stores do POD. Ours has already said they don't have the capacity to do print-on-demand in-house."
Kevin: Okay. Well, right. So, that was one of my suggestions, was of first talking yes, to the campus bookstore. So, sorry to hear that they don't have the capacity to do that, but hopefully some of the others will have better luck with that.
Carla: And I will just say, from experience, talk to your bursar's office. I know at one of my previous institutions, we were able to send bills from our library for overdue books, lost book charges, things like that to the bursar's office, that students could have paid off with loans. It wasn't automated. We had to go into their system, generate the bill and then hit submit. And then the student paid it with their loans. It wouldn't come directly from the POD machine to that, but that might be worth checking out. Talk to your bursar's office. They might have options for you. I think that's most of our questions that we have so far. Yeah. Sorry. I'm so sorry. That's my little blind kitten. He just woke up from his nap and wants his bottle. Let me see if holding him makes him feel a little better.
I'm sorry. Super unprofessional. This is baby Sam. So, please share your questions as you have them. Kevin, I have a question for you, and you kind of touched on all of this in your presentation, but I would say we are thinking about offering some type of printing program at Miami University. So, what would be your number one piece of advice to any institution who's thinking about offering some type of option to sell print copies? Is it best to make the decision based off the resources your institution has, or space or staffing? What are the number one piece of advice you'd give?
Kevin: Right. Well, if by policy you've decided that authors get the copyright, then where we're back here... Sorry, am I still sharing my slides? Oh, okay. Well, it's the one that if the... Here, let me just pull it up. Right. If the author of the copyright will receive all revenue, then let them work directly. Don't get in the middle. But for all the reasons I explained earlier in my presentation, that may well not be the case. And so, if you're going to be setting something up, I think you're going to want to explore what options you may have.
A service like Lulu, that serves the general public, consumers who just come to their website, may work fine. And you may be able to put that through your university procurement process and use them for your handful of books that you'll sell, or at least where you start. The ones in the publishing supply chain that work with publishers are in general going to be, they may not be jumping to work with a startup operation because they're used to working with publishers, larger organizations that put through a higher volume of content. And you may never have enough sales to make it worth it.
I actually work, for a while, with a smaller printer and distributor that it's one on the smaller end. They work with some university presses and things, but I had set up a couple of books with them to be essentially print-on-demand, and they eventually cut me off because I just wasn't selling enough copies to make it just worth their time for me to be in their system. So, I get it. So, you may end up having to go with one of these consumer-facing services. Again, IngramSpark, Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's... are two appealing options. Ingram's is totally plugged in the book supply chain. And the Amazon option gives you the option to have your books included in the Amazon catalog, which for many people is essentially the requirement decision.
Carla: Great. Thank you so much. That makes a ton of sense. I'm so sorry everybody. We invite everybody to post any last minute questions you might have. If I missed your question in the chat, please repost it. Bring it to my attention. I think I caught them all. Otherwise, we might be waiting for the last question or two to come in. Kevin, do you have any closing thoughts or recommendations for everybody?
Kevin: No. Yeah. Right. Cheryl mentioned printMe1 as well. I've also heard them recommended. A number of people have mentioned working with them for OER. So, yeah. I have not worked with them directly, but it is a promising option and much smaller than the other ones. But no, no other particular suggestions for you. I mean, basically take a moment to think, is it really worth all this trouble that I described to do different versions? Or can your user simply download a PDF and print them on a printer somewhere? It may just really be your simpler option.
Carla: Great recommendations. Thank you so much, Kevin, for your wonderful presentation. You know, one thing I think I've really been reflecting on over our past presentations, is how much unique knowledge everybody brings to the cohort, brings to this process. I obviously know nothing about this, even though this is something my institution is interested in doing. And kind of like Amanda said earlier, if somebody doesn't have an answer for you when you reach out with questions, I think one of my favorite things about the OEN is, chances are, they know somebody who has that knowledge and can connect you. Amanda and Karen, I'd like to invite you to unmute if you have any final thoughts or words for the group before we sign off on our last session. And I'm going to mute so you don't have to hear little Sam screaming. I'm so sorry.
Amanda: Everybody's in love with his screaming, though. We ended the best, right, with kitten screamings and kitten content? Yeah. I just want to thank you all for joining us on this journey during the spring semester. It's been really great having you all here together in a cohort to learn together. And I mean it when I say that you can reach out to me. That's not me being nice. If you have questions and I can help, I would love to be helpful. I'm going to turn it over to Karen now. Last thoughts?
Karen: No. Well, I will just thank Carla, Amanda and the entire Pub101 Committee for their time and attention and dedication to the Pub101 experience. We do truly want to make this meaningful and useful to all of you. So, thank you in advance for your feedback. And I look forward to our paths crossing again in the future. So, thank you very much and farewell.
Carla: Thanks everybody. Take care.
END OF VIDEO
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Pub101 is a free, informal, online orientation to open textbook publishing. This May 25, 2022, session is the final entry in the spring 2022 series. Host Carla Myers from Miami University welcomes Kevin Hawkins of the University of North Texas Libraries, Karen Lauritsen from the Open Education Network, and Amanda Larson from Ohio State University for a discussion of printing, sharing and selling open textbooks.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Watch the video recording of this session or keep reading for a full transcript. For those interested in reading the conversation that took place among participants and the resources shared, the chat transcript is also available below.
Note: If your comments appear in the transcripts and you would like your name or other identifying information removed, please contact Tonia.
Audio Transcript
Speakers:
- Amanda Larson (Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant, Ohio State University)
- Carla Myers (Coordinator of Scholarly Communications, Miami University)
- Karen Lauritsen (Publishing Director, Open Education Network)
- Kevin Hawkins (Assistant Dean of Scholarly Communications, University of North Texas Libraries)
Carla: Hi, everybody. Welcome. Can you believe we are at our last meeting? In a way, it seems like we started months and months ago. In a way, it feels like yesterday. But this has been a wonderful journey and it has been so great to be on it with all of you. My name is Carla Myers. I'm the Coordinator of Scholarly Communications for Miami University in Ohio, not Florida. I'm going to be your host and facilitator today. Soon, I'm going to be handing things off to Kevin Hawkins, who's the Assistant Dean of Scholarly Communications for the University of North Texas Libraries.
First though, we have a few housekeeping things to take care of. This webinar is being recorded. It will be added to the YouTube Pub101 Spring '22 playlist. So, if you do have to pop out for a moment, you can go back and catch up on what has been discussed. We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everybody aligned with our Community Norms, which I will share the chat to that. And I will share that link to the Community Norms in the chat in a second. Please join us in creating a safe and constructive space and review those Norms when you get a chance.
Before we get started, we are going to do a little wrap-up from us, your leaders, Amanda, Karen, and I. So, welcome to the end. We made it. We hope you've all learned as much as we have from our presenters as we've gone along. Karen, if we can go to the next slide, please. So, today, before we bring Kevin on to speak, we're going to reflect a little bit on where we got started. We're going to discuss options for continued support. We want your feedback, and we are going to share a link where you can provide that to us. And then we will bring in Kevin Hawkins to talk about printing, sharing, and selling open textbooks. So, I'm going to hand things off to Amanda.
Amanda: Hi, everybody. It's me, again, Amanda Larson, the Affordable Learning Instructional Consultant at Ohio State University and Co-Chair of the Pub101 Committee. And I think what we're going to talk about right now is just the scene that we have established so far in Pub101. So, we have talked about how publishing is integral to open education. It allows for more voices and perspectives to be a part of a textbook and a classroom. It allows folks to localize and indigenize textbooks to reflect their local context. And it also allows folks to update texts to reflect the moment.
So, in a lot of disciplines, there are case studies and stories and interviews with multimedia and data that change pretty rapidly, and OER gives them an opportunity to add those things as they come out. And also, it provides an opportunity and space where students can actually be authors of their own content and create content that contributes to the scholarly conversation in that class.
Go ahead to the next slide. We've also learned that publishing can mean many things. So, it could mean that there's an author who is creating and writing and making from scratch some sort of textbook or learning resource. It also can mean that they are adapting, editing, modifying, remixing. And also, that it could be a post or archive of information and that it also provides space for open pedagogy, which is, again, students helping to create the text. And it can also be a solo or collaborative process and support what you folks might be interested in providing. Can take many different forms. It can take time and expertise, but it also might be picking and choosing from a programmatic buffet. So, I only want to support this thing and this thing, and then you might need external support for the next thing.
Next slide, please. Pub101 Memories. This was your orientation to publishing, and we suggest that it's best to prioritize accessibility and inclusion from the start of your program, that you should build your program by defining and communicating parameters. So, thinking about what you can and can't support. Anticipate what you can and accept that there will be surprises along the way. I don't think I've ever not been surprised by something that's cropped up. And that you can work with authors strategically and openly.
Next slide, please. So, what we would like to do is just take a few minutes and chat and have you share what you'll remember from the Pub101 sessions that you have participated in so far. Cheryl says that, "Emily's advice was really helpful." Carlos says that, "I'm not alone when it comes to doing this work." Karen's going to remember how chatty y'all were. Ooh, these are coming in fast now. "Tools, example program calls, proposal, award agreements, and just the supports available." "The session on accessibility and DEI were extremely helpful and applicable to the strategic plan." "I appreciate that the ideas are flexible, i.e. the buffet." "We don't have to do it all, especially with no budget."
"The importance of clear expectations and descriptions of what the author and we will do." "So relieved to find out that all the resources that are available has increased my confidence that we can do this." I love to hear that. "I will remember the advice to set parameters with authors before starting projects, i.e. MOUs." "I appreciate the call for proposal examples and how it changed over the years." "I like that this is an OER movement and not just a project."
Those are all really fantastic and just make my heart so happy that those are the takeaways that you had from Pub101 so far. I just want to remind you that you're not alone. The community is here to help. You have this wonderful community of people who you have gone through Pub101 with. You have me and Karen and Carla, and all of the presenters who are part of that community as well. And if we don't know the answer, we can probably connect you to somebody who might know the answer. I know I'm always happy to help brainstorm things or talk through things, so please don't hesitate to use the community that you've built here. Resources abound. Please make sure that you check out all of the resources that are in your class notes, that the presenters have shared.
And remember that the templates that have been shared can be modified, so you don't have to start from scratch. And then most importantly, is that this work can be very isolating and lonely, but it doesn't have to be. Again, take advantage of the community. And remember that taking care of yourself is an important aspect of doing this work. You can't serve people if the well is empty. And it's really important to set yourself up for success by building in that self-care from the beginning, by making sure that you're setting clear expectations with your authors, and make sure that you take time for reflection to figure out what is and what isn't working, and how the work that you're doing could serve you better. So, with that note, I am happy to turn this over to Karen.
Karen: Thank you, Amanda, and thank you, Carla, and thank you everyone who has joined us on the 2022 Spring Pub101 journey. I would love to stay on that path with all of you. As Amanda was just talking about, there is an incredible community of people to support you in the work you're doing, and the OEN also offers ongoing support.
So, I'm going to talk a little bit about ongoing support and some options that are available. As you know, throughout our Pub101 eight sessions together, we were in what we like to call a one-stop doc or our orientation syllabus, if you will. All of the slides should be linked from that syllabus. I'll take a look after today's session to make sure that's the case. So, if you want to revisit anything, you can go back to that document.
We also had class notes, which are linked from the orientation document. There were some additional resources that were shared, particularly in the earlier Pub101 sessions, so you can always go back to that. And then, for the first time ever, this year we started sharing the transcripts and chat transcripts and video links on our blog. So, if you ever want to look at things holistically, you can go to our blog, which is listed there.
In addition, if you are the OEN contact for your institution, you have access to a dashboard that looks something like this. It's called the Community Hub. So, if you are the person with that access, you can also find a lot of the templates and resources that we talked about in Pub101 under the Publishing Support tab. If you do not have access to the Community Hub, you can also find almost all of these same resources in the canvas curriculum that we've been using every step of the way during Pub101.
You are also welcome to join the Publishing Cooperative. This is for institutional, allied or consortial OEN members. And what is the co-op? Really simply, it's a community of people who are publishing or who are interested in publishing open textbooks. Together, we're growing open textbook publishing expertise and capacity in higher education by figuring out how to do this thing, sometimes through trial and error, often by learning from one another. And so, the co-op is really a community of people to support one another in that process.
Here, at a glance are some of the institutions that are represented by people in the co-op, and it really is grounded in community and support. And I know that some of the Pub101 participants who are here today also participate in the co-op already, and so there's a lot of great overlap, and it's a really nice opportunity to get to know people in your community. Also part of the co-op, we have a monthly Tea Time session, very informal. It's unstructured. It's a drop-in time for all of you to really drive the agenda. And so, people come ask questions, troubleshoot, and support one another. We also have a Google Group for the publishing co-op. And so, if you were to join, I would be happy to add you to that.
And here is just a recap, a table of some of the publishing support that is offered through the Open Education Network. I have color-coded this, just to show you at a glance some of the different areas that we are working to support you. So, that includes through professional development, opportunities like these, through community and support, like the co-op which we just talked about, and also through tools and resources. And we've been investing a lot of our focus and energy in this tools and resources section lately, because there are more coming soon. You may have heard, we just launched a Manifold pilot. There are some people in this Pub101 group who are participating in that pilot. Again, really awesome to have that overlap.
We are also going to be looking at providing Editoria, which is another publishing platform tool. And soon at Summit in July, you will hear about the Textbook Builder, which is a tool we've been working on with the Editoria team through an IMLS-funded grant to provide authors with the opportunity to structure their textbooks before they start writing, and to give them some structure and support in making consistent books.
Okay. So, that is the OEN community support at a glance. Now let's take just three to five minutes for a survey. Carla, Amanda, and I, and the whole Pub101 Committee would really like to hear your feedback. As we mentioned in the beginning of this eight weeks together, this is the first time that we have provided Pub101 in this more committee-informed way. We just got started with the committee recently. We just took our first look at the curriculum, and this summer we're going to be doing a lot more revisions. And so, please help us. Let us know what worked and didn't work for you and provide feedback both on this live experience, and also on the curriculum experience. So, Amanda just dropped the link to the survey form into chat. I will set my timer and go ahead and give you three to five minutes.
After you have completed the survey, if you just want to... Uh-oh. Beth says it's not loading for her. We will look into that, Beth. Thanks for letting us know. Anyone else having trouble? Slowly. Maybe it's because I selected a really cute header image. Worked for... Okay. It might be based on your connection. Okay, great. Beth is in. Okay. Well, as all of you get started, I will stop talking so that you can focus. Thanks, Beth, for letting us know it might be your browser. So, if you're having any trouble, please try another browser. Once you've had a chance to do the survey, please just let us know in the chat, and that'll give us a little clue to resume talking. But for now, I will pause and give you a few minutes. Thank you.
Carla: So, I want to go ahead and turn things over to our presenter today. Kevin Hawkins is Assistant Dean of Scholarly Communications for the University of North Texas Libraries. I am so excited to welcome him to talk with us today about printing, sharing, and selling open textbooks. If you have questions, please share those in the chat. I will keep an eye on those and track those to share with Kevin at the conclusion of his presentation.
Kevin: Great. Thanks, Carla. Hello, everyone. I'm very glad to be here. Kevin Hawkins from the University of North Texas Libraries. I was asked to speak to you today about your options for selling and distributing print versions of open textbooks and other OER. So, as you know, OER is always freely available online to access. So, if you have an internet connection and can reach a website, then you, of course, can get to the OER online. And many times, the OER is available for you to download. So, maybe it's a PDF or ebook format or something. So, you could download it and use it offline. But some users would like a print version of that work, because they prefer reading the print. They would like to easily annotate. Maybe they have some connectivity issues or don't have the right devices for other formats and things like that. And so, it's something that you may want to be able to offer as part of your open textbook formats.
So, I want to talk through a little bit about this world and how it works. In brief, there's some good news here. Printing is much more accessible than it used to be. We've had a lot of advances in the technology. We are far past the world of printing things with printing presses in a traditional model here, which really only ever worked at scale. So, we can do a lot of digital printing these days, at much smaller scales, in niche situations here. And it allows you to print in very small quantities, or sometimes even one copy at a time. And we'll talk a little bit about how this world works.
First though, I do want to go over a few terms, and I don't want to get too far into the world of jargon here and the world of how the printing industry works, but you do need have a little bit of understanding of a few things. So, I'm going to try to give a high-level picture. So, in the conventional world of printing and distribution, you have print runs. So, when you are going to print a book, you print a certain number of hundreds of thousands of copies at a time, and those are all identical. And that is a print run.
So, when something is first published, you have an initial print run, and then later you reprint as needed, based on how many copies you sell. So, you print in these kind of increments, and then sell them. As I said earlier, there are some options that don't involve... But in this conventional world, you print a bunch of copies, and you need distributors who store those in a warehouse and receive orders and ship them out. And there in turn, they may be shipping directly to customers, but they often are shipping to wholesalers and regular bookstores that are going to turn around and sell them.
In general, the traditional model is to sell on consignment, so at a discount from the retail price. So, the bookstores are acquiring a whole set of copies that they are going to put on the shelf or maybe set up a little display inside of a bookstore, like a big release. And they acquire them all at a discount. That's how they can make a profit. But there's always this option to return their unsold inventory. So, if they don't sell the copies, it's okay. They can get their money back. So, they would ship those copies back to the distributor, or in certain cases, especially the paperback books, sometimes they would actually instead tear off the covers, ship just the covers back, but otherwise pulp the books. That's not.... So, this is this conventional model.
Now, in this new world of digital printing, that broadly speaking includes two subcategories: short-run printing, printing in very small quantities, one at a time, and print-on-demand. In this kind of world, you can replenish your inventory in small increments. So, it allows you to publish niche titles that aren't going to sell many copies, because it's affordable to do that. You're not having to commit to publish, to printing hundreds of thousands of copies, which costs a lot. So, this is really facilitating this long tale of publishing.
This technology for digital printing is available in the supply chain. And so, publishing houses, publishers and OER publishing operations can get access to these things in the world of book publishing. And some of these services are available for direct to consumer services. So, some of you may have bought a photo book from Lulu, or made one yourself, and so you know that you can set it up directly through a website, set up the book, and then you can even purchase copies right through there or send them to your friends and family to purchase their own copies. So, all of this has become much more accessible than it ever used to be.
So, that's a quick background on this. And then, I also, another caveat before I really get to the meat here, so please bear with me. I want to talk a little bit about versions of open books. The versioning and all of this is important. In the world of OER, we often use tools like Pressbooks that allow you to make the work available online and provide an interface where you can instantly edit the work, where you can improve it or make changes right online, and it's instantly available to your users' network.
So, even though we have tools that let you update a book instantly, and maybe even regenerate the, let's say, PDF version of that book, there really aren't workflows where a reader could order a print version of that book on demand from the latest version from the website. So, of course, they can download the PDF and print it on a home printer, but there isn't a way to get that PDF directly into the major printing services, digital printing services, so that when someone buys a book, that printing service goes out to the Pressbooks site and downloads the very latest version. So, that's something that isn't possible in the world today.
But I don't think that's such a bad thing, because I actually think it's confusing for readers of a book if there's this continual updating and then the product they buy is a snapshot at any point, and it's not really clear which version this is. In general, it's bad practice to update an open textbook mid-semester anyway, because your students and others out there who may be using it, the sand shifts under their feet. And so, it's good to save your updates and do them between semesters, in a time of year like January or August or something.
And so, similarly, it's good if your print versions are also tied to clear versions, because readers come to expect that all copies of an edition will be identical. But if you are going to make some more significant changes to your online book, which then..., you would in general, and this is the way it works in publishing, you would create a new edition of the book. You would clearly label that on the title page, Second Edition, Third Edition, whatever. You would assign a new ISBN number, because its a new distinct product. People who order it want to know which version they're getting and if they're going to order by ISBN, then they should know which one they're getting.
And you may want to stop selling the old edition of that. It's outdated, and people might not want to get that accidentally. On the other hand, maybe you do want to.... Okay. Let's really get now into the things you would be considering here if you decide that you want to support the selling and distribution of the print version of your open textbook. To me, the first question you want to ask is, whether you're going to be selling these print copies of books at cost, where you're aiming to generate revenue. Okay.
If you're selling at cost, and here, by at cost I mean the author and the institution aren't making any money. Of course your printer and distributor need to make money, so they're going to take their cut. But I mean, no one else is going to make money. You're otherwise going to sell at the cost that it costs you to set up this book. So, if you do that, there are no income tax implications for the author or the institution. So, it's just a lot easier in terms of official accounting.
There's also no ethical implications here about profiting from selling copies to students. So, if an instructor writes their own OER and lets their students use it, then offers a print version for sale, and they're going to get a little of the revenue for the print sales, we're getting into some slightly shady territory. So, it's kind of nice and clean if you plan to sell things at cost.
But if you do want to generate revenue because you're trying to recover some of the costs of operating your publishing program, you need to think about whether this revenue is going to go to the author, or to the institution, or split between the two. Or maybe flowed through the institution to the author. Maybe the institution is involved in setting up the print versions, but then they're going to be in turn giving revenue to the author.
But you might need to step back from that question and say, "If this OER was developed with institutional resources, perhaps an internal grant funding program using special resources, then the author may not actually even have any right to it." The copyright may belong to the institution anyway, according to institutional policy. And so, technically it's up to the institution to decide whether to share that revenue, and it may not even be your decision personally, it may be the decision of another office on campus.
There are, of course, some accounting and tax implications. And so, if this is coming to the institution and the institution's receiving revenue, there's usually quite a number of things that would need to be handled for that to happen. Institutions have ways of doing this. It is possible for example, for US-based not-for-profit organizations and universities to receive some income, but they have to account for it in very specific ways. And again, as I mentioned before, there's kind of ethical and policy issues about instructors assigning their own books to their own students, and then having them buy copies and potentially profit.
The next question would be whether you would do print runs of the books, even small, short runs. So, small digital print runs, a couple dozen copies, but whether you're going to do pure print-on-demand, where there are no copies printed in advance, and instead they're only copied when someone orders, that they're only printed when someone orders a copy. One order comes in, one copy is printed and shipped. All right. So, if you do a print run, this requires an upfront investment. Someone has to be willing to pay for that print run, that 50, 100, 200 copies. But you print a whole bunch of copies at once. And so, your unit cost is lower. Each copy costs less to print. Though, again, you're putting a lot of money in, and you need to store those copies until you sell them.
As I mentioned before, there are options for distribution and fulfillment in the book supply chain. And so, you could make an arrangement with one of these, or if this is a much smaller scale operation, if you're basically looking to just make print copies available to the students in your own institution, you could try to run this locally. You could have a closet where you store these copies and students walk in and hand a check to someone and they get handed a copy. But all of that needs to be accounted for, and institutions tend to have lots of rules about things like receiving payment, whether by check or credit card or whatever, accounting for inventory.
If you're looking to make this available for anyone to buy online, again, you're going to probably need a professional distribution option that can handle these orders, take credit card payments, potentially handle shipping, wherever this is going to go. So, professional distributors in the book industry do all of these things and they charge you to store copies. So, this is a disincentive for you to print too many copies up front and eat up their warehouse space.
On the other hand, with print-on-demand, there's no upfront investment. You are just setting it up, but then there's no cost to you at all here, until the book is ordered. And even in that case, you're receiving money from a customer, the POD printers handle the order fulfillment for you. So, that's great. You can just use one of these and they can handle the credit card orders. But one problem with print-on-demand is that bookstores tend not to stock copies of print-on-demand books, because they can't return the unsold inventory through the consignment model, actually. So, why does this matter?
These OER are unlikely to be bestsellers. They're not going to have a whole display in a conventional bookstore. But it may matter because most campuses and other institutions have some sort of campus bookstore for textbooks, and students are used to going there and want to be able to buy their books from there. And so, now you've got to make sure that that bookstore can in fact get copies of this book. Maybe they won't stock it. Maybe they will simply order copies when a student walks in and says, "Yes, I want that copy." And the bookstore will say, "We will order it for you, but it's not refundable."
So, as soon as you buy it, that's it. Or you have to prepay. Maybe that's okay, but you would need to make that arrangement. And this can be especially important because sometimes financial aid and scholarships are tied to using the campus bookstore. The students can only spend the textbook money at the campus bookstore. So, they're not going to want to go off to some other place, some other print-on-demand service to buy it. And you may actually have a policy at your institution that basically says university employees can only refer students to the campus bookstore. They're not allowed to send them to the competing one down the street or to Amazon or anywhere. Students can do that. But by policy, employees may not be allowed to refer students.
Color printing is also a tricky issue in all of this. Covers are always in color. So, that's not an issue, but it's the interior of the book. If you print the interior in grayscale, it's much cheaper to print. It works very well with print-on-demand. But if you have a textbook with color diagrams, where the color is essential, then you may need to be able to print the interior in color. This is more expensive. And in the world of print-on-demand printing, in most cases, you have to choose whether to print the whole interior in gray scale or color. You can't say, "Just print pages 33 and 69 in color." And so, it makes the whole book much more expensive to produce. And so, it makes print-on-demand less economically feasible, to sell it at a higher price.
A bar chart with some colors, that's easy. You can do it basically on standard paper. But if you've got photographs, and you need photo quality paper, that kind of glossy sort of thing, or thicker paper, because you have reproductions of art or whatever, that's even more expensive and really hard to do. I mentioned before that your covers are always in color. So, you could have a regular kind of paperback binding, no problem. Full color cover is just always included in the base price. If you really wanted to sell in hardcover, that's going to be more expensive, whether you're doing print-on-demand or not. If you do case binding, it's common for textbooks, actually. It's the kind of book where there's like images printed right on the hardcover. Or cloth binding, sort of a traditional thing used in scholarly monographs, it has a dust jacket. That's all much more expensive than paper.
From experience I can tell you, you can't print less than 500 copies at a time with a color interior and do hardcover binding and sell it for a reasonable price. You would have to sell it, individual copies at such a high price to recover your investment, that it will look crazy to anyone buying. They'll say, "But I can get an equivalent book, similar number of pages and in color, I'm used to being able to buy such things for $25." Whatever. Well, yes, because the publisher printed 10,000 copies.
You need to think about where your customers are. I alluded to this a little bit before. There are lots of options. If you are going to just distribute them locally, or even just to customers within your own country. Lots of printers will be able to ship within your country. Shipping abroad gets much more complicated. If it's important to you to be able to support readers abroad, lots of extra complications here. Distributors in general will only ship overseas with traceable shipping, where they can track what happens to it. And that's much more expensive. And so, that fee to ship is an extra cost that the customer ultimately would need to absorb.
Some print-on-demand printers, the largest ones have locations in multiple places, but still, if you're trying to ship to developing countries it can get really tricky. Amazon will ship to many places, even to some developing countries, and they do it cheaply because they send it sort of ordinary service through the postal service. And if a copy gets lost, they just eat the cost and ship another one. And distributors are rarely willing to take quite that risk. They're just not big enough.
So, that's something to think about. If you are trying to support online students who are in many countries taking courses at your institution, it may not be feasible for them to buy a print copy. So, just keep that in mind. If you were doing this to try to support your own students and assume that they could all do this, it might not be feasible. I will say that even if you were developing open textbooks where the print version is designed less for your own students at your own institution and more for users in a particular region of the world with poor connectivity, you see this as an alternative for them because it's about a topic that relates to that country or the region, you might try to have the book printed there rather than shipping it from here. It's almost certainly going to be cheaper to print, and not involved by shipping costs, and may give you more options in terms of shipping through a postal service.
But in all of this, because it's probably sounding a bit intimidating, I would strongly urge you to look into any distribution options that have a connection to your institution. There may be some options here that will save you from establishing all of these relationships. Your campus bookstore may in fact have a relationship with a printing service, even something like print-on-demand. And of course, can distribute because they're used to accepting orders. These bookstores are often part of larger chains and they have access to some of these things, and they may be used to running things like essentially course back services, that would reduce essentially custom works and sell them to students. So, they may be well set up to handle this for you.
And you may have access to a university press. Your campus may not have one, but perhaps you are, say at a public institution in North Carolina or Kansas, are just two states that come to mind, that have a press that serves the whole public university system in the state. The press may be able to help you out with all of this. They have these established relationships with printers and distributors, and may be able to handle all of this for you. They're not going to do it for free, because it's going to eat up some of their staff time and they're trying to recover costs, but it may be a mutually beneficial relationship.
And these two entities that come to mind, bookstores and presses, may be willing to work directly with your authors. If your authors are in fact going to keep all revenue from sales, if that's the arrangement that you would make, it's allowable under the policy, if that's what want to do, then you could let them work directly with these parties, and you, running an OER service don't need to be in the middle.
Basically, if the author owns the copyright and is going to receive all revenue, let them set this up directly. It could have been with that campus bookstore. It could be with a press, but it could also be directly with a print-on-demand service. They can go to Lulu, they can go to IngramSpark, Kindle Direct Publishing, many other options out there. And just take the final PDF or the interior PDF with the cover that meets that printer's specifications, and set it up and give the tax information so that they get to receive the royalty checks, and you're just out the picture. It's going to be easier all the way around.
So, that's what I've got. We have lots of time here for questions. I see there's a number of things in the chat, but I will let our moderators feed the questions to me.
Carla: Thank you so much for all that fantastic information, Kevin. So many different things to think about. And I think everybody really loved your quote on trusting you about printing books. So, we do have some questions. Let me go to my list. The first is, "I was at a conference where a librarian was reporting that she had to avoid adopting any OERs that had any kind of non-commercial CC license, because she knew she had to have the campus bookstore print copies. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by non-commercial licenses. Is that true?"
Kevin: I don't believe so, under US Copyright law. So, what I do know is that there was a court case about an educational institution working with... Carla, you will know this as well. Was it Kinko's or a similar service for printing? I think it was Kinko's, right?
Carla: It was. Yeah.
Kevin: And to print the copies to make available for use in the course stack, essentially make them available for use in the classroom. And even though Kinko's is a commercial operation, the ultimate use of the work is non-commercial. And so, that was ruled to be allowed under the CC non-commercial license. This situation was slightly different. So, sorry. Can you reframe it for me one more time? It was...
Carla: Sure. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by non-commercial licenses. Is that true?
Kevin: Right. Right. I don't think so. That's essentially what happened in this case, the instructor, the institution were not profiting. Right? They went to Kinko's and said, "Please print us 20 copies or whatever, for our students. Charge what you charge, but then otherwise, we're good." So, I think you're okay with that, but I'm not an attorney, and I'm not your attorney, in any case. So, it would certainly be worth having one verify this, or talking to your institution's counsel.
Carla: Great. Thank you so much. So, the next question is, "Only a campus store could handle billing students directly, which could be dealt with by loans. Correct? So, there is perhaps an incentive since campus stores do POD. Ours has already said they don't have the capacity to do print-on-demand in-house."
Kevin: Okay. Well, right. So, that was one of my suggestions, was of first talking yes, to the campus bookstore. So, sorry to hear that they don't have the capacity to do that, but hopefully some of the others will have better luck with that.
Carla: And I will just say, from experience, talk to your bursar's office. I know at one of my previous institutions, we were able to send bills from our library for overdue books, lost book charges, things like that to the bursar's office, that students could have paid off with loans. It wasn't automated. We had to go into their system, generate the bill and then hit submit. And then the student paid it with their loans. It wouldn't come directly from the POD machine to that, but that might be worth checking out. Talk to your bursar's office. They might have options for you. I think that's most of our questions that we have so far. Yeah. Sorry. I'm so sorry. That's my little blind kitten. He just woke up from his nap and wants his bottle. Let me see if holding him makes him feel a little better.
I'm sorry. Super unprofessional. This is baby Sam. So, please share your questions as you have them. Kevin, I have a question for you, and you kind of touched on all of this in your presentation, but I would say we are thinking about offering some type of printing program at Miami University. So, what would be your number one piece of advice to any institution who's thinking about offering some type of option to sell print copies? Is it best to make the decision based off the resources your institution has, or space or staffing? What are the number one piece of advice you'd give?
Kevin: Right. Well, if by policy you've decided that authors get the copyright, then where we're back here... Sorry, am I still sharing my slides? Oh, okay. Well, it's the one that if the... Here, let me just pull it up. Right. If the author of the copyright will receive all revenue, then let them work directly. Don't get in the middle. But for all the reasons I explained earlier in my presentation, that may well not be the case. And so, if you're going to be setting something up, I think you're going to want to explore what options you may have.
A service like Lulu, that serves the general public, consumers who just come to their website, may work fine. And you may be able to put that through your university procurement process and use them for your handful of books that you'll sell, or at least where you start. The ones in the publishing supply chain that work with publishers are in general going to be, they may not be jumping to work with a startup operation because they're used to working with publishers, larger organizations that put through a higher volume of content. And you may never have enough sales to make it worth it.
I actually work, for a while, with a smaller printer and distributor that it's one on the smaller end. They work with some university presses and things, but I had set up a couple of books with them to be essentially print-on-demand, and they eventually cut me off because I just wasn't selling enough copies to make it just worth their time for me to be in their system. So, I get it. So, you may end up having to go with one of these consumer-facing services. Again, IngramSpark, Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's... are two appealing options. Ingram's is totally plugged in the book supply chain. And the Amazon option gives you the option to have your books included in the Amazon catalog, which for many people is essentially the requirement decision.
Carla: Great. Thank you so much. That makes a ton of sense. I'm so sorry everybody. We invite everybody to post any last minute questions you might have. If I missed your question in the chat, please repost it. Bring it to my attention. I think I caught them all. Otherwise, we might be waiting for the last question or two to come in. Kevin, do you have any closing thoughts or recommendations for everybody?
Kevin: No. Yeah. Right. Cheryl mentioned printMe1 as well. I've also heard them recommended. A number of people have mentioned working with them for OER. So, yeah. I have not worked with them directly, but it is a promising option and much smaller than the other ones. But no, no other particular suggestions for you. I mean, basically take a moment to think, is it really worth all this trouble that I described to do different versions? Or can your user simply download a PDF and print them on a printer somewhere? It may just really be your simpler option.
Carla: Great recommendations. Thank you so much, Kevin, for your wonderful presentation. You know, one thing I think I've really been reflecting on over our past presentations, is how much unique knowledge everybody brings to the cohort, brings to this process. I obviously know nothing about this, even though this is something my institution is interested in doing. And kind of like Amanda said earlier, if somebody doesn't have an answer for you when you reach out with questions, I think one of my favorite things about the OEN is, chances are, they know somebody who has that knowledge and can connect you. Amanda and Karen, I'd like to invite you to unmute if you have any final thoughts or words for the group before we sign off on our last session. And I'm going to mute so you don't have to hear little Sam screaming. I'm so sorry.
Amanda: Everybody's in love with his screaming, though. We ended the best, right, with kitten screamings and kitten content? Yeah. I just want to thank you all for joining us on this journey during the spring semester. It's been really great having you all here together in a cohort to learn together. And I mean it when I say that you can reach out to me. That's not me being nice. If you have questions and I can help, I would love to be helpful. I'm going to turn it over to Karen now. Last thoughts?
Karen: No. Well, I will just thank Carla, Amanda and the entire Pub101 Committee for their time and attention and dedication to the Pub101 experience. We do truly want to make this meaningful and useful to all of you. So, thank you in advance for your feedback. And I look forward to our paths crossing again in the future. So, thank you very much and farewell.
Carla: Thanks everybody. Take care.
END OF VIDEO
Chat Transcript
00:12:54 Carla Myers: With more little meows in the background!
00:20:37 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: The MOU advice was really helpful
00:20:44 Carla Myers: That I'm not alone when it comes to doing this work!
00:20:45 Karen Lauritsen: I will remember how chatty this group was, and willing to share their own experiences, which was awesome!
00:20:48 Leanne Urasaki: The importance of a detailed MOU
00:20:50 Kelly Smith: The session on accessibility and DEI were extremely helpful and applicable to our strategic plan here
00:20:52 Frances Whaley: Tools, example program calls for proposals and award agreements, and just the supports available!
00:20:54 Anne Marie Gruber: I appreciate ideas that are flexible, ie. the "buffet". We don't have to do it all, especially with no budget.
00:20:55 Cliff Smith: the importance of clear expecations and descriptions of what the author and we will do.
00:21:01 Michele Behr: So relieved to find out all the resources that are available. Has increased my confidence that we can do this
00:21:02 Arenthia Herren: I will remember the advice to set parameters with authors before starting projects (MOUs)
00:21:21 Jessica Dai: I appreciated the call for proposals and the examples of how it changed over the years
00:21:27 Angie Balius: I like that this is an OER MOVEMENT and not just a project.
00:21:44 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I enjoyed the session on MOUs, even though I don't anticipate needing to establish MOUs myself, just better understanding of how they work
00:21:49 Jane Scott: MOUs.
00:21:56 Susan Whitmer: I appreciate the MOU testimonials, knowing these boundaries helps me move forward with projects.
00:22:15 Carla Myers: Yes!
00:24:25 Carla Myers: Here is the link to the community norms I mentioned earlier: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:26:10 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Will you drop- the link to all in one document?
00:26:34 Kelly Smith: How do we join the co-op?
00:26:53 Carla Myers: Here it is Genzeb: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:27:17 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thanks Carla
00:27:22 Carla Myers: That was the class notes. Here is our syllabus with more info: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#
00:27:28 Carla Myers: Glad to help!
00:28:20 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfT52X1f4t5W-TU_h2LrEaDdR19NHW87gb7OYhH4lNT3ah1uQ/viewform
00:29:10 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Hm, it's not loading for me....is it me?
00:29:18 Kelly Smith: It loaded slowly for me
00:29:26 Jessica Dai: Worked for me
00:29:31 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Yes!
00:29:33 Jane Scott: worked for me
00:29:37 Beth Daniel Lindsay: it didn't work in Firefox, but OK in Chrome
00:29:39 Beth Daniel Lindsay: FWIW
00:38:02 Kelly Smith: Question for later, if it doesn't get covered: I was at a conference where a librarian was reporting that she had to avoid adopting any OERs that had any kind of noncommercial CC license, because she knew she had to have the campus bookstore print some copies. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by NC licenses. Is that true?
00:39:42 Anne Marie Gruber: @kelly I attended a Creative Commons webinar recently & their staff/presenter answered that question. A campus store selling OER is fine as long as they aren't making a profit, i.e. they can recoup costs of printing and that doesn't count as "commercial". That was my understanding. #NotALawyer
00:40:04 Amanda Larson: a good resource about it - https://opentextbc.ca/printondemand/chapter/nc-licence/
00:40:30 Arenthia Herren: That was what I was taught by Creative Commons as well, Anne
00:40:56 Kelly Smith: Thanks, Anne & Amanda!
00:48:52 Anne Marie Gruber: Only a campus store could handle billing students directly which could be dealt with by loans, correct? So there is perhaps in incentive to have campus stores do POD? Ours has already said they don't have capacity to POD in-house.
00:51:42 Beth Daniel Lindsay: "You cannot print less than 500 copies at a time....Trust me." Quite possibly my favorite blurb on a slide in recent memory.
00:51:57 Carla Myers: Ha!
00:52:06 Karen Lauritsen: ?
00:52:50 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I'm so glad to see Kevin considering students around the world!
00:53:45 Anne Marie Gruber: I'm also thinking about accessibility questions. Some students may need print due to accommodations. I am awaiting reply from our accessibility office on how that works & how it might be different for OER.
00:55:25 Kelly Smith: Our campus bookstore, which shall not me named, would only agree to print OERs by OpenStax and other platforms pre-approved by them. {eyeroll}
00:56:18 Anne Marie Gruber: @kelly what was their rationale?
00:57:06 Kelly Smith: They didn't offer one.
00:57:17 Anne Marie Gruber: grrr
00:58:30 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: In my experience with our Disability Resource Center, a print accommodation is much rarer than digital accessibility.
00:59:26 Kelly Smith: ??
00:59:46 Anne Marie Gruber: I assume that too, @cheryl. Definitely want our accessibility office involved.
01:00:41 Cliff Smith: Angry cat! ?\
01:00:51 Amanda Larson: I love the screaming kitty
01:00:51 Kelly Smith: that's adorable
01:00:59 Frances Andreu: aw baby ?
01:01:04 Cliff Smith: super adorable!
01:01:06 Arenthia Herren: Awwww hi baby Sam
01:01:06 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I am also loving the kitten's appearance!
01:01:11 Kelly Smith: oh my goodness!!! so cute
01:01:53 Clint Peinhardt: I remember reading about authoring environments with automatic versioning built in. Then you can just require the August 2022 edition or whatever. But I can't remember what it is. Anyone?
01:03:11 Jamey Harris: If your bookstore doesn't want to be involved perhaps the university Print shop can help.
01:03:48 Anne Marie Gruber: we no longer have a print shop.
01:04:02 Anne Marie Gruber: #RegionalComprehensiveProblems
01:04:25 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Tina Ulrich had recommended https://www.printme1.com for POD too. "Cheap. Fast. And all about OER!"
01:04:42 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I've also recommended printme1
01:06:22 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you! I've enjoyed learning with everyone. (And sorry about my spotty internet today.)
01:06:25 Kelly Smith: It's just precious
01:06:28 Kevin Hawkins: ?
01:06:58 Carla Myers: He's such a sweet baby, but gets loud quick when he is hungry!
01:07:18 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Thank you!
01:07:20 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you everyone!
00:20:37 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: The MOU advice was really helpful
00:20:44 Carla Myers: That I'm not alone when it comes to doing this work!
00:20:45 Karen Lauritsen: I will remember how chatty this group was, and willing to share their own experiences, which was awesome!
00:20:48 Leanne Urasaki: The importance of a detailed MOU
00:20:50 Kelly Smith: The session on accessibility and DEI were extremely helpful and applicable to our strategic plan here
00:20:52 Frances Whaley: Tools, example program calls for proposals and award agreements, and just the supports available!
00:20:54 Anne Marie Gruber: I appreciate ideas that are flexible, ie. the "buffet". We don't have to do it all, especially with no budget.
00:20:55 Cliff Smith: the importance of clear expecations and descriptions of what the author and we will do.
00:21:01 Michele Behr: So relieved to find out all the resources that are available. Has increased my confidence that we can do this
00:21:02 Arenthia Herren: I will remember the advice to set parameters with authors before starting projects (MOUs)
00:21:21 Jessica Dai: I appreciated the call for proposals and the examples of how it changed over the years
00:21:27 Angie Balius: I like that this is an OER MOVEMENT and not just a project.
00:21:44 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I enjoyed the session on MOUs, even though I don't anticipate needing to establish MOUs myself, just better understanding of how they work
00:21:49 Jane Scott: MOUs.
00:21:56 Susan Whitmer: I appreciate the MOU testimonials, knowing these boundaries helps me move forward with projects.
00:22:15 Carla Myers: Yes!
00:24:25 Carla Myers: Here is the link to the community norms I mentioned earlier: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YY66Fnp0iBhlZ9Rd8qOv3Av8u3rGNja1Cj5epO1YRyk/edit#heading=h.oymdzx9d30td
00:26:10 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Will you drop- the link to all in one document?
00:26:34 Kelly Smith: How do we join the co-op?
00:26:53 Carla Myers: Here it is Genzeb: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wc9mwttZCPl7kV0WU6-DS37hmh7MJhldVUNBmAyPKCY/edit#heading=h.esmv09kvuc5k
00:27:17 Genzeb Jan Terchino: Thanks Carla
00:27:22 Carla Myers: That was the class notes. Here is our syllabus with more info: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16uhGJ7APTfcKqICdGQLdQ0r7sPTFbiep9d4NaQS1Gb4/edit#
00:27:28 Carla Myers: Glad to help!
00:28:20 Amanda Larson: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfT52X1f4t5W-TU_h2LrEaDdR19NHW87gb7OYhH4lNT3ah1uQ/viewform
00:29:10 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Hm, it's not loading for me....is it me?
00:29:18 Kelly Smith: It loaded slowly for me
00:29:26 Jessica Dai: Worked for me
00:29:31 Beth Daniel Lindsay: Yes!
00:29:33 Jane Scott: worked for me
00:29:37 Beth Daniel Lindsay: it didn't work in Firefox, but OK in Chrome
00:29:39 Beth Daniel Lindsay: FWIW
00:38:02 Kelly Smith: Question for later, if it doesn't get covered: I was at a conference where a librarian was reporting that she had to avoid adopting any OERs that had any kind of noncommercial CC license, because she knew she had to have the campus bookstore print some copies. She was under the impression that printing at cost was prohibited by NC licenses. Is that true?
00:39:42 Anne Marie Gruber: @kelly I attended a Creative Commons webinar recently & their staff/presenter answered that question. A campus store selling OER is fine as long as they aren't making a profit, i.e. they can recoup costs of printing and that doesn't count as "commercial". That was my understanding. #NotALawyer
00:40:04 Amanda Larson: a good resource about it - https://opentextbc.ca/printondemand/chapter/nc-licence/
00:40:30 Arenthia Herren: That was what I was taught by Creative Commons as well, Anne
00:40:56 Kelly Smith: Thanks, Anne & Amanda!
00:48:52 Anne Marie Gruber: Only a campus store could handle billing students directly which could be dealt with by loans, correct? So there is perhaps in incentive to have campus stores do POD? Ours has already said they don't have capacity to POD in-house.
00:51:42 Beth Daniel Lindsay: "You cannot print less than 500 copies at a time....Trust me." Quite possibly my favorite blurb on a slide in recent memory.
00:51:57 Carla Myers: Ha!
00:52:06 Karen Lauritsen: ?
00:52:50 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I'm so glad to see Kevin considering students around the world!
00:53:45 Anne Marie Gruber: I'm also thinking about accessibility questions. Some students may need print due to accommodations. I am awaiting reply from our accessibility office on how that works & how it might be different for OER.
00:55:25 Kelly Smith: Our campus bookstore, which shall not me named, would only agree to print OERs by OpenStax and other platforms pre-approved by them. {eyeroll}
00:56:18 Anne Marie Gruber: @kelly what was their rationale?
00:57:06 Kelly Smith: They didn't offer one.
00:57:17 Anne Marie Gruber: grrr
00:58:30 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: In my experience with our Disability Resource Center, a print accommodation is much rarer than digital accessibility.
00:59:26 Kelly Smith: ??
00:59:46 Anne Marie Gruber: I assume that too, @cheryl. Definitely want our accessibility office involved.
01:00:41 Cliff Smith: Angry cat! ?\
01:00:51 Amanda Larson: I love the screaming kitty
01:00:51 Kelly Smith: that's adorable
01:00:59 Frances Andreu: aw baby ?
01:01:04 Cliff Smith: super adorable!
01:01:06 Arenthia Herren: Awwww hi baby Sam
01:01:06 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I am also loving the kitten's appearance!
01:01:11 Kelly Smith: oh my goodness!!! so cute
01:01:53 Clint Peinhardt: I remember reading about authoring environments with automatic versioning built in. Then you can just require the August 2022 edition or whatever. But I can't remember what it is. Anyone?
01:03:11 Jamey Harris: If your bookstore doesn't want to be involved perhaps the university Print shop can help.
01:03:48 Anne Marie Gruber: we no longer have a print shop.
01:04:02 Anne Marie Gruber: #RegionalComprehensiveProblems
01:04:25 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Tina Ulrich had recommended https://www.printme1.com for POD too. "Cheap. Fast. And all about OER!"
01:04:42 Beth Daniel Lindsay: I've also recommended printme1
01:06:22 Karen Lauritsen: Thank you! I've enjoyed learning with everyone. (And sorry about my spotty internet today.)
01:06:25 Kelly Smith: It's just precious
01:06:28 Kevin Hawkins: ?
01:06:58 Carla Myers: He's such a sweet baby, but gets loud quick when he is hungry!
01:07:18 Cheryl (Cuillier) Casey: Thank you!
01:07:20 Leanne Urasaki: Thank you everyone!
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