What is the digital age, and what does it mean for ELT?
Find out what the panel of our recent ELT in the Digital Age webinar made of that question. Kirsten Cambell-Howes (busuu), Laura Patsko (CUP) and ELTjam’s Nick Robinson and Tim Giifford discuss in this recording of our recent Live Q&A webinar.
As ELT goes digital and expands into multi-faceted, multi-platform products (but with books not set to disappear anytime soon) and publishers restructuring all over the place, you might find yourself, as an author or editor, dealing with people with a whole array of unfamiliar job titles. Most of the people who do these jobs find themselves constantly answering the question “What is it exactly you do?” — if their blogs are anything to go by. To save you being that person at the coffee machine, here’s a rundown of some of the more common roles.
It was interesting to be at IATEFL this year, the annual land grab for attention larger than ever, and a conference dominated by discussions, presentations and a plenary about the future of ELT, which – it is suggested – will be completely mediated by technologies (more of this fallacy later). With Sugata Mitra selling his … Read more
If authors are becoming contractors rather than partners, that changes the role of both author and publisher in a big way. But why is it happening, and is it yet reflected in how publishers work?
If the author is no longer a collaborator, then the publisher must take on that role and so in effect become the ‘master’ author to whom they subcontract the details. This would be analogous to those master painters of old who would paint the head and hands of a portrait, leaving the sitter’s clothing and the background details to be filled in by their apprentices.
It’s crunch time for ELT publishers. There are a few more years left for the traditional ELT publishing business to stagger on, possibly even quite profitably for some. But we all know it’s on the way out, as evidenced by the attempts – with varying degrees of conviction – of the existing players to turn their businesses into ones capable of surviving and thriving in a world populated by rapidly changing student expectations and super-ambitious and rapacious EdTech start-ups who will very happily destroy the cosy world of ELT.
The debate over whether royalties for ELT authors are on the way out is raging on the conference circuit and in various corners of the Web. It’s clear that some kind of change is afoot within the industry, but it’s unclear yet just how extensive that change will be, especially for established authors. Here at eltjam, we thought now would be a good time to look at a couple of important issues related to fee-based ELT materials writing, especially on digital projects.
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