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Where would publishing pipeline go if there weren’t book distributers like Ingram? I must say the company is impressive. Who knew that they were an umbrella company for Lightning Source, Coutts, Spring Arbor, and MyiLibrary among many others? I sure didn’t know that until Ingram’s presentation.

MyiLibrary and Coutts were two Ingram services that I found particularly interesting. The presentation touched on both a bit, but I wanted to know a little more. MyiLibrary is an e-content platform for libraries of all types. It has about 250,000 e-books currently and is growing rapidly. I am excited to see where this service will be in the next year or so particularly since Ingram works with McGraw-Hill, one of the big textbook publishers. I think it would be nice to have my textbooks in an e-book format. No more buying highlighters, no more coffee rings, no more illegible notes on the sides, and no more weighty bag. With any luck, distributers like Ingram can help push textbook publishers into publishing more e-textbooks. Personally, I’m excited to begin working with MyiLibrary. I bet it makes updating a library’s collection simpler.

Coutts was formed in 2000 from the combining of the United States’ John Coutts Library Services and the United Kingdom’s Business and Medical Book Company. Coutts provides a similar service as MyiLibrary, but it is a little bit different. Coutts focuses more on academic libraries and their collection development through OASIS, the Online Acquisition and Selection Information System. I think one of the best things I liked about Coutts however was that they offer their publishers opportunities to promote their products. I honestly didn’t expect that. Of course I can’t say that I was entirely surprised either. Book packagers don’t simply package a book, so why expect a distributing company like Ingram with Coutts to simply distribute content? I think it’s great that Coutts offers to help publishers promote their products. I am definitely looking forward to working with Coutts.

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I went into reading the article The Term Paper Artist by Nick Mamatas thinking that I was going to come out of it totally disgusted by the thought of ghost-writing term papers and instead I found it interesting with a lot of ethical issues on both sides.

I am not a person to condone paying someone to do your homework for you and I am not the type of student that would put myself in a position to do so. However, I can appreciate, and I think we all can, the high amount of pressure that comes with large class loads in college. I thought it was an interesting point in the article when Mamatas mentioned that he wrote many last minute papers for people who would have failed a class or not graduated without a passable paper. In that case, term paper writers are doing something worthwhile to help out another person.

I also appreciate the situation of being in a class that is so far from your specialty/major and not feeling able to adequately do an assignment for it. I think as writing students this concept is really hard for us because we do know how to write and we can do it well enough to BS our way through most predicaments in classes outside our major.

For another class I am researching different curriculums in elementary and secondary schools focusing a lot on standardized testing which does not emphasize writing skills in comparison to math and reading. I think if schools really wanted to stop this controversy from happening, they should teach students how to write better.

On a last note from a writer’s point of view, I think you would learn so much if you were a term paper ghost and it would be a really good writing exercise if you wanted to eventually teach writing composition just in the same way that ghost writing Nancy Drew books would be a good exercise for an  aspiring fiction writer.