I missed last week so here is the blur of the past 2 weeks.

• Attended & presented at COHERE in Regina. I’ve been trying to go beyond the free bit when talking about open textbooks these days and look at some of the other benefits of open textbooks beyond saving students money. I grew up in Regina until I was 8 so always nice to visit the ancestral homeland of my people :). And put a lot of faces to Twitter avatars.
• Also presented at the BCOER Librarians event on the role of librarians in an open textbook sprint (thanks to Alec Corous for lending me his office in Regina to Skype in my presentation to the event in Vancouver.)
• As pat of Open Access Week, Leva and did a presentation on open textbooks to CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) on Wednesday Oct 22, the mrning things went apeshit in Ottawa. CARL headquarters are about 10 block from the hill, so that made for an interesting background for the presentation.
• Still working on our trades project. Hoping this one gets off the ground, soon. So many moving pieces.
• Met with Brad to discuss requirements to replace PrinceXML in Pressbooks. I want this thing to be fully open source and that PDF engine, as good as it is, isn’t.
• Posted for a new co-op position in January to help us with the OTB project.
• Met with Tony Bates and Leonora Zefi of Ryerson to talk about publishing platforms. Tony has been a bleeding edge user of Pressbooks Textbooks and is looking for other ways to incorporate rich media into his book, so we were talking to Ryerson about suggestions.
• Administrata working on the language and timelines for our service agreements.
• Worked on blog post with Beck about the upcoming research we are doing with Rajiv on open textbooks.
• Finalized our incentives for that research (win one of 10 Kindles for filling out our survey!)
• Also finalized the email distribution list of who will receive an invite to participate in our research.
• Began work on a 4 week open online Adopting Open Textbooks workshop we will be offering in January
• Lots of inter-provincial work with Alberta and Saskatchewan on open initiatives. Made contact with some key open textbook people at URegina while I was at COHERE.