It amuses me a little that I have just taken delivery of a book published in India to which I have contributed a chapter. I guess that just shows my age.
When I arrived in Denmark 17 years ago I thought I was being extremely international in having a contract to write a text book for a British publisher for the Further Education market there while living in Denmark. As it turned out I felt that I had an easier job writing the book in Denmark with free access to almost any book or article I needed than if I had stayed in the UK to do it. I guess I was lucky that the book was about the European Union so it was not too much to expect that I could find materials on that here in Denmark. I got the contract for that book because the publisher was based in the same town as I was (when I was still in the UK) and their representatives had visited our college asking if anybody felt able to write a book.
Seventeen years later and I give an online presentation about podcasts in language learning and then publish an accompanying article. That article is picked up by an editor in India who asks me if I would like to contribute a chapter. Truly globalised. Since I had just started coordinating the VITAE project at the time, April 2008, I elected to write the chapter explaining the VITAE approach. The book is
‘Teaching English as a Second Language – A new pedagogy for a New Century’ edited by Manish A. Vyas and Yogesh L. Patel 2009 PHI Learning Private Limited, New Delhi
It certainly does cover a wide range of topics attempting to introduce new approaches in a wide variety of aspects of language teaching and includes so much material that I have not had a chance to fully appreciate yet what sort of publication I have contributed to.
But while the sourcing of contributors and editing and proof-reading may have taken place electronically, the process seemed to come to a grinding halt once we were back in the physical world of printing words on paper so the publication date originally set for March 2009 was in the end barely before the new year of 2010 was rung in. Not a tremendous delay in the physical world but an eon in digital terms.