The Eleven Learning Blog

–Buckminster Fuller

By nearly all accounts, the publishing system which produces college textbooks in the United States is broken.

• Textbooks cost too much: Students face the prospect of spending many hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per semester on books.  The average is $900 per semester.
• Used books and rentals perpetuate the issue: The used book and rental markets make buying books cheaper for students, but also very effectively neuter a publisher’s ability to sell anything beyond the first two full semesters of “laydown.”  This leads most publishers into a dizzying shell game of supplement-packaging, ISBN-changing, special bundling, and ever-accelerating release dates for new editions, leading to higher costs and lower customer satisfaction.
• Big, expensive books rule the day: To get maximum return on investment, publishers focus on a hits-driven model anchored by large, expensive, generic books for the intro courses.  Smaller, more specialized titles are marginalized or ignored altogether.  Authors are squeezed to write books that conform to a sales and marketing strategy, not an academic or editorial vision.
• More modalities, fewer choices: Publishers grasp frantically at shrinking revenues for the big books by repackaging them for various platforms and modalities: e-books, e-readers, learning management systems, online delivery platforms.  The costs involved in this are significant, and produce an apartheid-like system of haves and have-nots.  Intro to Computer Science will get all the bells and whistles; 400-level Sociology might not get published at all.    The result:  fewer choices and options for faculty and students alike.

To their credit, there are some who have jumped into the fray to try to provide alternative solutions.  Flat World Knowledge, for example, provides students with free online textbooks and charges for the supplements that go with them.  Many of the major publishers have developed sophisticated digital initiatives aimed at doing something similar.  Laudable efforts, but none of them change the model.  Can Flat World Knowledge really sell enough supplement packages at $2.50 each to keep the cost of books free (or even low)?  Can the major publishers really keep “feeding the beast” while porting books to every reading app and LMS?  What of the hundreds of potential books which have markets but are left by the wayside in increasingly large numbers because of the all-consuming focus on the best-sellers for the intro courses?

Ultimately, these are worthwhile efforts are perpetuating the existing model.  But they don’t go far enough.  The old system must be made obsolete.  And it will be, soon.

To paraphrase Eric Raymond, the textbook publishing industry today is a business of building cathedrals.  Grandiose, soaring, heavily-ornamented cathedrals that bear names of deep and lasting reverence.  Stewart Calculus.  Giancoli Physics.  Campbell Biology.  Brown and LeMay Chemistry.  Keedy and Bittinger Algebra. Kotler Marketing.

A new model is coming, one that focuses not on the cathedrals, but on using the wisdom of the crowd, together with authors who have been freed from the yoke of “me-too” publishing,  to solve the Textbook Problem.

Stay tuned.