Textbooks Are Like Sausages
September 30, 2010
Let’s start with a quote widely attributed to Otto von Bismarck:
The less the people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep in the night.
I like to have coffee with people from the traditional textbook publishing industry; they tell me stories about how screwed up their companies are. Here’s this week’s example:
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Yet Another Bad Thing That Big Textbook Publishers Do
September 14, 2010
(We’re big fans of what the team at Flat World Knowledge is up to. Every success that a next-generation textbook publisher has—and lately, FWK has had a lot—validates the model for all of us. This is an example of them not doing the bad things the traditional publishers do.)
As we mentioned in our earlier post, Flat World Knowledge has released a new graphic novel textbook, Atlas Black: Managing to Succeed. There are some good (and not so good) points made by the commenters over at Inside Higher Ed.
The criticisms went along these lines:
- A comic book textbook is dumbing things down.
- Putting a textbook into story format has been done before.
- It doesn’t supply the wealth of pedagogical options that a traditional 900 lb. textbook can offer.
- The book isn’t modular, and the narrative flow means professors have to structure their courses around the book.
To which we respond…
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It’s Friday…What Did You Learn This Week? 9/3/2010 Edition
September 3, 2010
It’s Friday, and here’s what I learned this week. Hope you’ll share what you learned with us, as well.
- Daytona State College is moving to an e-book-only model starting in January, 2011. Students will no longer purchase “textbooks” for their courses, but will instead pay a “digital materials fee” to Daytona State for the use of the e-books the school has licensed from the various publishers. Significant? You bet. Academics will still control book selection, but pricing and delivery now fall squarely into the per-course cost model used by the for-profit institutions like DeVry and University of Phoenix. Guess who’s not happy about the new deal? That’s right…the campus bookstore.
- On a related note, our friends at fellow “upstart publisher” Flat World Knowledge are doing something similar at Virginia State University in the business school, although they’re trying a purely “free” model.
- Coincidentally, 5 Cal State campuses signed licensing agreements with the Big Publishers this week for all-digital course materials. In this scenario, however, students make the purchase through the campus bookstore.
Sensing a trend here? Do you think initiatives like these will result in lower textbook prices for students over the long term? Is this disruption, or just a new edition of the same old model?
Your comments are welcome and appreciated.
