A textbook by any other name…would be an improvement
August 22, 2011
When I was growing up, my friend’s dad told him that the best part of having kids was naming them: it was all downhill from there.
I didn’t take many parenting lessons from that guy, but I’ll give him credit on this one. Naming stuff is a blast. If you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.
How We Named Eleven Learning
We get asked this all the time. To everyone’s surprise, we spent much more time worrying about the second word than the first. We like ‘Learning’ a lot more than ‘Publishing’, ‘Education’, and the other words that legacy publishers use to brand themselves. Learning is something you do, not something that happens to you.
As for ‘Eleven’, that was easy. It’s one louder:
The new name for our short-form textbooks is…
When announced our intention to publish shorter, focused textbooks, we knew we’d need a quick way to describe them. That led us to set up a poll, and the feedback you gave us was fantastic. One educator pointed out that ‘razorbook’ was a very masculine name that might alienate half the planet’s population. That hadn’t crossed my mind: we were thinking of Occam’s Razor. ‘Razorbook’, for what it’s worth, came in dead last.
The winner-by-a-landslide is Picobooks. In the SI scale, the prefix pico- means something that’s 10-12 of a whole. (This is either one billionth or one trillionth, depending on whether or not you’re a native English speaker.) We’re saving ‘zeptobook’ and ‘yoctobook’ for our next project.
The prefix pico- is derived from piccolo, the Italian word for small
One thing we haven’t finalized is how to pronounce the name: is it “pie-ko” or “pea-ko”? (Off-topic: to my surprise, orange pekoe tea is pronounced “peck-o”.) This is a subject of much internal debate on our team—it’s me against everyone else—and the internet does not speak with one voice on this matter, either.
The Latest Naming Project
A few days ago I was speaking with someone who loved what we were doing but questioned why were still calling them ‘textbooks’. To her, textbooks are giant, static, linear, and print-only. And that’s not what picobooks are about at all. We just haven’t thought of something better: “Contextualized curriculum-driven learning objects” doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Anybody have any suggestions?
August 24, 2011 at 3:08 am
Follow along if you know how this goes…
R
August 24, 2011 at 3:09 am
E
August 24, 2011 at 3:09 am
P
August 24, 2011 at 3:10 am
O
August 24, 2011 at 3:13 am
The piccolo picture doesn’t really work…pico – picco, it’s stretch. Cool name, though.
August 24, 2011 at 3:13 am
C-c-c-c-c-c-c-COMBO-BREAKER
September 8, 2011 at 1:25 pm
Who trolls the company blog of a textbook publisher? Seriously?
You guys are crazy…
September 30, 2011 at 1:28 pm
Is sourcebook a copyrighted term? How about startbook? It would seem useful to emphasize the idea that knowledge/learning is mutable, and that these docs include links.
September 30, 2011 at 2:31 pm
Gord, thanks for the suggestions. We’re starting to wonder if it’s time to move away from the “book” suffix. For many, it seems to have a lot of baggage.
And when one takes the high-quality content away from the printed page and makes it interactive, perhaps it merits a new name…
November 11, 2011 at 12:16 am
[...] It will come as no surprise that we at Eleven Learning like the number eleven. When we have our weekly meetings, we rate our progress on a scale from 1 to 11. It’s good silly fun. Heck, we named ourselves after a joke in a movie. [...]