Legacy Textbook Publisher No Longer on Speaking Terms With Reality
February 20, 2012
What's up with this guy's chin? Is that makeup, or did he cut himself shaving?
Although its name is not well known, Cengage is one of the firms that, along with Pearson and McGraw-Hill, form the Triad that dominates college textbook publishing. Recently Cengage announced that they’ve transitioned from being a viable company with a vision for the future, to becoming a massive anti-capitalist prank: Cengage has pulled all their content from e-textbook distributor Kno.
According to Mashable, Cengage terminated their contract because Kno enables students to produce a study sheet excerpting passages from the textbook. Apparently Cengage views study sheets as derivative works and considers this a copyright violation. Never mind that every student who uses the feature has already bought the text, so there is no potential for lost sales. Never mind that it actually makes their textbooks more valuable to students.
While Cengage may be within their legal rights to pull their content, it’s an absolutely crazy thing to do. This is Kno’s reward for trying to pull Cengage into the 21st century.
Instant study sheets are a patently obvious feature for an online textbook reader—it’s one of the killer benefits that a print book just cannot match. And that’s the problem: legacy publishers only pay lip service to digital textbooks. They’re fine with them as long as they’re overpriced, missing compelling features, and don’t threaten the publishers’ print textbook hegemony.
If you’re working with the legacy publishers, you’re just putting a Band-Aid on the problem. At Eleven Learning, we’re not trying to fix the textbook publishing industry. We’re blowing it up and starting over.
What It Means to Be an Open Source Textbook Publisher
March 25, 2011
We’ve got big news. Today we’re announcing something that you may have assumed was already the the case: Eleven Learning is an open source textbook publisher.
What does that mean?
From now on, our textbooks will be available freely. We’re recommending that our authors adopt the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Click the link to read the full text of the license deed—in plain English, no less—but the brief version is that you can freely share and distribute our textbooks for noncommercial purposes. You can also modify them and share those derivative works, provided that credit is given to the copyright holder and that this license also applies to the new works.
What if an author wants to use another license, like CC BY-NC-ND?
We can live with that. You’ll find thousands of online debates about which license is most “free”, and the difference between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”, but you won’t find it here. For us, pragmatism trumps ideology. This is a big tent.
Why do you use the term “Open Source” instead of “Open Educational Resources”?
Because everybody and their grandma knows what “Open Source” means. Unfortunately, only OER people seem to know what “OER” means. When I use “OER” in an email message, I inevitably feel the need to define it. That’s a drag.
If the book content is free, and you’re a for-profit company, how do you make money?
Magic.
OK, more seriously: by charging for it.
Um, what?
Yes, readers can obtain the content for free. Some of them will do so. They’ll download the source, reformat it, print it, then get it spiral-bound. Good for them.
Many will look at the print and online solutions we offer and think, “It’s easy to buy. It’s a fair price. It makes my life more convenient. They’re paying royalties to the authors. That’s a pretty good deal.”
Call it the freemium approach. Call it similar to Red Hat’s value-added model for Linux. With apologies to Heinlein, we call it appealing to students’ self-interest and their better nature.
So just to be clear, students can just use the books for free.
Yes.
Why go open source?
Our slogan is “community-powered textbooks”. Through our peersourcing process, we ask our reviewers to help us both edit and spread the word about our books. And when one asks for help, it’s only fair to offer something in return. We can’t pay them back, so we are <gag>paying it forward</gag>.
What took you so long?
For a while now, we’ve danced around this issue and been open source in all but name. Our books were already free. People assumed we were open source. But we hadn’t officially committed to it. We were the common-law marriage of open source publishers.
The rest of our team was in favor of taking the leap. But I was chicken. Why? Perhaps it was the you-can’t-do-that look of horror I received from a few publishing industry sages when I shared our plans with them.
But then I remembered that, contrary to their knee-jerk reactions, we already are doing it. This is the way forward.
Please join us in welcoming the newest addition to the Eleven Learning family: ISBN 0-978-9834557-9-0, registered with the Library of Congress for the forthcoming book Developmental Linear Algebra: The Path to Mathematical Maturity by James Hefferon of St. Michael’s College.
With that number, we have moved one step closer to publishing the first completely new, commercially viable, open source linear algebra textbook. You can count on one hand the number of new linear algebra textbooks launched by Big Publishing during the past decade. The number of viable independently-published titles over that same period is zero.
Together with Jim and the team of volunteer peersoucing editors, we’re on the verge of doing something remarkable with this project. While getting an ISBN is a simple exercise, it’s still exciting and invigorating to us, and it’s a wake-up call to everyone who didn’t think this was the real deal.
Some of you may wonder why we aren’t doing away with legacy concepts like ISBNs. We debated that ourselves. In the end, we decided that ISBNs weren’t part of the Textbook Problem: they make it easier to locate, adopt, and order our textbooks. So we’re keeping the baby as we throw away the bathwater.
In this case, the baby’s name is 0-978-9834557-9-0.
Hammers, Nails, Crowdsourcing, & Textbooks
January 28, 2011
This week saw the President deliver his State of the Union address. Now it’s our turn to update you, Kind Reader, on the state of our peersourcing efforts. (You may remember that this is the word we invented to describe our community-powered review process.)
I’m pleased to announce that we recently wrapped up our first peersourced project: Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon. You’ll be hearing much more about this text in the upcoming weeks and months. In the meantime, however, I thought I’d share two of the more interesting things we learned.
- Peersourcing is a Great Leap Forward. I’ve done the textbook editorial thing for quite a long time and thus am jaded by the traditional peer-review process. I had high expectations for our real-time, collaborative, online review process. It’s safe to say those expectations were exceeded: it dramatically improved the level of engagement and quality of feedback from the reviewers. On balance, it was much more rewarding and fruitful for the author, for the reviewers, and for us. Even in this fledgling iteration, we’re clearly on to something big and transformative.
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“If All You Have Is a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail.” The online toolset we used for this first round was easy to use, but also bare-bones. From this we discovered that the reviewers tended to work at the level of the tools. Reviewers’ edits and comments, while plentiful and helpful, tended to be boxed in by the limited functionality we gave them. (The quote above is from FDR confidant and dapper dresser Bernard Baruch.) Since we’re in the design stages of dramatically improving our peersourcing toolkit, this is great feedback for us.
We’re launching three more books into the peersourcing process: Introduction to Computing, Introduction to MIS, and Abnormal Psychology. (If you’d like to be a peer reviewer for any of the books mentioned above, please contact me.) As we experiment with more powerful tools, I’m sure we’ll learn a lot from these books, too.
Boffo Biology Book Has Brain-Bending $10 Million Budget
October 26, 2010
A not-for-profit has announced a massive new biology textbook that, when complete, will have cost $10 million to develop. That’s just for content creation; it doesn’t include marketing and sales expenses. (It will be digital-only, so there are no print costs.) Before clicking on that link, be ready to exercise a little willing suspension of disbelief.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Do Textbooks Want to Be Free?
August 3, 2010
The recent article in The New York Times about the efforts underway at companies and organizations like Curriki, Flat World Knowledge, and the CK-12 Foundation to provide free, open-source textbooks certainly struck a chord. The thing that grabbed me was this quote from Scott McNealy:
What’s In a Name? Explaining “Eleven Learning”
July 30, 2010
People are always interested in hearing about what we do, and they generally ask us good, insightful questions about our business model, market, community, etc. Eventually, though, all conversations about Eleven Learning end up going in this direction:
“So, what’s up with the name? Did you guys really name your company after “Spinal Tap?”
Buckminster Fuller, Meet Stewart Calculus
July 16, 2010
