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.
Teaching Old Dogs New Tricks at Tools of Change
March 1, 2011
As regular readers will know, we participated in the Startup Showcase at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty overwhelming: we picked up some great information, met a lot of interesting people, renewed old acquaintances, and received tons of positive feedback. Some observations (warning, may include significant randomness):
- Starting conversations with “We’re an open source college textbook publisher” is a great way to grab people’s attention these days. More on our OER effort coming soon.
- Said the CEO of another textbook publisher: “I know you…you’re the guys who quit math.” Thanks for reading our blog!
- The mix of companies at the Startup Showcase was interesting. Some were disruptive, but most were enabling technologies. Overall, it was the right combination for an event such as this one. The audience was fantastic: we were pleased to learn that there were a couple potential authors in the crowd, too.
- Our favorite bit of advice came from media entrepreneur and investor Linda Holliday, who said “Your mix of free and revenue-generating content is a dance you do with your customers.”
- If you weren’t able to make the conference and want to check out some of the presentations, here they are. This conference really is the bleeding edge of the industry. We’re smarter just for having been in the building.
Finally, we were presenting opposite the Westminster Dog Show. Fluffy dogs are hard to compete with. As we headed back to Boston, we saw a bunch of them outside of Penn Station…
When to Ignore the Advice of People Who Are Smarter Than You Are
February 1, 2011
One of our neighbors here in Cambridge is HubSpot, and in the book Inbound Marketing they advise their readers to not redesign their websites.
Your visitors [...] think your web site looks just fine and are not particularly interested in your site’s colors or the type of menus used. Your visitors are looking for something interesting they can read and learn about [...]
Perhaps they’re not as strident as Joel Spolsky was in his seminal work Things You Should Never Do, Part I, but they’re getting there. Redesigning your website is like having a money bonfire.
So Yeah, We Redesigned Our Website
Our business has changed substantially in the year since we launched: we’ve grown from providing a web-based textbook reader to offering a suite of tools for authors and educators. Our old website wasn’t just outdated: it was deceptive. People would introduce themselves to me and say, “I read your homepage. So you do X?” And I would respond, “While I understand why you have that impression, no, that’s not our business.” I felt like I was a marketer on the Douglas Adams account, promoting Mostly Harmless as the “The fifth book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy.”
What Has Changed
If you haven’t done so, please check it out for yourself. Here’s what you’ll see.
- Emphasis on peersourcing and community. We’ve given author services equal weight with reader tools.
- Focus on what’s important. We have twelve months of data on what our users care about. Links to our catalog of available textbooks: interesting. Links to a definition of beta test: not so interesting.
- A new tagline. Thanks again to all who voted in our poll of a few weeks back. “Community-powered textbooks” does a great job of capturing what we’re about.
- Simpler registration. It was too complicated before. Now it isn’t.
- Aesthetics. Guilty as charged: while this wasn’t the reason for the redesign, we did some fiddling while we were in there. So you’ll see bigger, prettier pictures. And we picked a new display typeface, too; it’s the gorgeous slab-serif-with-humanist-influences Chaparral by Carol Twombly.
Comments? Please let us know what you think.
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.
Start Spreading the News…We’re at Tools of Change…
January 24, 2011
Hopefully you read the title of this post to the strains of Frank Sinatra’s masterpiece “New York, New York.” We’re all about the Big Apple because we received some excellent news last Friday: Eleven Learning has been invited to participate in the Startup Showcase at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing conference on February 15.
Now in its 5th year, Tools of Change is one of the premier industry events. It brings together a diverse group of professionals who are actively working to shape the future of publishing. The Startup Showcase is new for 2011 and will feature twenty or so companies that highlight the creativity and variety of the industry. We’re very excited to be a part of it, and we look forward to getting feedback on progress we’ve made.
We’ll be in New York on the 15th and 16th of February, so if you want to grab coffee, please drop us a line.
We Tried to Friend Math – Math Said TTYL
January 18, 2011
When we originally developed the editorial plan for Eleven Learning, our strategy was to focus on publishing in math and computer science. Both disciplines offer many great opportunities to publish up and down the curriculum…places that The Big Publishers can’t or won’t touch, but for which there is a clear need for good textbooks.
We decided to focus on math first. Our plan was to round up the cream of the free and open source math textbooks, convert them to XML (we store books in this format so that they’re easily portable to print, the web, at so on), and put them into our peersourcing process.
We found some great books, including Jim Hefferon’s Linear Algebra, Grinstead and Snell’s Introduction to Probability, Stitz and Zeager’s College Algebra, and Edwin Connell’s Abstract Algebra. Linear Algebra went right into the peersourcing process and became our first community-reviewed title. Anticipating good things, we readied the other manuscripts.
And then…a funny thing happened on the way to the browser. We discovered that it was hard to render math in XML.
YOU trying getting this to render properly in HTML.We dare ya.
Time to Pivot
Like, REALLY hard. Though there are some tools available for rendering complex math in XML, the amount of handwork needed is significant. Put in the context of a 600-page abstract algebra book, it became clear rather quickly that despite our efforts to find an inexpensive, scalable solution, executing our math publishing strategy was going to be difficult.
So, we did what all (smart) start-ups do when confronted with these kinds of problems: we changed course. Excepting Linear Algebra, which we’re committed to publishing, we put math aside until the technology for converting it to XML improves, and we’ve redoubled our efforts at acquiring computer science titles. We’re making great progress, and if anything, CS authors have been even more receptive than their colleagues in the math world. We’re also testing the waters in the social sciences as we think about expansion in 2011.
A word to the wise for math, though: someday, we’re coming back for you. And we’re not going to be nice about it.
Help Us Pick a New Slogan
December 21, 2010
We’re revamping the marketing content on our home page, and that means we’re selecting a new tagline that better matches our business. (Here’s a quick summary of what makes us unique: we ask textbook authors to work directly with potential adopters to get their books into fighting shape. This lowers costs for students and increases options for professors. Click here for more information–and to read about the new word we invented to describe our model.) Since we rely on the community for making our textbooks, we figured it was only in character to ask for help on this project, too.
As you no doubt expect, we don’t cross-my-heart-hope-to-die swear to follow the results of this poll. If somebody suggests something that’s absolutely brilliant, we might use that instead. So consider this fair warning that we reserve the right to claim ownership to any slogans people suggest in the comments below. (That’s Eleven Learning-style legalese for you, folks.) And if we notice themes in what people like that aren’t reflected in the final outcome, we might pick something else. Or we might just pull rank.
Happy voting.
How To Attract Small-Time Criminals to Your Website
December 16, 2010
There are lots of reasons for a company to blog. For us, it isn’t to attract new users through SEO. Our audience of textbook authors find us via referrals from peers, not because they’re actively searching for us. While I look forward to a day when this isn’t the case, Google just isn’t the way we attract new authors. (On the subject of referrals: Kind Reader, do you know someone who has written a college textbook, refuses to give up control to the big publishers, but still needs help sharing it with the world? Don’t be shy.)
Instead, we blog to describe ourselves to the authors who are already on our site and want to learn more. By talking about the issues surrounding textbooks, we can show them how we’re different from the competition.
That’s not to say that search engines don’t drive traffic to us; it’s just that they don’t drive terribly valuable traffic, and I don’t look at that data very often. So I was very surprised when I looked at our all-time stats this morning. The number one query that led people to our blog was…
“stealing textbooks”
I also spot these gems:
“is it ok to steal textbooks”
And this one:
“how to make money stealing textbooks”
Perhaps it was this woman who Googled that.
The entry drawing all this attention to the blog? This one. It’s a post (with an admittedly snarky title) on how the big textbook publishers have lied about their business model for decades, and how that deception is coming back to bite them in the butt. When I wrote it, I honestly had no idea I was putting out the welcome mat for scofflaws.
The full scoop is that while “stealing textbooks” may be our #1 search term, it–and all the related terms–still comprise under 10% of our total blog visitors from searches. That may no longer be the case after I post this, of course. I’ll keep you updated.
Some Follow-up From Our Inside Higher Education Feature
November 18, 2010
In case you missed it, we were recently featured in Josh Kim’s “Technology and Learning” blog over at Inside Higher Education. We were very pleased with what Josh wrote about us, and we think he got most of it right. I just want to follow up on a couple of things from the piece that I don’t think warranted being dumped into the comments section of the blog post, which has a different vibe going on.
- I can’t really argue with the description of us as a “long tail” publisher, but I prefer to think of us as an “ignored tail” publisher. Our goal is to breathe new life into the books The Big Publishers no longer touch because they are so focused on churning out the big intro books. The markets for those books still exist, and we think we can do a better job of reaching them.
- Josh makes reference in the post to The Big Publishers pricing for a “65% profit margin.” What he really should have said there is something like “up to a 65% gross profit margin,” which is more correct. None of the sales, marketing, or other overhead costs associated with each book are reflected in what Josh wrote; his description of the economics is purely focused on the editorial/production costs. Sales, marketing, etc. costs are derived from that gross profit margin and result in a lower net profit margin.
- For all intents and purposes, a “successful” textbook will be one which recoups its plate and PPB before sales get completely sucked into the black hole known as the used book market. Unit sales figures vary widely, and can’t necessarily be relied on to indicate “success” anymore.
The piece stimulated a lot of comments about our peersourcing process; if you’re an academic and would like to be a part of the ongoing peersourcing project, please get in touch. Our community is also open as a private beta test right now; people interested in joining should contact me.
