School's In, It's Textbook Time!
2 Sep 2005, 7:48:04 pm
0 Comments
Online book-middleware Alibris saw a huge jump in sales -- just from textbook sales. Now, that's sales of used textbooks, not new textbooks...because who wants to pay full price for their books? It's insane to -- students spend around $900 a year just on the text. Alibris' increase is quite remarkable: 40% over last August, and 70% increase just from July to August. On the other hand, textbook producers have been hoping electronic versions will drive future sales...but reliance on electronic knowledge has given way to shunning textbooks altogether.
From a publisher's standpoint, free and open used textbook sales cut into profits, and abandonment of textbooks is a scary proposition. Ebooks do represent an opportunity, through use of digital copy protection, but if the files cost the same as the ink-n-paper version most students will not be pleased at the elimination of the resale market. What's a publisher to do?
Look at the textbok-free school: where are they getting the knowledge imparted upon the students? Teachers are either downloading curriculums from websites devoted to the subject, or they are developing new curriculums referring to internet-based information repositories. When I was in high school and college, barely 15 years ago, teachers and professors jumped around within a textbook, skipped chapters, and created new ones via handouts and alternate reading -- not much different than the so-called textbookless schools; they are essentially an extreme extension of curriculum 'tweaking'. There will always be free websites with good info, but the ease of getting the info or collecting all the information into a semester of classwork can be difficult if starting from scratch. While most teachers love their work, I doubt many are prepared to create a textbook's worth of instruction on their own.
Publishers would be wise to ease into the market of packaging single-subject content: for example, a 7th grade Earth Science teacher could log in to McGraw-Hill's curriculum aggregator, and pick individual 'chapters' from dozens designed by experts -- one on volcanoes, one on weather, one on earthquakes, another on glaciers -- but state law doesn't like evolution, so that's left out, and only a quick summary about hurricanes is included since they're uncommon in Kansas. The instructor would recieve warnings for chapters that overlap, or if a chapter has a prerequisite piece of information that must be included. Once the teacher reaches an acceptible curriculum, the aggregator's software will assemble the chapters, compile them into a table of contents (with cross-referenced information in chapters), and design handouts, research materials, online references, and a teacher's guide -- almost instantly. What if the teacher would prefer hard-copy textbooks? Print-On-Demand services could produce, in a matter of days, enough custom textbooks for a teacher to supply all of his classes. Progressive teachers could download an HTML version for teaching online or a PDF version for eBook distribution. The cost will not need to be as high as traditional books -- but a teacher may even be willing to pay more, knowing that every page of the book will be used to instruct the class. Individual chapters could be altered as new information is discovered or errors corrected, with automatic updates sent to subscribed teachers, rather than requiring an entirely new edition to be released. Coursework could be coordinated between different teachers, even in different schools -- for instance, to ease the transition from junior high to high school, or so a sociology teacher and a history teacher could cover the same topics around the same time of year.
Students hate buying textbooks that they don't feel they're getting the full value out of; at least one school has found no value in buying textbooks at all. What's needed is a new way to create textbooks everybody needs: what schools need is timely information that fits their curriculum, and they've found that pulling the information off the internet is better than buying a textbook. Publishers need to step in and make themselves available this way: providing their textbooks in a format that can be downloaded and assembled, creating a valuable resource for both the teacher and the students.
. . . . . . . . .
User Comments
No comments at this time.
