An edition by any other name smells as sweet

Every three years or so, textbook publishers release a new edition of a textbook. One has to wonder, though, why? Calculus hasn’t changed much since Sir Isaac Newton, so what’s the point? More importantly, what has changed from that last edition to the latest one?

In four words… not a whole lot. Sure, there are textbooks that change substantially from one edition to another – ones in dynamic subjects that actually change (like planetary geology, or current political science). Most textbooks, though, don’t change – especially introductory ones.

Let’s look at what does change from one edition to the next:

• New Cover – This is the oldest trick in the book. Put a new cover on an old book and it looks like new! It makes the new edition look nicer, but it certainly doesn’t help you study any better.
  
  
• Chapter Re-order – Another familiar trick is to juggle the order of chapters. This makes for a new book without bothering the authors, but it doesn’t help you a bit.
  
  
• New Examples – This one’s a bit of help. Instead of the two examples in last edition, you get two different examples. Umm… maybe that isn’t much help after all.
  
  
• New Pictures – Charts, tables, graphs, and photos, all appealing to our attention-disordered TV generation. The new stuff is no more effective than the old stuff, but once again they don’t need to bother the authors.
  
  
• Error Correction – Woah, here’s something useful – fixing the damned errors! We paid good money for the old edition, they couldn’t throw that in too?!?
  

So what’s changed here? Nothing much, except for the price.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

Some hidden reasons why college textbooks are so expensive

The National Association of College Stores has a breakdown of where each dollar goes for a new textbook. A closer look at their logic, though, reveals enough slight-of-hand to make Penn and Teller genuflect in awe.

First, let’s take their categories for the non-bookstore portion. (Face it, no matter what the publisher charges the bookstore is going to make their cut – at least they aren’t shy about telling you that.)

32.8 (42%) -- Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs
15.6 (20%) -- Publisher Marketing Costs
11.8 (15%) -- Author Income
10.2 (13%) -- Publisher General and Admin
1.0 (1%) -- Freight Expenses
7.2 (9%) -- Publisher Income

After removing the bookstore parts, we find that 78.6 cents per dollar go to the publisher. If we divide each number by 78.6, we get the percentage of textbook dollars attributed to each category.

(FYI, I’ve spent almost twenty years working in various capacities within the college textbook publishing industry, so I have more than a passing familiarity with what goes on behind the curtain.)

OK, let’s talk about these categories now:

Paper, Printing, Editorial Costs – Paper and printing are such a small part of the cost of a book that it’s embarrassing. Called PP&B in the industry (the ‘B’ is binding), this can run from $2 or less for a typical study guide to $12 or so for a high-quality art or biology text. So, pulling back this particular curtain, we find that the lion’s share of this category is editorial costs. I won’t address the relative worth of these editorial costs, but they are incurred whether publishers print a physical book or create an e-book. It’s easy to see, then, that the idea of going the e-book route is not going to do much to reduce the cost of the textbook.

Publisher Marketing Costs – Publishers send their sales people to your professor’s office to convince her/him to use their textbook. How do they do this? Certainly not by striving to produce the highest quality, most useful book imaginable. No, they give the professor armfuls of “free” stuff to help them teach the class – copies of the student text, instructor manuals, answer books, powerpoints, etc. They also dangle “free” stuff for the student to use, like student websites, bundled CDs, etc. Who do you think pays for all that free stuff? That’s right, you do.

Author Income – 15% royalties… are these guys on crack? Twenty years ago major authors were getting a 15% royalty, but not anymore. Go ahead and ask any of your professors who have written textbooks, they’ll tell you. The trend over recent years is to get royalties down to 10-12%, putting more profits in the publishers’ pockets.

Publisher General and Admin – All big businesses try their damnedest to avoid paying taxes using whatever legal means are available. (We’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this one.)

Freight Expenses – Can’t do much with this one, except that recently at least one major college textbook publisher has begun charging the bookstores a restocking fee for returned books. This will reduce some of the freight expenses, but shouldn’t have much impact on the bottom-line cost of the book (although it is pissing off a lot of bookstore managers).

Publisher Income – The chart says this is 9%, but that’s too low. At the very least it’s got to be 12% or more, based solely on the reduced royalties being paid nowadays.

By conservative estimates, then, around half the cost of a textbook is attributed to the business practices of the publishing industry (editorial and marketing costs). E-books is not the way to bring down these costs, revamping the business practices is.

A Revolution for E-learning?

E-learning remains a concept yet to reach its full potential. Still, while there have been incredible strides made within the industry in the last few years the revolution is still to come. I believe that once e-learning is implemented beyond the creation of Content Management Systems (CMS) into the higher education market then the real revolution will begin.

Many may argue the revolution is already here, pointing at more students participating in on-line courses because of the abilities of the CMS. An incredible amount of time and money has been spent developing the CMS and its capabilities to improve the administration and communication process between instructor and student.

A CMS does an incredible job of improving the administration aspect of delivering a course on-line, but e-learning is more than administration. At its heart, e-learning is learning. Do students learn purely from a well-orchestrated roll attendance, test delivery, or group think? E-learning should be centered on the delivery of solid content. Where is the content in CMS? Content Management Systems are crucial, but unfortunately, in some areas the publishers of textbooks are driving them.

Typically, the higher education market has depended upon the creation and organization of content from textbook publishers. A publisher seeks out authors from among the higher education market, primarily to secure adoption rates, and only secondarily to delivery content. Textbook publishers have one goal -- sell textbooks. With the recent trend of declining individual textbook sales the industry is seeking new avenues to increase the sale of the products. Each year the prices of textbooks increase as the individual unit sales decrease.

E-learning from a publisher’s point of view is another avenue to increase the sale of textbooks. The tools and content they are providing to instructors for use in the CMS systems are developed to support the textbook and make teaching easier for the instructor. Most of the tools are PowerPoint slides, quizzes, or digital copies of the book, with a few linear-based content presentations. None of these are truly new or innovative in their approach, or are focused on using the full capabilities of the medium to delivery quality content targeting the actual user - “Students.” It is time to move away from e-learning content produced for the purpose of increasing the sale of textbooks and produce true interactive e-learning modules that empower instructors and students.

The instructors are still key to the classroom. They are the administrators of ideas, concepts, theories, questions, and thought processes for students. E-learning ought to be designed and produced to allow an instructor to custom design their approach to teaching a course. It also should allow for students to access specific learning modules when they need it, without working through a course. It is through the creation of College-Cram.com and the library of learning modules, “cramlets,” that I have been able to explore the concepts of e-learning for the higher education market.

The approach of College-Cram.com has been to identify the core concepts of a subject and build a small Flash™ learning module only on an individual concept. The library consists of individual learning modules organized by concept. This allows students to seek out what they need to learn and gives instructors the tools to customize their course. By concentrating on the core concepts, a library of generic content is created empowering the user to build their own knowledge base.

There are some limitations to this approach as generic content creation only works with those courses that are built upon an agreed foundation of principles, theorems, and laws. Subject matters within science, math, business, and languages provide the best opportunity for this approach.

Revolution will occur for e-learning when the approach for higher education is not based upon the sale of textbooks but in providing access to viable, and desired content. The content must be interactive, customizable, and granular in design and administered using advance technologies of the 21st century in place of digital page turning programs.