Comments on: Textbook Costs

By: RobRittenhouse

RobRittenhouse — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:45:10 +0000

CMU’s Online Learning Initiative has some online courses including some math and science courses that are Free and Open enrollment. See

http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index.shtml

Caveat: I did some work with them.

By: Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:13:15 +0000

Interesting discussion, especially since I just wrote a textbook. I plan on blogging more about this myself, but I would say a few quick points off of the issues raised here:
– A textbook need not be written in a dry, detached manner. In my own, I’ve really tried to offer a lively voice with a clear set of arguments. Perhaps that might push away some potential adopters who disagree with my perspective, but for me it’s what makes the project pedagogically defensible and useful.
– At least in media studies, images can be used as fair use screen grabs from films & TV. That helps make my book a bit more affordable – “only” $50…
– While I do hope that I get some income from it, the other major reward is the ability to shape and frame the field. If the book is successful, the impact is far greater than a specialized monograph ever could be.
– I’m not convinced that most students are interested in an online book (yet). I’ve used a version of my book in draft PDFs, and virtually every student prints it out. By buying the book, they get the images, portability, and resale or archival value.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:31:28 +0000

Yeah, it would. Actually, I can think of one Africanist textbook I like quite a bit: Fred Cooper’s Africa Since 1940. That’s a good example of a work of synthesis that still has a viewpoint but that can be used pedagogically as a textbook.

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:30:57 +0000

Poor editing on the last sentence. Delete “force one.”

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:29:03 +0000

I was wondering how I became socialized into that attitude, frankly, and how typical it is: to what extent it’s a function of academic culture.

(It’s not that I think writing a textbook would be easy, to make that clear – I’m fairly sure that it’s much harder than just adding another piece to the pile of specialized work.)

Along these lines: wouldn’t writing a broad survey textbook force one be an example, in its way, of the sort of generalist work that you’ve called for?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 21:00:47 +0000

Another way to do it: credit someone who writes a cheap or free textbook that’s seen to be high quality with having done work more valuable than having published original research or written a monograph, as in topometropolis’ example of Allen Hatcher–if an achievement like that shows up in a tenure dossier, maybe we should be in a position where we regard that as almost automatically demonstrating the kind of commitments we want to see in tenured faculty.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:55:21 +0000

I’m not wild about textbooks personally for the same reason, both as a user and as a possible author.

But on the labor question, here’s how I look at it. Despite the stereotypes of the leisure-class academic, I think most faculty in most institutions are working hard to handle their teaching and research and service responsibilities as they stand. So I’m very uneasy about adding a presumption that in addition, we all be expected to personally generate a textbook for our major survey courses, unless we somehow budget that either financially or temporally into existing workloads. I would have no problem with a different way to budget for that besides straight-up monetary compensation. For example, if a university went to its economics department and said, “Everyone who wants to participate in a textbook-making project gets a course off this year (with the assumption that the end result will be a quality ‘local’ textbook and group of problem sets that can be used by members of the department).” You’d get some complicated intellectual property issues (would the university own the textbook? the faculty? could you take it with you to a new position elsewhere? etc.) but those aren’t hard to handle if you approach them in the right spirit. (Maybe, for example, using a Creative Commons license for the end product.)

By: G. Weaire

G. Weaire — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:41:36 +0000

“…beyond your ordinary responsibilities as a teacher or researcher.”

This point interests me, and I’d like to hear you say more about it. Academia is rather good at getting us to internalize a sense that we should do certain kinds of work without direct compensation. So why not this, especially since (as you indicate) we end up doing a certain amount of informal “text-book writing,” (informed by both teaching and research), anyway?

I don’t mean this as hauling out the old “X isn’t respected for hiring/tenure/promotion” cliche. Because I don’t think that’s it – there are plenty of us in institutions where this would count.

My own motives for reluctance – which may not be typical – would definitely have something to do with the fact that I’d see a “textbook” as requiring a certain suppression of my own point of view and personal voice. On the one hand, academic publishing is all about articulating one’s own point of view, and on the other, academic lecturing is inseparable from a personal voice. While textbook writing, perhaps unfairly, feels to me like it would be a bit bland on both counts.

By: dmerkow

dmerkow — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:53:12 +0000

I’d follow on that the rise of Amazon and the internet has upset the balance in terms of textbook pricing. Once upon a time, publishers and wholesalers could lean on college bookstores to adjust the size of scope of the used book market, such that roughly speaking everybody could win – students weren’t ripped off, bookstores made their operating expenses, publishers made some money and so did the new/used book wholesalers. Now the student and the publisher compete head on for power. The student can pretty much draw on the entire world in search of the cheapest used book, whereas the publisher has to capture as much of the necessary revenue in each sale to cover expenses because once a book goes deeply into the used book market the long tail all but disappears. So they have to turn over editions as quickly as possible and shovel stuff into the book because the long tail is all used books and not new.

By: topometropolis

topometropolis — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:12:45 +0000

I find the textbook situation particularly frustration in my discipline. Undergraduate mathematics courses, especially low-level ones like calculus and linear algebra, haven’t changed substantially in content in a hundred years. Sure, the emphasis has changed a bit (less analytic geometry, less computation but more about the underlying ideas), but it’s not like the sciences where textbooks need constant updating as new things are discovered. Yet still the standard texts cost $150. Moreover, most of them are actually pretty poor, both from the student’s and the instructor’s point of view.

A positive story: Allen Hatcher wrote a book for the standard first-year graduate class on algebraic topology and put it on the web for free. He then negotiated a deal with Cambridge University Press to sell copies for less than $40. It’s now by far the most common text for this course, not just because it’s free but because it’s really excellent. If this can happen for a small volume specialized text like this, surely it should be possible to do this for calculus as well…