Having read thousands of syllabi, I’m not sure you want to leave this task in the hands of the faculty.

Also, aggregation is necessary to ensure that course materials can be used by disabled students. I think California has been heavily involved in this.

That is the disruptive nature of open access textbooks.

Consider the disruptive technology i.e. open source textbooks. They will be replacing a medium whose management is paid for directly by students. Collecting the textbook list from the faculty of a university and then providing those course materials for sale is a very expensive task. Open source textbooks would likely shift costs from the bookstore to the University and that means the students still get to pay, this time in the form of additional tuition.

One would assume that an open source textbook needs to be developed by a university faculty member. Realistically, the time spent developing and maintaining the textbook would replace time that a faculty member would have spent doing something productive for the university. This will be an invisible expense at first, but soon the university will figure out why certain faculty are not as productive as they used to be.

The more obvious expense comes from the fact that the bookstore would be unable to sell open source textbooks. Thus, the course materials department for a bookstore would not be able to sustain itself. It would then have to turn its course materials aggregation and distribution duties over to the university. Granted, the extent to which the university chooses or needs to pursue these new duties may be very different in the distant future, but in the near future this could be a huge expense.

So, the question that needs to be answered is which is the more efficient model?

It is interesting to think about your own strategy as well. His book also speaks of the “Basis of Competition” — four stages of product competition. He uses a hierarchy devised by Windermere Associates in which there are these four metrics that a consumer uses to measure products: performance, reliability, convenience, and price. When all other factors are equal at one metric, the basis of competition in the marketplace shifts to the next factor. It sounds like your company is making a conscious decision not to accelerate along the functionality trajectory (and the corresponding rat-race) and is instead focusing on the other factors of competition.

The complex ‘educational solutions’ that depend on new media delivery systems, aggregated collaboration, user customization, end-user initiated decision-making, and constant updating of both the content and the technology through which the content is consumed are MUCH better examples of “performance oversupply” than the textbooks that these educational solutions aspire to replace. Survey after survey, focus group after focus group, faculty themselves tell us (and by “us,” I mean my company) that the various new initiatives create more work for them and produce no discernible improvement in students’ learning. These systems, so beloved by administrators and IT managers, offer too many features requiring too many separate decision-points, with not enough payoff.

Interestingly, many of these new initiatives are doing precisely what Christensen would say is the wrong thing: trying to effect a wholesale revolution all at once, attempting to unseat traditional textbooks + ancillary packages completely, instead of heeding Christensen’s main point, which is that they should be focusing on a very limited (and different) “performance dimension” from the one that the big textbook publishers currently operate on. The ‘kitchen sink’ quality of so many new-media educational initiatives is easy enough for existing publishers to undermine and simplify, as they surely will.

And for those of us operating in the small- to mid-sized space in educational publishing, we’re finding that we’re picking up significant market-share with one-color, just-the-basics books (yes, traditional books–still the primary way that most people become acquainted with Clayton Christensen’s ideas, by the way) that undercut the big publishers in price by 50% or more. Imagine that. No doubt the big three will continue to undermine their *own* established four-color behemoths with these sorts of ‘essentials’ texts, too, as publishers have always done. Publishing has been pretty good that way—-always back-filling market niches with new, less expensive and more bare-bones alternatives that then are ‘improved’ in subsequent editions with additions and ancillaries requested by their ‘best customers’. The fact that the publishing industry manages not only to move one product up the performance curve but ALSO create new products that fill in the space further down the curve seems to me to argue for seeing publishing as pretty good at managing the ‘dilemma’ that Christensen describes.

Openly licensed textbooks could be that disruptive option. They certainly are not good enough now, but have the potential to become good enough very fast. If so, the least demanding customers will leave the incumbent producers — and the incumbent producers may respond with a “good riddance.” As the disruptive option gets better, it becomes good enough for the most demanding customer. If the disruptive option competes favorably now on both price and performance, the incumbent loses. (Point ‘c’ on the graph.)

And, Peter, believe me when I say that I think academic libraries are facing such a disruption from Google in particular and the internet in general. I’m not surprised by declarations that the profession’s “services [are] no longer needed, and that the ‘value’ [librarians] claim to add to the information-stream is non-existent.” I’m hip deep in it enough to say some of those very things about this profession. (Hence the use of the Jester moniker in this blog — to poke at the profession from within the castle walls.) Whether academic libraries survive in a recognizable fashion is a debatable point; it is by no means a certainty. From what I’ve seen, so far, of the college textbook ecosystem, much the same could be said about its principle actors.

It amazes me how blithely the work of hundreds of publishing professionals is dismissed or, even worse, not considered at all in discussions of textbooks and textbook prices. If only those who speak so knowingly and optimistically about “open source” or “wiki” alternatives could see just how bare-bones, badly-written, and pedagogically moribund most textbook manuscripts are in their first (and even second) drafts, and if they could see just how many of the great aspects of the truly great textbooks (books like Campbell’s BIOLOGY, for example, or Gardner’s ART THROUGH THE AGES, and many others) originate with the publishers of those books, they might appreciate how much value–real, palpable value–publishers add to the material that the specialist-authors produce, and they might not be so sanguine about the possibility of open source content replacing teaching resources that are professionally edited and designed.

This isn’t to say that textbook authors are clueless dolts or horrible writers. Instead, the point is that producing an effective textbook is not something that just comes naturally to anyone, not even the most talented and beloved teachers. The ‘genre’, if you will, functions in very specific ways—some of them counterintuitive—that don’t correspond to the ways that a good lecture or class discussion functions. The people who work in publishing possess a deep institutional well of knowledge about the structures that animate that particular genre. Ask anyone who has authored a major college textbook how deeply their publisher was involved in the process. Anyone who is honest (and whose book is truly a *major* college text) will respond in one of two ways: 1.) “those guys were a royal pain in the butt”; or 2.) “I can’t thank them enough for everything they did.” Both responses are evidence of the same thing: dozens of publishing professionals devoting thousands of hours of work to helping the author publish an effective and (one hopes) successful textbook.

I don’t presume to know the world of library science so well as to declare that you all are obsolete in this new era of “new media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations” (quoting one of your other posts). Instead, I assume that librarians are working incredibly hard to adapt their skills to those new media and new realities, and are thereby ensuring that they will continue to offer a valuable service to other knowledge-workers well into the future.

How do you imagine you would feel, however, if the entire public discourse about your profession was essentially reduced to a sweeping declaration that your services were no longer needed, and that the ‘value’ you claim to add to the information-stream is non-existent—-a mere figment of your imagination?

Just sayin’.

Flat World Knowledge is hoping to make money by providing (selling) alternate media formats of their open source textbooks. I’m not sure this is a realistic model. I think FWK is going to find it difficult to develop content that will meet the standards of the faculty of most universities. And I doubt that there are that many faculty who are willing to spend the time and effort to properly develop a wiki textbook with little or no financial remuneration. I just don’t see it happening unless universities change the job description of faculty to include creating wiki textooks for their students and we know that most tenure seeking faculty are not encouraged to publish basic level textbooks.

Your last question is the crux of the digital future. The bookstore needs to remain the focal point and the agregator of course materials. After all, we do not want to send our students on a cyber scavenger hunt to find their required course materials, do we? Can you imagine going to 5 classes and getting 5 syllabi, each with an URL to a website which requires you to download your course materials? And then going to the bookstore to pick up the few extra books that just aren’t in digital format yet. Crazy.

My vision of the future entails a student registering and then receiving a link to a bookstore website or a Learning Management System (Ohio and California already have these in the works.) which will allow them to see, purchase, and download all required digital course materials at one time. It will also provide the opportunity to place an order or reservation with the bookstore for any additional physical textbooks as well as provide the opportunity to review and purchase any ancillary materials that would be of benefit to their education. In such a scenario Flat World Knowledge would simply become another digital book to download. I’d imagine bookstores could work a deal with FWK in which the bookstore would charge the student a nominal fee to enable the transfer of any wiki textbook. Bookstores could also be involved in providing print versions on demand since we already create custom coursepacks and therefore have the mechanisms in place to provide this service.

The download itself will be possible because the bookstore will continue with it’s current role of gathering course material information from the faculty–this is our toughest job. And anybody who wants to jump into this process better be aware of the thousands of hours that go into collecting and verifying faculty course material requests.

BTW, most of your forward thinking bookstore are already selling digital books and early signs indicate that we are on the cusp of the future. It is going to grow slowly until we see somebody bring to the market a really good digital book reader and then it’s going to happen so fast that we will be amazed.