Next-Generation Textbooks: Book Smarts
With textbooks
and other forms of scholarship moving to
electronic formats, schools are turning to
a surprising array of innovative tools.
That creaky spine. The yellowing paper. Those eternally typeset words.
Why do we still love the printed page? In the age of electronic media,
some say producing textbooks is a dying art. And it may be true that every
day, devices with names such as iPod and eBook threaten to replace the
age-old “technology” of the traditional book with a newer, faster, and
equally (if not more) portable approach. In many cases, at colleges and universities
across the nation, students and teachers alike are embracing these new technologies.
At the University of Virginia, for instance, technologists have created an entire
library of e-texts designed to eliminate the process of taking out books. Elsewhere, at
schools such as Central Florida Community College, Valencia Community College
(FL), West Chester University (PA), and Indiana University, technology leaders have
embraced a variety of vendor tools that combine traditional textbooks with eLearning,
for an entirely new experience. These tools differ in scope and approach from more traditional
learning materials, but it appears that across the board, they work.
Nobody knows what lies ahead for old-fashioned books, but as it becomes easier to
grant reproduction permission online, and as textbook prices continue to rise, one can only wonder: Will the book go the way of the Dodo bird
and someday be studied on an eBook, as scholarship of the past? Will book-based learning
survive the onslaught from the learning technology sector? Will colleges and universities
move in a different direction entirely, linking learning forever to cutting-edge
technological development? Only time will tell.
Blazing New Trails
Clearly, there’s a fine distinction
between digital libraries and digital
scholarship. The former house the latter,
which usually are electronic copies of
printed works. At the University of Virginia,
which houses one of the most
respected digital libraries in academia,
librarians have made this distinction for
years. The school used to separate its
digital scholarship material into two
camps: the E-Text Center and the Rare
Materials Digital Services Center,
which preserved rare materials in
electronic form. Earlier this year, the
groups came together under a new
Digital Research and Instructional Services
department.
The new department contains everything
from electronic maps to social science
data sets; from journal articles to
book chapters. Seen another way, it
boasts electronic versions of just about
everything a reader might find in an
average textbook. Works in this new
department are much more than just
electronic copies of physical documents;
instead, all of the pieces have been digitized
and marked up by certain scholars
to enhance the original content. Donna
Tolson, director of Outreach and Instructional
Services, says the approach makes
learning so easy that students don’t even
realize they’re doing it.
“The medium is now so engaging,”
she explains (referring to age-old textbooks
as “useful but dry” to most students),
“it allows you to access this
information in many more multifaceted
ways than the printed book has done
over time.”
Within the new department, a number
of individual resources have taken the
place of textbooks for particular fields.
The Tibetan and Himalayan Digital
Library, for instance, is
a clearinghouse for marked-up texts,
maps, data charts, photos and more—all
in electronic versions that are perfectly
accessible from any computer in the
world. Another example: the school’s
renowned Geospatial and Statistical
Data Center,
which provides electronic copies of data
for architecture, planning, and other
civil engineering disciplines.
Writing on the eWall
MOVE OVER eBOOKS: There’s a brand-new
single-screen technology that makes the digital
reading experience even better. The technology,
dubbed electronic ink, provides clarity
and resolution that rival paper itself. It is the
brainchild of Cambridge, MA-based vendor
E Ink, and is available on a
host of new products, including the new $350
Sony Reader, which can store
dozens of books.
To the naked eye, E Ink displays appear to
be very similar to traditional liquid crystal display
(LCD) screens. But this new technology is
quite different—a sophisticated, 21st-century
take on the Etch-A-Sketch toy many of us grew
up with. Essentially, the principal components
of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules,
about the diameter of a human hair.
Each microcapsule contains positively
charged white particles and negatively charged
black particles suspended in a clear fluid.
When a negative electric field is applied, the
white particles move to the top of the microcapsule,
where they become visible to the user.
This makes the surface appear white at that
spot. At the same time, an opposite electric
field pulls the black particles to the bottom of
the microcapsules, where they are hidden. By
reversing this process, the black particles
appear at the top of the capsule, which makes
the surface appear dark at that spot. Naturally,
black particles at the top are what form letters
and words.
With this in mind, a standard E Ink electronic
display is comprised of two parts: a plastic film
that contains the microcapsules and clear
fluid, and a layer of circuitry underneath it.With
the help of display driver software, circuits fire
and adjust electric fields beneath the film,
thereby altering the characters that appear on
each page. As users scroll through pages of
text, the characters change accordingly.
Sure, this process is unique. But particularly
in the higher education environment, the
technology has practical benefits, too.
Screens on E Ink electronic displays reflect
light like paper—requiring no front or backlight—
with much higher resolution than an
LCD or computer display. Furthermore,
because the technology uses power only when
refreshing new screens rather than to keep
them lit, users can go 7,500 pages without
recharging—a true luxury in the world of
eBooks. What will they think of next?
Neither of these sites compares in
scope to Virginia’s biggest and boldest
collection of digital scholarship materials
yet: the world-famous Virginia Center
for Digital History, which boasts documents,
photos, videos, and more. Tolson says
that in many of her school’s history
classes, this site has completely
replaced textbooks as the method of
instruction. While she predicts professor
reliance on the site will only
increase in the months ahead, she is
careful to note that there will always be
a place for the beloved textbook in the
learning environment overall.
“You can take all the data in the world
and have the largest possible electronic
project, but it won’t mean much unless
you’ve analyzed it, taken it, and thought
about what it means,” she says. “Textbooks
tend to provide pathways [to
learn] how to do that.”
Vendor Connections
While Virginia’s digital book and digital
scholarship collections span a variety
of subjects, the digital books at Indiana
University are more focused on a select
group of topic areas. One of these subjects
is ethnomusicology, the comparative
study of music of different cultures.
Previously, professors used textbooks to
teach this subject. Today, through a
series of CD-ROMs from Heritage
Muse in New
York, students can access The English
and Scottish Popular Ballads edited by
19th-century scholar and folklore specialist
Francis James Child—a compilation
of 305 songs, lyrics, maps, and
audio and video clips.
“In studying specific ballad texts, students
are often asked to work from a
particular text: A, B, C, or what have
you,” says Mary Ellen Brown, a professor
of Folklore and Ethnomusicology.
“Having a digital version makes access
almost instantaneous for the students.”
Ethnomusicologists at West Chester
University have just started using the
same Heritage Muse CD-ROM collection.
There, technologists recently have
made this digital catalog available at
designated computer workstations in
the university library. Dick Swain,
director of Library Services, says the
tools go “above and beyond” the typical
textbook because they permit those
using and studying the ballads to link to
additional versions and explanatory
materials. This, in turn, allows students
to better understand the basic texts, and
provides them with the ability to discover
relationships among the texts
which previously were hidden, he says.
Ride the SafariX
DIGITAL BOOKS ARE nothing new to the folks
at SafariX. The company, a
joint venture between technical publishers
O’Reilly Media and Pearson
Education, launched
in 2004 to deliver books online for up to 50
percent less than they would cost in a university
bookstore. Today, through the SafariX
eTextbooks Online service, the outfit has
established a huge following.
Unlike an online bookstore, SafariX
houses the entire, cover-to-cover digital
version of books from O’Reilly and Pearson
imprints: Addison Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Macromedia Press, New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Que Publishing, and Sams Publishing. Overall, the
organization offers titles in more than 30 different
subjects.
As part of this effort, SafariX also launched
an online service by which teachers can
create custom coursepacks and textbooks.
The service, dubbed SafariU, was just the
thing Jon Preston, assistant professor of IT at
Clayton College and State University (GA),
was looking for. Preston says for years he
searched for a textbook with a particular type
of content. Finally, with SafariU, he was able
to create his own.
“I could pick and choose a couple of
chapters from six or seven different books
and put together something that was customtailored
and made-to-order for the course I
was teaching,” he says, noting that at a time
when books are going digital, he preferred
the tangible work. “I created a book because
I think students appreciate having something
tangible that they can bring to class; a text
they can mark up and keep.”
Other schools have turned to different
vendors for help integrating technology
into traditional textbook offerings. At
Central Florida Community College,
technologists realized more than a
decade ago that they needed to offer an
alternative to on-campus learning for
students who were at some distance or
unable to commute to campus on a
regular basis. To meet this need, the
college implemented Plato Interactive
Mathematics (Plato Learning), a multimedia instructional
resource for both distance learning
and on-campus courses.
Students use the interactive course
software to work through problems
with professors who are physically in
class. If they need additional work,
the instructors encourage them to
refer to their textbooks and take practice
quizzes and explore other selfdiagnostic
features at home. Dr.
Judith Wood, professor of Mathematics,
says this has proven effective in
decreasing dropout rates and increasing
course completion rates. The
same can be said for Valencia Community
College, where students utilize
the same Plato products, and have
achieved similarly impressive results.
“The textbook is a one-size-fits-all
approach to learning, but students
have lots of different learning styles,”
says Gisela Acosta, a professor of
Mathematics at Valencia. “Our philosophy
in embracing this technology was
that the more instructional deliveries we
offer, the better opportunities we have
of reaching more students in total.”
For more ways innovative vendors are
reshaping digital learning tools with
cutting-edge electronic displays.
Permissions Issues
In addition to Plato, vendors such as
SafariX and XanEdu are offering a hybrid
approach to old and new scholarship.
Over the past decade, this company made a name for itself selling coursepacks;
physically bound compilations of
magazine articles. Today, with the help
of the Internet and Acrobat Reader from
Adobe, the company
now offers hybrid models of the same
product—coursepacks that exist physically
but also have an online component
students can log into when they don’t
feel like lugging around four or five
pounds of photocopies.
The new Digital Research and Instructional Services
department at the University of Virginia boasts electronic
versions of just about everything a reader might find in an
average textbook, but all of the pieces have been marked
up by scholars to enhance the original content.
XanEdu hybrids are put together just
like traditional coursepacks. Educators
at schools such as Arizona State University
submit a list of works for inclusion
in the packet, and XanEdu analysts
set out to find the rights to reprint these
works for one-time use. Some of the permissions
come directly from publishers;
others must be obtained from individual
rights holders. Tyler Steben, VP of Publishing
for XanEdu, notes that a small
percentage of documents don’t require
permission at all; if the original copyright
on an item has expired, the item is
considered to be in the public domain,
and anyone can reprint it.
“Obtaining electronic reprint rights is
a complicated but critical process,” he
says, pointing out that hybrid coursepack
models usually require special permission
for reproduction in two media, and
that hybrids generally cost 15 percent
more. “So long as we get permission, we
can put just about any item into our
coursepacks and make them available in
whichever way a teacher wants.”
Rising Costs
WHY ARE TEXTBOOKS losing their luster?
Prices certainly aren’t helping. According to a
2005 report on rising textbook prices from the
California Public Interest Research Group
(CALPIRG), a nonprofit advocacy
organization, the average student pays
$900 a year for textbooks, equal to nearly half
of the tuition and fees of two-year public colleges
and a fifth of the amount that in-state
students would pay for tuition and fees at fouryear
public colleges this year.
The report, titled “Rip-off 101, 2nd Edition:
How the Publishing Industry’s Practices Needlessly
Drive Up Textbook Costs,” surveyed the
most widely-used teaching texts at colleges
and universities in California and Oregon, and
alleged that textbook publishers artificially
inflate the price of textbooks by adding bells
and whistles to the current texts—forcing
cheaper used books off the market by producing
expensive new editions that are barely different
at all.
The report also found that most of the faculty
members surveyed in the report do not think
many of these add-ons are useful, and are
supportive of efforts to streamline textbook
costs and extend the shelf life of current textbook
editions. “It’s appalling that at a time
when students are contending with rapidly
rising college costs, textbook publishers are
playing games to increase prices,” says Merriah
Fairchild, the study’s author and a higher ed
advocate for CALPIRG.
Among the study’s other findings:
- Textbook prices are increasing at more
than four times the inflation rate for all
finished goods, according to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics’ Producer
Price Index. The wholesale prices charged
by textbook publishers have jumped 62
percent since 1994, while prices charged
for all finished goods increased only 14
percent. Similarly, the prices charged by
publishers for general books increased
just 19 percent during the same time
period.
- The most widely purchased textbooks on
college campuses have new editions published
every three years.
- New editions of the textbooks surveyed cost an average of 45 percent more than
used copies of the previous edition.
- When issuing new editions, most publishers
raise the prices of their books. Of the
textbooks surveyed, new textbook prices
jumped 12 percent on average between
the previous and current edition, almost
twice the rate of inflation between 2000
and 2003 (6.8 percent).
- Are they justified? Three-fourths (76 percent)
of the faculty surveyed in the 2004
report said that they found new editions
justified only “half the time” or less.
- Adding padding. Half (50 percent) of the
textbooks in the survey were sold “bundled,” or shrink-wrapped with additional
instructional materials such as CD-ROMs
and workbooks.
- Kill the add-ons. More than half of the
bundled textbooks surveyed (55 percent)
were not available for students to
purchase a la carte, in which the textbook
is available without the add-on materials.
This was the second year of the “Rip-off
101” study. The entire study can be found
online HERE.
Most of the time, companies such as
XanEdu use permissions clearinghouses
to obtain reproduction rights. The Copyright
Clearance Center (CCC) is one of the biggest permissions
brokers. With the help of the
firm’s Electronic Course Content Service
(ECCS), instructors can obtain permissions
for coursepacks and digital compendiums
online. Still, according to Bill
Burger, VP of Marketing for the CCC, the
industry faces quite a number of challenges
pertaining to rights and permissions
with digital media down the road.
First and foremost on that list is securing
digital content that has been reproduced
legally. Burger says publishers are
growing increasingly concerned that students
will obtain a piece of digital content
that has been reprinted with permission,
then nonchalantly pass the content along
to their friends, essentially breaking the
law. While the CCC d'esn’t have a way
to assuage these concerns, Burger says
that his organization will continue to pursue
the distribution of rights and permissions
and ensure that if nothing else, the
first reproduction of someone’s intellectual
property is protected.
“This kind of transitional pain is not
limited to digital books and the academic
world,” he says. “It is something that
will characterize the publishing industry
for years and years to come.”