Discussion: View Thread

Michael, I confess that I am only just hearing about open source texts.  I am intrigued.  I see the leap to e-books, coming much sooner now that our students are in deep financial doo doo.  I relish the idea of faster revising in light of changes in business and the world that live media can barely keep up with.   How do we learn more?

David

Hi Michael,

The only open textbook resource that I'm aware of (and it's just getting off the ground) is http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/

Of course there are a few other initiatives like the MIT Open course ...

Let me know of any other resources you might come across.

BTW: I'm a grad of the USF program in IS and took mgmt as a minor. Are Nord and Jermiah still there? This would seem to be a good Marxist approach, eh?

Regards, Tom Schambach

Hi Michael

I've been involved in a few conservations lately about the cost of books especially as I am the director of a small publishing house ISCE Publishing.  I am also an academic and researcher and so have an interest to see the price of book come down too.

Many readers and buyers of book do not realize the cut that distributors take when they sell a book.  Amazon, which is not unusual by any means, takes a whopping 55% of the retail price.  Cutting out the middle man would certainly cut the price of books.  For example, any book brought directly from our website automatically get 20%.  This could be even higher if we didn't have to offset the 55% taken Amazon and other distributors.  An interesting way to bring down the price of academic books is for the government to support an academic version of Amazon where the distributor premium is no more than say 5% to cover running costs, not the outrageous 55% taken by Amazon – a non-profit Amazon if you like.  This way publishers could reduce the retail price on books by 30% easily, and buyers would have the tools available to them to buy from many publishers without going through the bother of buying directly from the publisher and having to maintain thousands of different accounts.

Academic books are always going to be more expensive than trade books because of the relatively small numbers sold, but there is no reason for the current inflated pricing.  For example we sell 800 page hardback academic books for around $50.  A similar book from World Scientific can cost well over $100.  This is partly because we are non-profit and World Scientific are out for all the profit they can get.  So maybe in addition to Academic Amazon, authors of text books and suchlike, might consciously target non-profit publishers to keep the costs down.  Of course this favor my company ISCE-P, but bear in mind our focus is on the content not the profit, so once we have made back our overheads, the profits can then be pumped back into academic activities... ISCE-P is in the fortunate position to be subsidized, but our longer term goal is to make any profits realized through sales available to researchers around the world.  And the that authors target non-profit publishers, the more non-profit publishers will spring up – at some point this may provide sufficient competition to the bigger publishers resulting in widespread downward pressure on pricing.

I've heard some suggestion that books going electronic will bring pricing down, but it should be noted that the print costs of a book are actually small compared to the manpower costs.  And readers are increasingly expecting more and more from their electronic content (like embedded web links to various sources).  These 'extras' take time to develop and therefore money... so it is quite reasonable to expect electronic books to actually be more expensive than print books in the future.  A book a lot more than the paper it is printed on!

So my modest suggestion is for the government to support the development of Academia ( as opposed to Amazon), and for authors to target non-profit publishers like ISCE-P.  Initially sales through such small non-profit publishers will be lower as they lack the big marketing machine, but bringing the costs down will eventually support greater higher distribution and diffusion of the content which at the end of the day is the most important (or perhaps should be) aim for academic publishing... and with modern publishing technology there is no need for any title to ever go out of print.

Open source is an option, but I don't believe it is sustainable as it is, and in most instances the cost is simply paid via a different avenue.  Open source journals receive huge government (or other) financial support so they are hardly free, and it is not at all clear to me that the tax payer should immediately cover the costs of making textbooks cheaper by subsidizing them...

Good luck in your efforts.

Kurt

PS ISCE-P is always looking to bring back out-of-print titles so if you have any suggestions!

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

This thread has focused more on the supply side of the textbook issue, but it's also important to look at the demand side.  As a textbook author, I'm always mindful that the student pays, but the faculty member decides.  The faculty member is choosing not just a text but, as Scott Valentine mentioned in his post, a pedagogical bundle.  A significant part of the price of textbooks is the ancillary materials – which may include instructor's guide, Powerpoint slides, test bank, Blackboard cartridge, video clips,  etc.  All of those make the text more expensive for students, but more attractive and useful to the professor.  So, in effect, the professor serves as the students' agent in choosing the text and, as usual,  the interests of principal and agent may differ.

Not every professor wants or needs the whole bundle, but many appreciate being saved from needing to personally reinvent every pedagogical wheel.  If author and publisher do their job well, the package is much better than most individuals could produce without substantial effort.   I'm stunned by Jim's story about being asked to provide a manuscript in 4 months -- it takes me and my co-author roughly a year every time we revise our book, even though revision is a lot easier than starting with a clean slate.  We only wrote it in the first place because we couldn't find a text that did what we wanted.  It was pretty rough initially, and it wasn't until the 2d edition that we began to get it right.

That suggests to me that less expensive alternative texts are likely to require a collaborative effort – colleagues who come together around a conception of the kind of course they want to teach and the resources that would enable them to teach it.  They'll have to be able to provide for themselves some of the things that publishers do, such as editorial guidance, copy-editing, proofreading, production (turning manuscript into polished package), and marketing.   The web and digital technology make it pretty easy and inexpensive to get stuff out to the world.  (I've got a variety of pedagogical stuff on my website available to anyone who wants it at http://www.leebolman.com/reframing_teaching_resources.htm.  Distribution costs are virtually zero, so it's cheap marketing.  More important, colleagues sometimes tell me they find the materials useful.)  The hard part is getting the content right.

Lee

Lee G. Bolman, Interim Dean

Professor and Marion Bloch/Missouri Chair in Leadership

Bloch School of Business and Public Administration

University of Missouri-Kansas City

5100 Rockhill Road

Kansas City, MO 64110

Tel:  (816) 235-5407

Fax: (816) 235-6529

Email: bolmanl@umkc.edu

Web site:  www.leebolman.com

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">UK</st1:country-region></st1:place> perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Florida</st1:place></st1:state> public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">South Florida</st1:placename></st1:place> to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">University of South</st1:city> <st1:state w:st="on">Florida</st1:state></st1:place>

<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Business Administration</st1:placename></st1:place>

Department of Management & Organization

<st1:street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">4202 E. Fowler Avenue</st1:address></st1:street>, BSN 3527

<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Tampa</st1:city>, <st1:state w:st="on">FL</st1:state> <st1:postalcode w:st="on">33620-5500</st1:postalcode></st1:place>

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher.  Thank you for confirming.

Cheers,

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher.  Thank you for confirming.

Cheers,

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student’s Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I’m allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I’m similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn’t accept nicely, I’d be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don’t make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the ‘you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation’ argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher’s sales force….

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the “cost-of-textbook” issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there’s no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say “demands” because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don’t write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors—they change so often and all of the people I’ve “replied” to from emails two years ago come back “no such address.” 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem—how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there’s no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where’s the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one’s view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that—and there’s more lead time—since there’s no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren’t.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn’t like an actuary see some “on average” return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack—and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we’ve got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it’s structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there’s NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn’t you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn’t you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you’d/we’d have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts….????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I’m currently chairing a “Textbook Affordability Initiative” at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We’ve tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they’ve quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we’ve turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I’d rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don’t know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don’t know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don’t know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don’t know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don’t already exist, we’d offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We’d put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I’m hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I’d rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I’m glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

I 'd like to offer the services of ISCE-P, a non-profit publishing house in the US, but then I might be accused of trying to earn money to pay the mortgage... how dare I ;-) K

Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher.  Thank you for confirming.

Cheers,

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

The author experience must vary by publisher.  Maybe we've been unusually lucky, but in more than 25 years with Jossey-Bass, Terry Deal and I have had a series of happy, long-term relationships with editors.  Our current editor has been in place close to a decade – she's wonderful and we hope she stays forever. J-B was a small independent when we first hooked up, and we've crossed our fingers with each ownership change (most recently to Wiley).  So far J-B still retains a lot of the feel of a small publisher with people who love their work, are good at what they do and are good to work with.   We chose them in the first place because they were more responsive and helpful than anyone else we talked to back in the early '80s.  They've continued to give us a lot of help over the years, so it's a marriage that's worked out pretty well. 

We only do a new edition every 5 or 6 years, which feels about right – the world does change a fair bit in that span.  That might be a little less frequent than the publisher would like, but so far they haven't threatened to toss us overboard.   We've managed to keep our price under $50 (under $40 right now at Amazon), even with ancillary materials, and maybe that's helped sales (which, in turn, help keep the price low).   In the later years of an edition we no doubt lose sales to the used market, but that's a good deal for students, so we feel OK. 

Lee

Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher.  Thank you for confirming.

Cheers,

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

---------------------------------
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).

Colleagues,

Look about us 360 degrees.  Is there any view that does not present the cracking, c rumbling, and sagging of models that worked once, but not now?  Name me a sector that  is allowing its producers and consumers to count on status quo?  As I read these comments on textbooks,  and the pressures on and by remaining publishers, I realize I am looking at the end of another aspect of how it has always been done for my ease and convenience, this time with academic publishing. Well, damn!  There, that out of my system, let's help each other invent or revive what we need to keep ourselves and our learners learning to manage what is coming next.   This List is nicely lively these past few days. Maybe it has already started and I am just doing my best imitation of the church mouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party.

David

Thanks, Sheila, exactly same experience and language with same Publisher.  Thank you for confirming.

Cheers,

Jim asked whether W.Europe had similar structural problems. I can only speak from a UK perspective, and two publishers, FT-Prentice Hall for The MBA Handbook (now 6^th edition) and The Business Student's Handbook (now 4th edition) and The CIPD for Practical Business Research Methods (about to appear).

My experience on editorial churn is that it is similarly high. I often deal with two editors during the 9 months or so I'm allowed for a new edition, and am on my seond editor at the CIPD although we only signed the contract last autumn.

I'm similarly obliged to produce new editions on demand – usually every 3^rd year, though one time they shortened the interval. To be fair they do ring up and ask me nicely, but if I didn't accept nicely, I'd be in the same position of losing royalties to whoever did it in my stead.

I feel that since the first edition appeared (would you believe 1991?) things have changed radically. I felt really cherished by my first editor, and that the book was a shared venture. Now it is more like being book-fodder. The publisher will cheerfully commission other books to compete with yours, as the production costs have now shifted radically towards the author. They can afford to launch several competing books and quietly drop those which don't make it.

The royalties are nice, but I do worry that the costs are too high for students. And I find the 'you must do a new edition every 3 years because otherwise there are too many 2^nd hand books in circulation' argument makes good commercial sense, but is not student-friendly if the subject has not moved on that much in the couple of years since the last edition appeared.

Would I kill myself writing books if there were no royalties? Probably not. I only agreed to write the current one because they use a bigger publisher's sales force....

Sheila Cameron

s.cameron@open.ac.uk

Dear Colleagues,

There is a structural problem here in the "cost-of-textbook" issue that needs to be solved.  Text books, on average, have a smaller, captive audience.  Smaller because there's no guarantee a text will be adopted widely, and captive because students have to buy a text that is assigned.  Further, those who write textbooks usually have in their contracts that they must update their books whenever the publisher demands.  I say "demands" because going from the third to fourth edition of one of my books, the first inkling I got was a terse email from a production editor saying that my manuscript was due in four months, would I be complying.  Total news to me.  Then they said, well, if you don't write it, we can use your name and the title and get someone else to write it and charge your royalties for that cost.  True story.  Today, I cannot even contact my current editors-they change so often and all of the people I've "replied" to from emails two years ago come back "no such address." 

This is similar to the big-pharma problem-how do you compensate the investment companies make on the front end if the back end is a low probability return?  Text book publishers charge high rates, even higher rates for the least popular books, so they can get their investment back.  How can we restructure that value chain? 

Publishing open source books on-line is one alternative with its own issues.  The cost of printing is pushed downstream to the students.  If there's no cost to buying the book, why would anyone want to write them?  Where's the return other than the psychic return (see the related on-going flood of emails on extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation) of putting one's view out there? 

One could publish on Xlibris or similar on-line services and still get a hard copy in the mail/bookstore.  They only print on demand and charge a fee for that-and there's more lead time-since there's no inventory. 

Professors could take more responsibility for writing their own materials for their courses (including teaching manuals and materials), but then why re-invent the wheel is someone else has already put it down on paper?  Plus this apparently takes too much time as so many want to be handed a course complete with bells and whistles and complain if they aren't.  This preparation would take away from research time collecting data, analyzing, writing, submitting, revising, etc.  

The government could specify standard texts thus reducing the number of competing texts in the market so choice would be limited and volume runs would go up thus lowering costs.  How many of us would want that?

Why would anyone want to publish a textbook if they couldn't like an actuary see some "on average" return for their investment? 

My conclusion is that this is a tough economic structural nut to crack-and unless we want to push the cost of printing onto students and their inefficient printers or get more oversight that limits choice so they can up their runs, we've got the system that we have. 

Does anyone know what happens in the Western European world?  Do they have the same problems?  Since it's structural, my guess is yes. 

Should we all  self-publish on Xlibris?  You get a little royalty, they only print on demand, and there's NO marketing involved.  At the moment this seems to be the only way to limit these high costs (less margins than costs).   But if you wrote a book, wouldn't you want a sales force out there selling it?  Wouldn't you want your book to be adopted?  Maybe you'd/we'd have to rely on our own web pages to market our texts....????

----- Original Message -----

From: Barnett, Michael

To: MG-ED-DV@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU

Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 10:46 PM

Subject: Open source texts

 

-- Fair warning: I'm cross-posting yet again.  When will I ever reform?

 

Textbooks are expensive.  In Florida public universities, textbook costs rival tuition costs.  I'm currently chairing a "Textbook Affordability Initiative" at the University of South Florida to help resolve this problem (and not simply by raising tuition costs to make textbook costs appear cheaper by comparison!).  We've tried direct negotiation with a major publisher to purchase blanket access to their electronic archives (cf. library purchase agreements with journal publishers), but the price they've quoted makes it infeasible. 

 

And so now we've turned to exploring open source textbook options and ways to use other course materials in lieu of texts.  I'd rather not recreate any wheels, should they already exist, and so I ask for your advice and experiences with open source projects, should you have any.  I don't know if the quantity and quality of open source texts is adequate.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing authors to release texts and course materials for open source.  I don't know all the challenges of incentivizing professors to adopt open source texts and materials for their courses.  And I don't know if I should be prepared for serious legal or other challenges from publishers who want to maintain the gravy train of privatizing a bit too much of what, in my mind at the moment, should largely be public knowledge.  And, of course, many recipients of this e-mail are also recipients of royalty payments, so what are the implications of upending this system for you?

 

I have a perhaps overly optimistic idea that I can create a pool of funds on the order of, say, $100,000, within my university that could be used to provide grants to authors and adopters.  Where viable open source materials don't already exist, we'd offer new authors, say, $5,000 for releasing a text that at least, say, two other professors have agreed to adopt.  We'd put the text through external review, and to receive the full grant, the authors would have to agree to a few revisions to ensure the text is of adequate quality.  I'm hoping that there are enough out-of-print or unpublished texts of relevance out there that this becomes feasible without great effort.  Professors would be offered grants of, say, $500, for completing a tutorial on open source use and then adopting open source materials for a course.   I'd rely on student pressure to encourage professors to adopt open source as well.

 

Please let me know of your experiences and your thoughts on this idea.  I'm glad to summarize for the list, should folks desire.  I currently can be reached at: mbarnett@coba.usf.edu.  

 

********************

Michael L. Barnett, PhD

University of South Florida

College of Business Administration

Department of Management & Organization

4202 E. Fowler Avenue, BSN 3527

Tampa, FL 33620-5500

Phone: 813-974-1727

Fax: 813-974-1734

Webpage: http://www.coba.usf.edu/barnett

 

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
<http://ssrn.com/author=414796>

 

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The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).