The big basals and intro textbooks also pass through an expensive and exhaustive process whereby permissions are secured for every media element not generated as work-for-hire, ancillaries are farmed out to piecework contracts, and lots of “book production” work is done. The finished goods are stocked for distribution in a warehouse and the publisher waits for the orders to arrive so they can ship out the materials.

The upshot is that this takes lots of capital and incurs lots of risk. Winners subsidize losers and any successful textbook is burdened not only with fixed setup costs, but the costs of books that failed. Hollywood handles the latter by setting up limited partnerships that shield much of the costs (and part of the profits) from the studio. Textbook publishers generally don’t do this and are fully exposed to the costs.

So, what changes in the new regime? Many things. First of all, moving to a distribute-then-print model removes a lot of the warehouse and preprinting costs that the older print-then-distribute model incurs. Next, the production pathways for online materials are far more tolerant to minor errors and changes. You can update materials and therefore don’t have to strain every last nit before releasing a title. The costs tend to rise exponentially as you attempt to drive the defect rate towards zero. Paper publishers have to reach that since they can’t afford to reprint tens of thousands of books. Online publishers can slip an erratum into the text as needed. This isn’t an invitation to be sloppy, but an opportunity to release the text early (and often) to ensure it is effective in helping students learn.

Third, and perhaps most important, experts can write what they know (or know how to teach) best. There isnt’ a burden to build complete texts covering all aspects of a subject. An expert can spend less time writing towards their passion and a good professorm teacher (or even student) can select materials that are edited by peer groups (lightweight and/or social reviews) rather than by heavyweight cost-burdened corporations. DIsaggrgation and reassembly of materials by customers or other intermediaries is the great fear of publishers. They saw how the music industry lost most of its easy profits when they weren’t needed to capitalize the batch production of “albums” (composed of a few hits and a lot of dross). There are a few products where the whole is truly more than the sum of the parts, but those are in the minority.

At any rate, it’s no surprise that HMH burdened by costs from “goodwill”, a failed acquisition by Vivendi, a leveraged buyout by a hedge-fund manager, and a shift in underlying market structure and demand needs to hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE on its balance sheet. It’s certainly possible that this is the moment when they reinvent themselves and redeploy their considerable content assets and expertise through a different business model with a different revenue and cost model. I wish them well. As for the writers and editors, those that add value will also need to reinvent themselves – moving from cogs in the machine to craftspeople. Some can become expert professional development folks helping professors and teachers select and fuse materials and processes into effective teaching. Others can try their hand at authors. In the music business it used to be the case that you toured to promote the album. Now it’s more common to sell or give the tracks to promote the concert. The packaged music become a calling card to introduce new listeners to the music. I expect to see more of an “indie author” market the industry created new ways to discover and preview materials. This is what leads to focused and effective books.

BTW, the first reaction to the post’s title I had was the phrase, “And so it begins… there’s a hole in your balance sheet.” (apologies to the Babylon 5 / Kosh fans out there).

Doug Stein
MemeSpark LLC

Believe me, I know the criticisms. But I’d like some recognition that results like these drastically affect people’s lives.

I think that the idea of producing textbooks online is a lame attempt to keep the educational world the same as it has always been, and simply reproduce what we have always done in a digital format (how about the proliferation of university lectures online). It is time to start considering new models of learning and education

Jesse Martin (Thoughts about Higher Education)

We all, as David Wiley writes, want to empower learners. While we read a great deal these days about education as job training and workforce readiness, what we really want to be able to do is to enable each person to make his or her way in the world, to pursue their own good in their own way.

This, to me, involves reducing and eventually eliminating their need to depend on experts. As I imperfectly expressed the point the other day, “It’s about actually empowering people to develop and create their own learning, their own education. So not only do they not depend on us for learning, but also, their learning is not subject to our value-judgements and prejudices.”

Unfortunately, this is often read as a casting of the student into the world to rely solely on their own devices. David Wiley echoes the sort of misinterpretation of this view that is common:

“It is hard to imagine any form of learning that does not involve an expert – except pure, unguided, trial-and-error discovery learning. Without reference to any person – or any artifact created by a person – of more experience than ourselves, all learning would be maximally inefficient. We would each be left to rediscover the entirety of physics from scratch. And the entirety of music theory. And the entirety of every other field, without a conversation or a textbook or a Wikipedia article to guide us.”

Such a proposition is absurd, and as it is absurd one should conclude (I would hope) that it is not the proposition I am arguing for.

So let me be clear: in the world as I understand it, there are more than two options. There is an option somewhere between “depending on an expert” and “left to rediscover the entirely of physics from scratch.”

And – to be clear – a great deal of ‘expert content’ exists. There is not only the aforementioned Wikipedia, there are also academic publications, magazine and newspaper articles, open online courses, blog posts, NASA videos, TED talks, and a host of additional educational content. Indeed, in today’s environment, and for the forseeable future, we are virtually swimming in educational content. It would be rash, irresponsible, and unthinking to say that a person should not consult any of this when learning physics or any other discipline. So, that is nbot what I am saying.

What I am addressing with remarks like “we should not depend on the expert” is the *stance* that ought to be taken by the learner with respect to the learning material extant on the web and elsewhere. And I mean this two two distinct but related ways:

- first, the learner should not accept the report of the expert uncritically. Expert advice on any given subject may not merely be misleading or misinformed, it may also be offered out of context, it may be outdated, it may be misunderstood, and in some cases it may be malicious. Examples of any of these cases may be found in abundance, expecially on today’s polarized and politicized media environment.

- second, the learner should resist the characterization of certain sources, certain perspectives, and certain content types *as expert*. While once we may have been able to rely on peer and publisher review to verify the authenticity and accuracy of the information, this is no longer the case. Moreover, an increasing body of verifiable and reliable information is being published outside tradititional channels.

These two conditions amount to the assertion that the learner should take what amounts to a critically reflective stance with respect not only to expert content but with respect to all content. Maybe there was once a day when we could trust expert opinion, but today we live in an environment where not only can we not trust the experts, we cannot even trust that the people offered as experts in fact *are* experts.

This is an important point. While it is common to use terms like ‘elite’ and ‘expert’ interchangeably, they are in fact distinct concepts. To call a person an expert refers to their knowledge. A person is an expert in a discipline if they have a deep knowledge of the field, a base of experience in the field, and can talk about matters related to the field ratrionally and reasonably. But to call a person an ‘elite’ refer to their position in a community or society. A person who is elite will have accumuluated a disproportionate amount of power, wealth or influence.

Sometimes a person will be elite as a result of their expertise. If we speak of, for example, “elite scientists”, we may be referring not to the richest or most powerful scientists, but those with the most expertise. But in practice we are rarely so precise. And so the word ‘elite’ even in a scientific discipline may refer not to those with the greatest knowledge, but to those with the most power and influence.

My own experience in life is that the people who become elite do not always become so as a rsult of their generosity, but rather as a result of their parsimony. They achieve their status as elite not by sharing but rtaher by hoarding. Such members of the elite carefully cultivate a culture of dependence. By ensuring that their followers depend on them for knowledge, infleunce and wealth, they augument their own position in society. The parsimonious elite are not interested in the empowerment of their students. They are greedy, selfish and self-interested.

Not all members of the elite are parsimonious, and not all experts are members of this elite. But the membership is sufficiently large that a learner ought not, as a general policy, place oneself in a position of dependence on experts. With every word of advice received, the learner must be in a position to ask whom the advice is intended to benefit. And the learner must be in a position to seek alternative sources of expertise, to weight options, and to decide what to believe for him or her self.

What is significant, to my mind, is that by being able to adopt such a critical stance with respect to expertise, learners are not only much better able to vet for themselves the reliability and authenticity of a piece of expert advice, they also acquire the capacity to look beyond a smaller set of ‘trusted sources’ and cast their gaze across the wider information landscape, as they will be able to select the reasonable and reliable even from such nontraditional sources as discussion lists, blog posts and alternative media.

It’s like being able to read. Before we could read, we had to depend on the priest to tell us what the book said. After we learned how to read, not only could we see what the book says for ourselves, we can also read other books that may say different things. Being able to read not only increases ourunderstanding, it increases our power to choose what will inform that understanding.

From my perspective as an educator, we should not be like the educator who reads to people, and who builds a large hall and charges fees in order to have people come to us to listen to use read to them. We should be like the educator whose primary interest is in teaching people to read, so they do not need to come to us at all, so there is not only no need for a hall and for fees to be paid, but no need for our particular expertise, because everyone can have it.

Some things to keep in mind …

1. I am pleased to find worthwhile journals to publish in that are open access, and that no-one has to pay to access (we have to disregard the little matter of access to broadband for this thought experiment, and a few other little digital divides, if you dont mind). 

2. I am interested in engaging in conversations with other people who are worthwhile talking to, and conversely, this will only happen if they think I am worth talking to, in turn.

3.  So what’s this ‘worthwhile’ bit?

4. Worthwhile is worth my while (time/energy I suppose) and theirs.  We have to be comparable, compatible, com …..(fill in the blank to taste) in some sense – knowledge, expertise, imagination, sense of humour, etc etc.

5. So I have a metaphorical ‘box’ of worthwhile/free, which I do in good faith, at no cost to anyone else (like this post, and publication in some, selected, open source journals – I’m quite picky), and then I have various other boxes that have ‘costs’ attached to them. 

6. As an anthropologist/ sociological observer, you can use that profile to describe in what sense I am an ‘expert’ or part of a self-appointed ‘elite’ – feel free. 

These discriminating boxes are variable, and negotiable, but they’re not going to go away, and I strongly suspect that this  applies to most of us 7 billion hominids, including hypothetical Stephens and Dr. Ivy-leaguexyz’s: it used to be called private v. public space, now its called social network presence, but it hasnt really changed that much. 

Try asking for 30 minutes of their time, every Monday, for the next 4 weeks, to discuss something that might happen to puzzle you next Monday (not).