One of my motives in moving from a commercial textbook company to writing through Amazon was the desire to write on a continuous basis. My frustration with the commercial approach was that you ignored your work for three years and then worked feverishly for 3-5 months in order to generate the next edition. I saw there were two problems in this approach. First, hard copy textbooks are out of date when first published (at least when addressing technology) and it made sense to me to take an approach that would allow me to continue to offer new content (online) as soon as the content was relevant. Second, the hectic pace of meeting a deadline does not allow for the best analysis and writing. This was particularly the case for me as my academic job means I have the most open time in the summer and this was not the time frame during which the work had to be done. The commercial folks never disagreed with my analysis, they just did not want to pay any amount for a future edition and would not offer an advance.
You may or may not understand how textbooks are financed. After the first edition for which you should be able to secure an advance on sales, the company decides whether or not a future edition will be offered and does not offer an advance. Since you, as the author, do not own the copyright but share it with the company, you are not free to suggest that a different company might be more willing to support the authoring model you propose.
Anyway, we have now exclusively held our copyright for several years and I have been offering resources based on this approach. We have a web site offering “supplemental” content to our book since it was released and I plan to rework the core book based on this content this summer. Since, the release of the latest edition the topic of “computational thinking” (programming or coding to many) has kind of returned to favor among practicing educators. You may be aware of this trend or perhaps interest in the “maker movement” which often incorporates programming skills. I have prepared a chapter and supplemental resources for our the next revision of our book. Rather than wait until this summer to make the “chapter” available, I am offering the draft of this chapter on our web site. This content will be available from the site until the revision of the book is complete. If you are interested in computational thinking and would like to review my take on the topic, access to our web site is available at no cost.
Beta content – http://learningaloud.com/grabe6/code/index.html
