Category: General

I have been putting in a lot of time trying to get our textbook revised by the start of the Fall semester. I have had the revisions completed for a few days and I have been struggling with formatting issues as I prepared the document for uploading to Amazon. Since we split from Cengage, we have been self-publishing for about 5 years. That story our move to work without a commercial publisher has been told multiple times, so I will not tell it again.

In preparation to generate an ebook, I read several ebooks on publishing with Amazon. If you read the forward for these books, you typically find the authors claim they decided to write about publishing in this way after publishing in this way. After having done this several times now, I can appreciate this sentiment. However, at this point, working on another manuscript is about the last thing I want to do. I did decide to offer a few comments on the process for those who might wonder what this is like.

Let me begin with this statement. I know that many folks complain about the cost of textbooks and I have a mixed reaction which I have explained in previous posts. BTW – if want to read the previous comments I mention here, you might search this blog by using the tag “book” which should be attached to this post. When a college student purchases a textbook, they are paying for many things. Some of these things they may value and some may represent what they assume are unnecessary. I suggest they keep their position and also try understanding the situation from the perspective of the publisher and author. A major factor in cost is that the publisher must make its money and cover its expenses (including the 12-14% of the price to the bookstore that goes to the author) on the first sale. This is the only one that counts for them and us. Then there are the sales expenses that cover ads, free books for instructors, and salespeople going door to door trying to push their books. Finally, there are the costs of features that make the book look pretty and perhaps more useful. Photographers, editors, and designers must be paid in addition to the authors. If you have read many Kindle books you will note that the are plain in appearance and contain even in the highest sales books from famous self-publishing authors a few spelling and grammar errors. Doing it all yourself requires time and skills that vary and are independent of content knowledge.

There are really two categories of Kindle books each with different issues. There are free-flowing and fixed-format books. A free-flowing book is what is used for text-only books (most of the popular books). Free-flowing content can be adjusted by the reader to meet the personal preferences of text size and text format. You might find you need to enlarge text to make it easier to read (I do) so with text-heavy books free flow makes sense. It creates some weird formatting problems. You might encounter a section header at the end of a page. There is probably an editors term for this, but I don’t remember what it is. Our textbook has been published as a free flowing book until today.

Fixed format books are better suited to books with images and graphs and tables. This is what you encounter in a heavy dosage in most textbooks. A fixed format is just what it seems – the author/editor controls the format the reader will experience. The problem here is that a fixed size page (enlarged or shrunk) is not ideal for the multiple devices and multiple preferences of readers. For example, to produce a product I like to read, I have to use a 14 point font for body text. Without this sized font, the print size that appears on a smaller iPad is just too small. This size may seem unnecessarily large on a computer where you would have the room to manipulate the size of the page as a way to manipulate the size of the print.

When you submit a fixed page format manuscript, you are basically working with a pdf within the special Kindle Create tool. Because of the way I work, I had multiple challenges getting to the stage of generating this pdf. Our textbook is a “technology for teachers” resource for teachers, but mainly written for undergrad courses that address this area. One thing I have always done is to use the same tools I suggest teachers use in my own work. So, I use inexpensive or free tools in my writing and web development activities. Amazon seems to assume authors will use Microsoft Word. I don’t own this product and although I still work on occasion for a university that would allow me to use it for free, I prefer to write in Google Docs.

I assumed I knew most of the ins and outs of working with Google tools, but did not realize that a 300 page manuscript would not be converted to a pdf when downloading from Google docs. People don’t believe me when I say this because they have created pdfs with Google docs. They have not tried doing this with a large file. My workaround sounds pretty strange, but it kind of worked. I downloaded a docx file from Google, opened it in Pages, and saved out as a pdf. Only one issue most also might not anticipate. When you cross products like this, you can encounter font substitution. Different products don’t always recognize the same fonts and when another font is substituted this can change the number of lines that appear on a given page messing up the page formatting that had been so carefully crafted. I know of no easy way to fix this issue. I used a recommended style guide for selecting fonts and font sizes, but I guess I should have used a Word book to find these suggestions rather than an ebook guide for the Mac. I scrolled through the manuscript 5 times between yesterday and today playing with page breaks before I gave up. There are still a few issues, but pretty is not my goal.

I probably started this project too late for what I ended up doing. It is interesting to watch the sales pattern for our textbook. We see single sales over the summer and then group purchases once Fall hits. I was working as fast as I could, but now these singles, some of which I assume represent profs looking for a textbook, represent the view of a dated book when a new book should be available in a couple days. This matters because in switching from a free flow book to a fixed format more appropriate (according to Amazon) for a textbook, I have to list the new book as a different book. Those web addresses instructors may have saved for the book they reviewed will not work once I see the new book is available and I delete the older book.

This is probably far more than you want to know about ebook publishing, but I thought some of the experiences may have provided useful insights.

Our newest book is now available, but it will be a week or so before you can take a peek with the x-ray view feature.

Pearson, the academic publishing company, has announced that it intends a very different future direction. Pearson is making a bold bet that educational resources for higher education will go digital and will eventually offer learning resources involving elements not presently part of even digital books.

Pearson describes what it is embarking on as a “digital first” approach. At the most basic level, this approach will allow updates and modifications to be made in an on-going fashion rather than once in every textbook revision cycle (3 or more years). Pearson projects that a digital approach will allow textbooks to be sold for $40. There are substantial cost savings in materials, printing, and shipping for a digital product, but perhaps the most significant advantage to a company comes from the elimination of the resale market. My experience with the resale issue translates as students sell a book to be used in a subsequent semester back to the bookstore at 50% of the sticker price and the bookstore resells the book for 75%. See my somewhat cynical description of this as the “beer money ploy” (students don’t tell parents they sold their books and use the income for spending money). A new industry has been created to serve a similar resale function. Off-campus services buy books, pay for transportation, and then resell books online. I guess competition is good and essential when a prof decides not to use a book the next time a course is offered. Again, I know from experience that profs are “encouraged” to stick with their books to keep the money local and prices to students low.

As a textbook author, I have a little different perspective (not always understood by the consumer). Authors and textbook companies make their money on the initial sale and drastically less once used books are available to compete with the sale of a new book. I assume this reality is figured into the initial cost and some cynically believe a motive for a company to push the newest books when making recommendations to faculty members. A different way to look at the same situation not explained when people criticize the initial cost of a textbook is that this amount of money is all the publisher and author(s) will ever get even though that book is likely resold two times. The actual initial cost to the student ends up being half of what the price at purchase time says. It is the book stores that make the easy money. All they have to do is put the used book back on the shelf.

Anyway, my understanding of the initial Pearson approach is that it is very similar to how we proposed modifying our Cengage textbook 5 or so years ago. I was becoming frustrated with the three-year revision cycle not allowing involvement for 2.5 years or so and then after getting approval for another edition having to sprint to finish in three or four months. This is not an ideal approach for conducting thorough research to make changes to a wide variety of topics. After creating 5 editions, I argued that the quality of our work could be trusted so it made more sense for us and for the learner to write continuously. New updates could be placed online immediately and then worked into the next edition if a normal cycle was maintained. In addition, we proposed scaling down the “book” to a core of information least likely to change. Note that technology moves rapidly and it made sense to us not to describe the classroom application of a program or service online rather than in the book. In one case we experience, such a description in our book was actually discontinued by the time a new edition was put in the hands of students. We wanted this shorter Primer to be sold for $29 dollars supported by free access to assorted online content organized to augment and keep current the chapters in the Primer. We went back forth for 5 years long after our existing edition should still have been on the market. We eventually settled on getting our copyright back and did what we proposed generating a $9 Kindle book competing against our own dated Cengage edition still being sold for $140. I guess that with innovations the timing of an idea is everything. Pearson could have piloted what they now propose five years ago had we been working with them.

If anything about our efforts to change the textbook model seems interesting, use the book tag associated with this post to locate multiple posts now buried early in this blog.

In one of those weird coincidences we all sometimes experience, we were having dinner with a former grad student the night before the Pearson announcements began popping up. He happens to be a senior design researcher with Pearson (the only person I think I know working for Pearson) and he was describing their new initiative.

He indicated that even more innovations may be coming. You only get a hint of this from the EdSurge description. He works with research tools tracking learner engagement with content (e.g., eye tracking, changes in posture and galvanic skin response) and is trying to understand what seems to be responsible for the greater difficulty learners have remaining active when reading content from a screen. He proposed that content be prepared according to instructional design principles more likely to be applied in computer based instruction than textbooks. In this approach, content is organized into more focused segments rather than long rambling chapters. Content is supported with clear goals and embedded and perhaps individualized learning supports (a simple example would be inserted questions and perhaps learner selected expanded explanations) are added. Of course these innovations would be far easier to offer with an online delivery system.

Taking the perspective of an author, I wondered what the role of an existing author would be? I taught in an instructional design program so I was familiar with the way designers work with content experts in creating instructional content for what I tend to classify as training – focused skill or knowledge instruction typically outside of formal educational institutions. Would the authors who now write textbooks work with Pearson as content experts under the new model? Too early to tell, First, a more traditional approach providing digital books.

As I think about this possible trend for higher education learning resources, I also wonder about what this would mean for instructors. One way I think about instructional design is that it moves some functions provided by a face to face educator to the learning content. A teacher can establish goals or goals can be embedded in content. An instructor can ask questions to guide cognition or questions can be embedded in content. An instructor can respond to individual students with additional explanations and personalization examples or content can be expanded to offer learners the opportunity to consider extended explanations or select from multiple examples. Moving teacher functions to content is not ideal, but the traditional approach of a teachers trying to meet the differing needs of a large group of students is also not ideal.

In the K12 environment, self-paced learning allowing learners to work through designed content at different rates depending on differences in understanding is often criticized using the image of a room full of students working on computers while the teacher sits at a desk making certain discipline is maintained. This should be a stereotype, but it probably does happen. The ideal model would be for the teacher to move about helping individual students in a way not possible with group-based instruction. Still, given the reaction by some in K12, how do you think profs would react to more highly designed material?