Tag: book

I am trying something different with one of my longer writing projects.. My wife and I had a 15 year run with a commercial textbook for the “technology for teachers” undergraduate teacher preparation course. Fifteen years translates as 5 editions of the book. This course does not generate the review of a large lecture course (e.g., Introduction to Psychology), but there is less competition in the area of our book and we did well financially. 

As we gained a lot of experience allowing us to analyze the textbook industry and the niche in which we published, we became very aware of the backlash against textbook costs (ours sold for $140 to students) and began to identify issues a traditional textbook for this niche could not address.

We came up with a plan to publish a much shorter version we called a Primer and wanted to match this with online resources. We proposed a $29 Primer and intended to serve the online content ourselves. I still think some of our arguments for this approach make sense. For example, those intending to teach high school and early elementary have very different interests in what to do with technology. Why not provide the basics in a Primer and then a larger variety of content for specific content areas and grade levels online? Technology is a field that moves quickly and keeping content current is a tremendous challenge. Not only did we publish once every three years, but 9-12 months were set aside to generate the next edition. You see the time lag that is created. Why not write online continually to keep a given textbook current? 

Textbook companies think differently about their relationship with the authors they hire. A proposal such as paying someone to write continuously does not make sense to them even though they might appreciate the issue of keeping content current. They typically have a couple of books in a niche and their field reps encourage the adoption of the most recent book in a niche. This is more because of the used book market than the issue of currency and the issue of a general approach rather than what would be best for a given book is the perspective they take. At the time (this has changed since), combining online content with a physical product was also a foreign idea that did not translate as easily into income. 

Anyway, we agreed to go our separate ways and were given our copyright back so we could pursue our interests with another company or with an outlet such as Kindle. 

We continue to offer a version of this textbook through Amazon. I developed a second resource (Layering for learning) which was not really a full-length textbook, but concentrated on specific online services I proposed educators could use to make more effective use of web pages and online videos. It is this second “book” that I have decided to take in a different direction.

My professional writing activities have long been mostly a hobby. We made our money on our original textbook, but now my work is mostly about exploring topics in online publishing. Instead of $140, the online textbook sells for $9. Same basic book. I think it appropriate content that takes considerable time to create be treated as having value and I have always require some payment for my professional work even if mostly symbolic. So, what other outlet and approach can I explore as an alternative to Amazon?

Here is my new project. I am updating my layering book and serializing it on Medium. If you have not used Medium directly, you may have encountered work offered on Medium through a search engine. Sometimes you could read what the search engine found and sometimes you may have found that the content was behind a paywall. There are two competitors in this space – Substack and Medium. With Substack, if an author wants to be compensated for her work, she requires readers to subscribe to her work for a price. A reader makes a specific commitment (usually $5 a month or so) to specific authors. With Medium, you pay a subscription fee ($50 a year) and then read whatever you want from as many authors as you want. Medium takes a cut and then allocates the rest to the authors based on several variables they use to define value. Like other social outlets for the vast majority of writers, you receive little money (I hope to make enough to cover my own Medium subscription fee). I think of it as a way to keep score. Do people find what I write interesting and of value? What are the options for those who generate the kind of content I create and how do different options compare? 

If you are not a Medium users, I think you are allowed three free reads a month and the Introduction to my serialized book is explained in greater detail. 

I have generated few posts lately because I have been updating our textbook to make it available for the Fall semester. I have written about our involvement in writing textbooks several times before (use the book tag at the end of this post if you are interested in reading earlier posts). We have had a book used in the preparation of inservice teachers and the continued development of practicing teachers since 1996. We worked with a commercial publisher (Houghton-Mifflin and then Cengage) through 5 editions and when we wanted to offer a different approach (a Primer selling for $29 augmented with online resources) we could not reach an agreement and then decided to continue with our experiment by selling our Primer through Amazon ($9). Much of this adventure and our rationale is explained in previous posts.

One of our core ideas was that proven authors should write continuously rather than rush every three years to produce the next edition. The combination of a Primer and online resources allows this approach. We reasoned that in a field that moves as fast as the application of technology this makes a lot of sense. What I have been working on for the past few months was the update to the Primer.

I found that my update was more challenging than past updates. It was time to do the update, but the pandemic and how K12 education was forced to change as a consequence left me uncertain how best to position our view of technology integration for the future. Online experiences will undoubtedly play a larger role despite the negative reaction of many educators to their experiences during the past year. The core principles of how learning happens and how educators must provide external experiences to optimize the internal cognitive work of students have not changed. Our best guess is that we better appreciate how to use technology to better individualize learner experiences and part of how this will happen will require educators to function more often as instructional designers rather than rely on commercial instructional content.

I guess we will see as we try to get educators to take a look at our update and make decisions about how best to develop the skills of future and practicing teachers.

I learned a couple of things that may be of value to others who like to work in Google docs. I write almost exclusively in docs and this has been the case for a while. I like working online because I work using many different devices in many locations. I also like the way I can organize the many resources I use in one place. Anyway, here are the issues.

First, I learned that large documents (i.e., a book) cannot be saved as a pdf from docs. I was totally confused by this at the end of work as I needed a pdf to load into Kindle Create. I could download in other formats, but not pdf and I could swear I have never had this difficulty before. Anyway, there is evidently some issue with file size. The solution was simple – print to pdf. This is an old hack, but evidently it works on your own computer and does not stress Google.

Second, I needed to create a Table of Contents that links to the beginning of individual chapters. I have encountered this challenge before and I know I solved the problem in a different way before. Unfortunately, when I am working under a deadline, I frequently solve a problem and then don’t keep an account of how I did it. A few years later and I can’t remember. This time I used the capacity to add internal links in Docs. You add a bookmark at the beginning of each chapter (see bookmark under the Insert dropdown menu), list chapter titles on a TOC page, and then link from each item on the list to the appropriate bookmark. You should see the bookmarks you have created when you select text and then the same link icon you use for external links.

Finally, the last challenge I am trying to resolve is to get Amazon to identify the newer version of our book as an update. This is supposed to work when you upload a new version in place of an older version, but I have not been successful in accomplishing this change. When you update an existing work, the folks who purchased your original work are supposed to be given the opportunity to update their copy at no cost. I know this works because I see the “update” option from time to time in my own Kindle library. This also means any link you have used to reference your book in the Amazon store still works. The downside is that Amazon will continue to list your book by the original publication date which is misleading to new potential buyers. I am waiting a few days to see if the “update” link appears for the old version I have in my Kindle library and then I will have to decide what to do.

Access through Amazon

When I was doing the research for my previous post and doing some searches on my own content I came across this site.

What this site provides is a way to download at no cost, our textbook. You can get it as a pdf, mobi file, and a couple of other options. Going through the letters of appreciation (not to me) and the notes about it being provided under a CC option (creative commons), I could not help but become a little frustrated and a bit angry.

This content was stolen. Our book is sold through Amazon for $9. We sold previous versions of this book through first Houghton-Mifflin and then Cengage for well over $100. We opted out of that arrangement which was quite lucrative because we were unable to convince Cengage to go to a $29 model consisting of a paper Primer and a free web site. Through an arrangement that returned our copyright, we moved our Primer to Amazon ($9) and offer our supplemental resources at no cost on our own server. If you are interested in the logic for our model, search this site for book (I will tag this post so you can read our explanation). In short, there are advantages to our model that include lower cost, less dated content, and greater flexibility in what instructors can assign. This was not a decision we made intending to make more income and without the promotion of a major publishing company we receive a fraction of the income generated by our original paper textbooks.

I find it hard to believe that college students cannot afford to purchase this textbook for $9. Whatever anyone thinks of the cost of textbooks and what complaints one might have about this industry, these issues do not apply to us. Because this is a textbook intended for practicing teachers involved in graduate education and preservice teachers, I find it disturbing that people in this line of work would be so unethical as to steal a $9 book.

Maybe I am being too hard on the students who did this, but I assume they know or don’t want to know. This is a current book and not a book developed through a source of external support to warrant the phony creative commons representation that someone other than me has claimed for this work.

OK – end of rant. Just be honest and respect the effort and skill required to generate the content you use.

P.S. – The day I wrote this post I also responded to the site using a form that was provided. I kind of knew that if the site wanted responses in this fashion instead of via email I was unlikely to receive a response. I have not and the pirated book is still available.

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?

Cindy and I had a commercial textbook, Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning, through 5 editions which would be approximately 15 years. Nearly 6 years ago now, we proposed to Cengage, our publisher at the time, that we explore a different model for college textbooks. We thought that our concept would be reasonably explored with our textbook because we were involved with a field that was moving very quickly at the time and because educational technology deals with helping learners via technology making our message delivered via a traditional textbook kind of disingenuous.

What called what we were proposing the $29 book project. The basic idea was to write a shorter book at a much lower cost ($29) and combine this resource with online material. The book which we referred to as a Primer would contain the content we thought was core to how technology could benefit learners and was assumed to have a three-year life cycle. The online content would contain product/service demonstrations, student project descriptions, and new content written as it surfaced. The two components were to be bound together by an “interactive syllabus” created by the instructor that would reference the Primer, link content selected for the student population from the online content we provided, and links to other content selected by the instructor.

We spent several years with Cengage discussing this project and how it might be implemented. We finally agreed to disagree and we were given the copyright for our existing content. We implemented our idea as a Kindle book, web content from the server I lease, and the suggestion that educators use Google Sites to create the interactive syllabus. The book is $9 (ebook only) and the online content is free to all.

The commercial version never materialized for multiple reasons. The price point was too low if the online content would be free. The book company wanted to professionalize the online content including using generic educational video they were producing. We wanted to create the online content using the same tools we wanted teachers to use with their students and we wanted to use project examples based on the classrooms and the teachers we described in our writing. They wanted to pay us to write every three years and I wanted to be paid to write continuously rather than every three years so that new content would constantly be available online.

I am not upset we no longer sell a $140 textbook and appreciate the professors adopting our $9 ebook for their students. The one issue that I find frustrating is the amount of use our online content receives. Cost, flexibility, and keeping content current are common complaints about college textbooks. Our free online content is available, but not used at the level we expected given the use of the Primer. I still see this flexibility as useful.

I was thinking about our content model when I just had to remove material from our online resources. This was not possible when we included obsolete content in our traditional textbook. I was a big fan of Google+ in combination with Google Hangouts. What I felt was uniquely useful in Google+ services was their idea of circles. Individual users (students) could be assigned to multiple circles depending on the content/service to be provided – students in a school, students in a class, students working on a common project. This seemed an effective and highly efficient way to control access. Once a student was in the system, it the association of students with specific circles was an easy process. I guess Google just could not find enough situations in which assignment to multiple content resources and services was that important.