More eTextbook Madness
Thank you, Wisconsin Public Radio, for bringing me my inane news of the day. Further details available via this UW-Oshkosh news release. Prof. M. Ryan Haley has a solution for soaring textbook costs. Professors will write their own textbooks and deliver them electronically to students. Professors won’t work alone, of course, but rather will collaborate to build the texts from scratch. Then, in later years, professors can update the texts, add in their own examples, and truly make the texts their own, all while saving students hundreds of dollars in textbook costs.
But wait, has Prof. Haley ever written a textbook before? It seems like writing a textbook is no easy feat, or textbook costs would have plummeted. Professors are often forced to apologize over the high price of a text, simply because there aren’t other ( or at least decent) books out there on the subject. Maybe I’m wrong. Prof. Haley’s area of study is statistics. It might be very easy to produce texts on statistics, but even the process of laying out the pages would seem incredibly labor intensive. How are professors supposed to balance their own research and teaching responsibilities, all while also writing new textbooks? All this effort hardly seems worth saving students some money.
What about subjects that don’t lend themselves well so formulas and numerical examples? Would you really expect a professor in the hard or social sciences to be able to produce a book that covers the breadth of material for an undergraduate class? Professors specialize in a specific area of the field. That means that, for many different topics, the relevant studies may not be at their fingertips. Writing a textbook, thus, would either require an excessive amount of reading and review, or would require plagiarism. Neither seems ideal.
Further, since when are textbooks the primary means of instruction for a course? I understand that professors want a good textbook, but its purpose should be to augment, not supplant, lectures and teaching. Will professor-produced texts really add a lot to lecture? It seems like the professor will basically be putting her lecture notes online, perhaps in book form. Then, students can download them. Since that’s basically what all my professors do now, I fail to see how this will replace the value of a good textbook.
Part of the selling point of this program seems to be its electronic delivery method. After all, these aren’t just “texts,” they are “e-texts.” But, as I’ve pointed out before, the printing costs for a book make up just a tiny fraction of its final selling price. Anyone interested could probably produce a decently bound packet of reading material for $20-30 a student. If this printing was done by the University itself and priced at cost, the price would likely be even lower.
Efforts to lower the costs of books are always appreciated, but not if it means sacrificing the benefits of the book itself. If a textbook is used for a course, then students have a right to expect a quality textbook. If the textbook is not quality, then it should not be used. Having professors author their own texts seems likely to produce a lot of non-quality material.
Online resources are always good, but why try to produce e-texts as a replacement for textbooks? Stay tuned, as tomorrow I will write about feasible options to replace textbooks in college classes.
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