
Textbook Goliaths: You're Dancing on Thin Ice - DTrejo
http://bookxor.blogspot.com/2010/12/textbook-goliaths-youre-dancing-on-thin.html
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civilian
I agree that textbook goliaths are going down, but you didn't present the
solution to the problem.

IMO, you should have included the basic description of your business at the
end, instead of going all mysterious. Like from your website:

-Professors post course content.

-Bookxor collects feedback and analytics from students and colleagues.

-Professors use feedback to retune their content, share and collaborate.

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astrofinch
FWIW OP, the word "content" used this way makes me wince.

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impendia
It is not just the students that are pissed off. Walter Rudin wrote the
classic book in advanced calculus, and when the publishers started playing
games and jacking up the price, he fought them long and hard, and (as I
recall) at considerable expense to himself.

And having taught calculus out of the umpteenth edition of one of these books
-- they often introduce mistakes! I taught out of the eighth edition of a
mainstream calculus book and they got the statement of Taylor's Theorem (which
is a big theorem) WRONG. I think it could not be more obvious that all these
revisions are useless to students and teachers.

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koichi
I'm hoping that we'll see more of a shift towards individuals writing about
more niche subjects. For example, those learning biology will learn from
smaller books, or, more likely, ebooks that cover specific things, like
"photosynthesis." These smaller books, in theory, would be written by better
writers focusing on very specific things, which means each section or thing
students learn about is a better experience, and written by people passionate
about a smaller subject. These will be cheaper, though the big downside is
organizing all these smaller texts into a "class," though I think the
experience with the books would overall be better.

Big textbooks are just so... drab and generalized. The self-publishing
revolution is coming, and I'm hoping a lot of passionate experts take
advantage of it and write smaller textbooks that teachers can use and students
can buy (for a lot less).

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erreon
I hope the onslaught of good e-book readers and tablets will have a huge
effect on Goliaths of the textbook industry. The things they currently get
away with are nuts. If the industry doesn't go in that direction on their own
then schools should try and lead them that way.

