Textbook Authorship

Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 5

This is the fifth part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. This post includes a discussion of myths about textbooks publishing, especially the issue of revisions. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.

Myths and Urban Legends about Textbooks
Contrary to popular misconception, textbooks are not all clones, although by necessity they must be similar to reflect course syllabi. Publishers go to great lengths and expense to ensure that their products are unique while remaining mainstream and competitive. “Mainstream” means following the conventional scope and sequence of the course as it is typically taught on the nation’s campuses, based on market research. “Competitive” means that it has all the bells and whistles that make other companies’ textbooks successful (i.e., profitable). And “unique” means that it has its own value­added twist or enough novel material to pique customer interest and capture market share. Editors fill whole binders with comparison grids to chart how their book is mainstream, competitive, and unique in relation to other books for the same course from other publishers in their league.

The downside of this is that major publishers do not take risks of any magnitude with textbook content and organization. If you have a radically different approach to your subject or want to teach it in a new way that is not currently accepted practice, you likely will not find a textbook that suits your needs. In fact this is a prime reason for not using a textbook. Assuming that your institution, department, and students explicitly know about and want what you are offering, you will need to find or develop your own course materials or persuade a publisher to consider your own proposal for a new textbook. To do this you would need to present some proof that there really is a new or emerging market or clear demand for this kind of textbook. I have seen this done successfully—for
example, with the world’s first introductory textbooks in field of applied anthropology. However, I have also seen such efforts fail—for example, when the world simply is not ready for your take on the “emerging critical consensus” or “new synthesis” that you have in mind.

Another urban legend is that revisions are merely cosmetic. Actually, the investment needed to bring out a revision is only slightly less than for a first edition, which can be as much as a quarter of a million dollars for an introductory textbook in a core subject. Much more is involved, therefore, than slapping on new covers. The authors’ contracts must be renegotiated, new authors may be brought into the team and others retired, editors apply new market research and competition analyses to develop a revision plan, and usually the book is at least
partly redesigned. The degree of similarity in appearance between a revision and its previous edition depends almost exclusively on market considerations. Do people love this book and remain loyal to it? Then make it look much the same. Are people dissatisfied with it or iffy? Or is there simultaneously a major new challenge from a competitor? Then make it look different.

Industry standards dictate that a revised edition of a textbook should be approximately one­third changed from the previous edition or substantively different in some other way. This extends to replacing a third or more of the
photos and figures. The real reasons for revising are to correct, update, improve, or adapt a work. At one point, psychology textbooks that did not discuss DSM­IV were judged obsolete, for example, and had to be revised. Teacher education texts had to be revised after enactment of the NCLB. Most publishers made rapid and costly revisions in selected titles after 9/11. I have worked on textbooks that were revised within two years because customers objected to certain content or certain content was found to be outdated or wrong, but also because the authors were suing each other over royalty splits. While some of these changes did not add up to a third of the book, they necessitated a revision.

While it is easy to think (and not unheard of) that publishers put out new editions as often as they can get away with in order to reap more profits, this usually is not the case. For one thing, textbooks, especially first editions, normally need at least two years of sales just to pay for themselves, much less pay the authors their royalties and the publisher its margin. For another, the market readily punishes publishers (justly or not) who put an older edition out of print by bringing out a new higher­priced edition after only a year. While this may look like corporate greed, however, it’s usually just a desperate effort to save a book with insufficient sales that otherwise would be taken off the market entirely. Such a book might even be revised heavily enough (half changed) to be brought out as a new first edition. Older textbooks often are recycled in this way, through mix and match
cannibalizations. I call them “frankensteins,” and like the original, they’re not inherently bad, (though I have seen some that are badly done).

Unless it is in a series designed as annual editions, therefore, a book that is revised after one year is in trouble. Maybe it had something in it (or not in it) that was killing sales. Maybe it was late coming out and missed its sales for the first semester of its copyright year (in which case a revision can justify permitting it to continue to exist at all). In any event, the publisher is risking double shortfalls by bringing out a revision before the previous edition has paid for the cost of publishing it. In light of these facts we may wish to reexamine our prejudices and assumptions regarding textbook revisions.

There no doubt are other myths and urban legends about textbook publishing (I would love to hear about them from readers). Now, however, we come to the arcane matters of how a textbook is built and how its scope and sequence are realized and how these factors might affect your decision making process for textbook adoption.

Labels: choosing a textbook, course adoptions, evaluating textbooks, textbook publishing, textbook revisions

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 10:06 AM