Textbook Authorship

Academic Self-Publishing

Well, I've been neglecting to post lately. 'Tis a lonely enterprise, given the lack of responses or dialogue. Lately I've even heard blogging referred to (among the youtube and facebook set) as an enterprise for "losers". Perhaps blogging is losing its cachet in the Internet world (aside from celebrity bloggers), or perhaps blogging has been appropriated by commercial enterprises for marketiing purposes. Whatever the case, I would now like to think publicly about another subject that interests me--self-publishing.

I am a self-published author, as well as a publisher of others' works (see www.atlanticpathpublishing.com). In the course of learning how to be in business as a publisher I have acquired much intelligence about publishing models. Aspiring authors, especially academic authors, are vulnerable to grave errors in choosing among publishing models. I'm not talking about open access publishing in this case but about subsidy publishing.

Subsidy publishing, sometimes called subvention in academe, occurs when authors pay publishers to have their work published. A legitimate context for subvention is a manuscript with little or no demand or commercial value--say, on a subject so esoteric that not enough copies can be sold to recover the costs of printing--or a work intended for free distribution. In other contexts, however, many authors naively cross the line into vanity publishing.

Vanity presses include subsidy presses and so-called co-publishers who charge you to self-publish under their aegis. They provide all the services that a traditional publisher normally would supply--including registration of copyright, assignment of an ISBN, and production and manufacturing (e.g., book design and printing)--at your expense. This expense is greater than in traditional publishing—greater in per-unit cost (because only a small number of copies is ever printed) and greater in reduced potential income (because the companies typically also keep more than half of any revenue from sales).

These companies claim that you retain ownership of your book, but copyright law already guarantees that you own your work. By signing a contract with the company, you may be assigning copyright to them inadvertently. And if you use their ISBN, they become the publisher of record, with all the rights that publishers of record have, and their logo may appear on the cover or copyright page of your book. Purchasing a single ISBN from them or some other source does not make you the publisher of record, unless you have set up and registered a company of your own. In any case, people in the book industry recognize and do not trust “scalper” and “proxy” ISBNs.

Thus, you should not use a vanity/subsidy publisher if you want to sell more than 100 copies of your book, recover your costs and then some, or offer your book to the trade, i.e., to bookstores for resale to their customers or to libraries for acquisition to serve their patrons. Booksellers and acquisitions librarians simply will not buy vanity press books. And there's more--in the next post.

Labels: academic authors, authorship, self-publishing, subsidy publishing, subvention, vanity press

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 9:42 AM 0 Comments

Ethics of Authorship--Part 3

By neglect, I mean failing to care for the reader as a learner. Research from fields such as cognitive psychology and educational psychology have provided a lot of useful information about how people learn and about factors that affect individuals' motivation to learn, learning rate, mastery or expertise, and retention or memory. Many authors of college textbooks think that this information has nothing to do with them (if they think of it at all). These authors assume or believe that students are entirely responsible for their own learning. In both classroom teaching and textbook teaching, intentionally or out of ignorance, they may make no effort to apply learning theory or research-based knowledge about learning. To me, this a breach of ethics on a par with "First, do no harm."

In their quest to sell more textbooks, the large higher education publishing houses do attempt to apply learning theory and research. They know that the blockbuster textbooks are the ones that engage learners and facilitate students' success in the course of study. And they know these things cannot be taken for granted. The publisher's request for "pedagogy" and the chapter opening and chapter closing elements of the chapter apparatus are derived directly from learning theory. Boldfaced key terms, margin annotations, headings, content applications, interim review questions, pedagogical captions, summaries, and so on all address particular realities about the way humans think and acquire knowledge.

Some textbook authors refuse to supply these elements, thinking they are fluff or windowdressing or some kind of gamesmanship among publishers. Pedagogy can be done studpidly and wrong, of course. Everyone has seen textbooks cluttered with thematic "boxes" that clearly were outsourced and bear little connection with the narrative context. This is not the way it is supposed to be, but a perversion. Done right, those "boxes" can aid learning in significant ways, connecting content with the learner's direct experiences or aspirations, real-world examples or issues, or the latest news or developments. A textbook author's conscious aim should be to provide content and organization in a pedagogically responsible way that will enable readers to think clearly about new content and to acquire new knowledge swiftly, efficiently, and permanently. For this, some appreciation of learning theory is required along with a sincere consideration of textbook apparatus and pedagogy.

My posts on the ethics of authorship have focused on 3 negative factors: (1) author misrepresentation to the publisher or reader; (2) undeclared bias; and (3) neglect of the learner through ignorance or rejection of learning theory and pedagogical principles. I would be very interested to hear visitors' views and about other factors that might be included in a discussion of the ethics of authorship.

Labels: authorship, ethics

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 12:38 PM 1 Comments