Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 7
This is the seventh 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 continues a discussion of criteria for selection with observations on the famous "thumb test." © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.The Thumb Test
Marketing managers in higher education publishing often refer to the “thumb test,” a textbook selection technique even more quick and dirty than the “index text” and the “currency test.” In a thumb test you hold the book’s spine in your left hand and ruffle the pages from the front to the back of the book between thumb and forefinger of your right hand, as if flipping the cels in a homemade animation. Your eye catches the design and format, including fonts, number of columns of text, color palette, design motifs, part or chapter openers, photos and art, tables, captions, type and frequency of headings, and boxes. Out of this visual blur your mind builds an impression: This is (or is not) the textbook for you!
I’ve often been astonished to read professors’ prejudices regarding book design and format, as if they knew anything about book building or were expert in programs such as PageMaker, InDesign, or QuarkXPress, and as if they even understood how font sets work or the role of PMS colors in a book’s palette. I don’t think much of those who choose textbooks on the basis of appearance alone; e.g., you don’t like pink, or you don’t like orange, or you don’t like boxes, or the margins are too crowded, or the pictures are too large (or too small).
That goes for judging a book by its cover too. Publishers expend great sums on cover designs, having learned that professors, not just the masses, will adopt or not adopt on that basis alone. That Introduction to Criminal Justice textbook, for example. Should the cover be art or photos? One photo or a montage? Should the American flag appear somewhere on the cover? Or the American colors? If there are police officers, should they be literal or abstract or iconic? Should care be taken to include female and minority officers? Should they appear armed? What
about the border patrol and tribal police? If police officers are shown, will it appear to skew the survey course in favor of law enforcement over the courts and corrections? Or should the cover show a courthouse (all those nice pillars) or a prison (all those nice bars) instead? Or all three? Or maybe just a symbol of justice—the statue of the lady with her blindfold and scales? Is there one where her breasts are not too revealed or suggestive? Or is the statue idea too trite or too focused on law per se. Would a statue look too highlevel? Is there something we could have on the cover instead that would suggest terrorism or Homeland Security? And so on ad nauseam. Book designers and all those who work with them strive for beautiful books, and often succeed, but we nevertheless must refrain, I think, from selecting textbooks solely on that basis.
Format is an exceptionfor example, the delivery of content as a book or an e book and, if a book, the type of binding and trim size. Your course may beg for a hardcover textbook with a sewn binding, a perfectbound paperback, or a spiralbound layflat flipbook. The 7 X 10, 8 X 10, and 8.5 X 11 trim sizes are fairly standard for undergraduate textbooks. The larger the trim size the lower the level, as a rule, although there are exceptions. Smaller trim sizes, especially the 6 X 9, are more typical of trade booktype texts such as may be assigned in higherlevel courses.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, thumb test
posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 8:27 PM
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