Textbook Authorship

New Business Models in Textbook Publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Tue, 20 May 2008 15:25:00 +0000

Digitization, the online delivery of instructional materials, the used book business, the rise of self-publishing, and the open access movement collectively are fundamentally changing the world of higher education textbook publishing. Many are asking, how can the college textbook business remain profitable for both authors and publishers? Authors stand to lose out on advances and royalties, not to mention losing intellectual property. And to survive, publishers must find ways to provide low-cost instructional materials while competing with free online sources and the used textbook market.

Depending on their mission and commitment to a traditional publishing model, publishers' responses have included divesting themselves of their higher education divisions, becoming online rather than print publishers, licensing textbooks to institutions as part of course management software, and slicing and dicing their backlists to provide free or low-cost course content. Solutions also have included a "pay-per-view" approach, selling textbooks by the chapter, and a consortium approach, in which a group of publishers shares a website for retail sales where customers can buy textbooks or mix and match textbook content from a variety of publishing houses.

Publishers' dollars that once went into textbook development and design are now going into web site development, content delivery software, and online marketing. Job boards in the publishing industry now call for workers filling new job categories like the following (from Publishers Lunch, publishersmarketplace.com): online editor, digital workflow associate, digital manager, digital analyst, electronic media editor, online marketing manager, digital publisher, digital community builder, web producer, and digital business developer. Many big houses now offer advances only for projects with the greatest projections of sales revenue, and royalty schedules are kept at the lowest until a book breaches high sales benchmarks. Publishers also increasingly require that authors pay back advances that don't earn out, and books that merely break even are not revised (i.e., get the axe).

What can authors do to continue to derive income from textbooks they have written? They can try to keep their textbook alive in online revisions and adapt or provide content for companion web sites or other digital supplements. They can try to negotiate electronic rights separately from print (and good luck to them). If they get back the right to their existing textbook, they can parse and repurpose text to sell as instructional content. They can self-publish the work as an e-textbook and sell it online. And they can use their existing work as the basis for constructing a new interactive online course that institutions or students pay for. These latter solutions essentially put authors in competition with publishers. How's that for a paradigm shift!

Finally, authors can give away their textbooks or supplements or other content for free online and make money on collateral goods. Some online textbook sites, for example, offer royalties for downloads or print copies ordered or for homework site subscriptions. Some repositories offer to pay for the exclusive or nonexclusive use of content. Some authors offer some content for free on their web sites and deliver other content by paid subscription, or offer fee-based teleseminars, webcasts, or consultations. Thus, though it seems counterintuitive, the irresistible open access movement toward free textbooks is actually suggesting new ways to make money.

In my next posts I will explore those new ways and how authors can repurpose existing text and construct original digital textbooks.

Online Courses, Continued

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:19:00 +0000

No, I haven't abandoned my blog--just a very busy spell when I could not make time for it.

I was talking about online course development and have expanded my studies on this topic in preparation for participating in the 2008 convention of the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) in Las Vegas, June 19-21. On Saturday I will be in a publisher's Q&A roundtable and also will be giving a presentation on the future of textbooks (e.g., how textbook authors can continue to make money in the digital world of free online content). I also signed up for some 15-minute mentoring sessions with textbook authors on Friday. On Thursday I look forward to attending Michael Spiegler's workshop on writing a textbook. Michael has used my book as a text (Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, 2nd Edition, Atlantic Path Publishing 2008). TAA is a great resource for textbook authors and editors (www.taaonline.net).

Topics for my mentoring sessions cover standard areas in textbook publishing, such as writing a prospectus, finding the right publisher, the publishing cycle and process, textbook organization and headings, apparatus and pedagogy, working with co-authors and editors, and doing revisions. My presentation/discussion focuses on the online environment for instructional materials, however, and is called "Textbook 2.0" (at a TAA member's apt suggestion). The deeper I go into this subject, the more I find out, and the more questions arise--an exciting prospect as I love both the research and the puzzle. I look forward to writing and speaking on this and learning even more.

As it happens I have also been developing online courses for clients, learning by doing and thus discovering both limitations and ways to get outside the box. I've also discovered how expensive it can be to have software written for online course platforms and applications. I don't know much at all about that, as my involvement has been on the soft side, with content, using templates. I have not even had to learn a markup language (html or xml). I think I would like to do that anyway, though, as soon as I get a chance. There seem to be many good tutorials online, e.g., at www.killersites.com.

One platform you can check out without commitment and at no cost is the beta at www.utilium.com. [Disclosure: I am listed as a partner in that venture (though I'm only a consultant and not a legal partner or an investor).] In any case, I think Utilium and sites like it hold a lot of promise for instructor-led development of high-quality custom course content that can be sold or shared, as desired, without permissions problems, but with the full potential of the World Wide Web and, hopefully, the interactive user interfaces of social networking.

I look forward to sharing on this blog more of what I learn about the future of textbooks in a digital world.

Providing Pedagogy

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:52:00 +0000

In addition to narrative context, the learning objects and media assets in an interactive online textbook need pedagogy--devices or elements that are not part of the narrative and are not in the link per se but that teach about the content and are useful or essential to the learning process or otherwise help students achieve the learning objectives. Minimum pedagogy would consist of learning objectives--what students should know, think, do, and/or feel after completing the module--and a system of headings to structure the scope and sequence and relative salience of the content.

Pedagogy also may include a systematic way to begin and end each module, links to definitional glosses, contextual or historical asides, bibliographic or reference annotations, graphic organizers, chronologies, expository captions for photos and art, questions or problem sets, interim reviews, and examples or applications. The pedagogy you provide may reside on your computer as files to which your course is hyperlinked. Pedagogical elements that hyperlinks themselves provide may include, for example, case studies, profiles, research studies, news reports, or journal articles with thematic content. However the links have pedagogical value to the learner only to the extent that learners are given opportunities to interact with the content and assess their grasp and use of it.

Thus, a link to a document describing ground-breaking research would have pedagogical value to the extent that you frame questions about it (or guide learners in framing questions) and to the extent that you suggest answers to those questions (or provide ways for students to interact to find answers). At the least, you would ask or test why the research was ground-breaking and what knowledge it discovered, expanded, or overturned.

One consequence of providing pedagogy in online contexts is that textbook supplements for students--such as test questions and study guide material--may become integrated into the course rather than provided as separate publications. These components, too, enhance the pedagogical value of online courses.

Providing Narrative Context

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:07:00 +0000

To me nothing is worse than finding an online course whose assets are merely listed topically. In that case the classification of information provides the only clue to discovering meaning or learning the content. A proper outline is not just a list of topics; it is a system of conceptualization that organizes topics by meaningful terms, degree of importance, and level of specificity--a roadmap for comprehension in the learning process. More than that, even a proper outline is not enough. There needs to be a narrative context.

Narrative context is provided in complete sentences built into paragraphs, telling the story of what it is we are to learn and why. Each asset should have a narrative introducing it, followed by narrative that links it coherently to the next asset in the sequence. Thus the same requirement for print textbooks--that there be transitions--applies no less to electronic textbooks and course packs. Brief annotations identifying the subject of a video or the title of a document, etc., does not constitute narrative context.

Even with a wealth of essentially non-text online visual stimuli, to learn anything at any level of sophistication, students still have to read.

Permissioning Online Resources

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:48:00 +0000

Getting permission to use or link to online content is still a gray area in copyright law and application. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf) confirms that you must request permission to use anything you find online that is protected by copyright law, unless a grant of release appears with the material. In that case the author or copyright holder of the published material has authorized its use. A notice may appear such as, "Permission is granted for teachers and students to copy and use this content so long as no fee is charged and this web site is cited as the source". Not all material is protected, nevertheless, including facts, ideas, methods, works in the public domain, many government documents, and so on. Clear explanations of "public domain" may be found online.

The best explanation I have found for determining if you need permission is published by the University of Texas at www.utsystem.edu/ogc/Intellectualproperty/COPYPOL2.HTM. That site also has a clear explanation of the four tests for fair use. Basically, if you are using a lot of original material commercially (online or in print) in such a way that the value of the material to its owner or creator will potentially be diminished, then you must have written permission. Educational use is not fair use if money is involved. For example, if students have to pay for your coursepack or online course, then you must make sure that everything in it is permissioned or falls into the public domain or is defensible as fair use on other grounds.

It used to be that we were supposed to request permission to link to another site before doing so. That practice has been found to be largely unenforceable, however, and is contrary to basic web architecture, which distributes information via hyperlinks. Although link requests increasingly are viewed as a mere nicety, the nuances are still being tested (or threatened) in court cases on trademark infringement. In your online course, use hyperlinks to direct students to other sources of information or media assets, taking care to link to the home page rather than internal pages that may be viewed as more proprietary. Importing hyperlinked material into your web site is another matter, however, and in that case the rules for permissioning apply.

Another gray area is the use of social networking sites to gather information for publication. Private speech is protected, but defining privacy on social sites is troublesome. I recently advised an author to incorporate a waiver into his online questionnaire such that people understand that responding to the questionnaire automatically grants release for him to use it as he sees fit without further consideration to them. I also advised him that the speech of minors is extra-protected and he must have written permission from parents regardless. Also, email is protected speech, and making speech anonymous does not necessarily protect against privacy infringement.

I am not an attorney, though, and my advice cannot substitute for the real thing (which can be found at reasonable cost). My own policy (erring on the side of caution, perhaps) is always to cite sources, include credit lines, observe terms of use (and publish my own), and seek authorization or ask permission whenever I have any doubt.

Finding and Choosing Media Assets

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:07:00 +0000

In my last post I discussed how to develop a shell for your online course--the structure and conceptual framework for the course you want to teach. You have your units, modules, and headings, along with learning objectives for each module and section in your outline. Now, finding the right media assets to plug into your online course shell is part art and part the luck of discovery.

Recall that media assets include web sites, documents, podcasts, audio files, webcasts, videos, animations, photos, other images, or any of a host of specific files, such as maps or graphics. The best way to find these assets is to start with links you already know or that have been recommended to you by colleagues, and those that are available through your institution, such as library subscriptions to online resources. Then move on to the keyword or key phrase search, preferably trying a variety of search engines.

Evaluating assets for inclusion in your course should be based on the following criteria:

1) Does it directly advance the learner's potential ability to fulfill the stated learning objective for that topic or section? Is the content at the right intellectual level for your audience?
2) Is the source known, credible, authoritative, authentic, literate, accurate, and reliable? Does it cite sources?
3) Can you use it or link to it legally without permission; or can you get permission? (more on this in the next post)
4) Is the web site or link stable and secure? Is it current or routinely updated?
5) Depending on context you also may want to ask, Is it free? Is it free of advertising? Does it require registration or subscription?

Web sites to favor include large or well-known national or international organizations; academic associations; federal and state government sites; online archives of newspaper, journal, or research articles; and open-access college- and university-based repositories.

Web sites to avoid include students' and instructors' pages; personal home pages other than your own; unarchived articles (which tend to disappear); commercial sites with pop-up ads or registration requirements; pages with internal links that are broken or lead to inappropriate content; sites with offensive or salacious content or undeclared bias.

Collect your finds into a bookmark folder, annotating each URL and categorizing it for placement in a section in your course outline. The bookmark folder will help you conveniently hyperlink your narrative text or pedagogy to your assets, or, alternatively, to hyperlink your assets to the learning objectives and headings in your course outline. Providing narrative and pedagogical contexts for your media assets will be the subject of a future post.

You no doubt will find far more resources than you can use in your course. As you develop your bookmark folder, try to choose the right number of assets to correspond with your predicted "time on task" for students to get through a module and satisfy the learning objectives. You may wish to apply the traditional industry standard of a maximum of 50 pages of reading per college course per week, and then reduce this to account for the time needed to study real-time media assets such as audio and video.

Many resources you find will not be conveniently available to you because of permission issues, the subject of my next post.

Online Course Development

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 16:56:00 +0000

My recommendations for developing an online course start with building a working table of contents with textual headings, just as you would for a print textbook. The best structure for online application is a sequence of units of study, which can be presented online as a learning sequence comprised of self-contained modules. Depending on length and complexity of content, a module can function at the level of a unit or a chapter. In any case, text headings serve as conceptual organizers for topics and subtopics within a module.

The more self-contained modules are, the more easily they can be moved in the sequence of instruction or chosen for other customizations with content from other sources. Learning objects, your own or ones you find online (or in repositories such as MERLOT), are self-contained lessons or bits, such as definitions or examples. You can put bits together to help populate sections within a module. Discrete learning objects and modules permit maximum flexibility in constructing courses, but it it critical to functionally interrelate information as well.

I think a serious flaw in online course development is the tendency to unharness information from larger meaning. For this reason it is essential to include pedagogy, such as learning objectives, module openers and closers, discussion questions or critical thinking questions, overviews, summaries or reviews, and glosses for technical terms. Each module should have learning objectives--what students should know or be able to do after studying the unit. There should be one of more learning objectives for each main heading within a module. Among your learning objects should be text boxes or links to brief documents in which you address the question of larger meaning within each module and the conceptual (and logical or historical) relationships between modules.

Consider developing a course in 8 to 14 units or modules inclusive of pedagogy, depending on semester length and course requirements, such as opportunities for assessment or student presentations. The number of modules should provide a practical course load for learners (and for the instructor to administer) at a rate of around one module a week. Getting course content into a finite number of modules is the same challenge you face in having a reasonable number of chapters in a textbook. Highly dense and technical material usually needs a larger number of shorter modules assigned at a rate of two a week. Keep in mind learning theory and research about chunking information for maximum effective learning rate.

Module content consists of the learning objects, bits, personal documents, links, and media assets that you assemble to help students satisfy each learning objective. If you wanted your introduction to economics students to distinguish among financial markets, for example, what would you show them and what would you have them read and what would you have them discuss, etc.? Learning materials you offer them might include choices among podcasts, videos, animations, simulations, news articles, scholarly articles, research reports, interviews, graphics, photos, links, prepackaged lessons, maps, demos, tutorials, blogs, dictionary entries, government statistics, and so on. For teaching effectiveness, the media assets you choose must be somehow endowed with pedagogy and couched in the larger meaning that makes learning anything worthwhile.

Next time: More on finding media assets and endowing them with pedagogy.

Topical Development in Textbook Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:52:00 +0000

I talked with someone recently who was developing an online textbook. A competition analysis based on online course syllabi had left him fairly baffled about what the course should cover, so he and his colleague had mapped frequency distributions of all the topics expressed in the course syllabi. They then chose the 12 topics with the highest frequencies of use and built the 12-week course around them. Problems arose in marketing the course, however. I said that the problems probably resulted from difficulty of use in teaching the course, caused mainly by the random ordering of a finite number of topics as discrete units of information and by the lack of pedagogy.

I explained that unlike encyclopedias, textbooks are not arbitrary compilations of topics of equal value. Rather, textbooks teach, and learning is constructed from a scope and sequence of interrelated topics nested in an expository structure. The author pointed out that the course was intended for upper-level undergraduates (majors) and grad students. I said that regardless of level, there needed to be a core narrative with learning objectives, a system of headings, and pedagogical devices to engage and guide or aid students in the course. Pedagogical devices include, for example, unit opening and closing elements, figures and tables, glosses for terminology, question sets, and features such as real-world examples, research briefs, news items, or case studies.

The author said that instructors in his field have no background or training in how to teach, and I said, "Aha, the truth is out!" The sad and sorry truth! There's the rub, and why is that? Why (and how) is it that people can get PhDs and teaching appointments in their fields with no training in or even exposure to learning theory, instructional methods, and general pedagogy?

I know this issue has been addressed in the rapid spread of campus-based faculty development centers during the past decade, also in the growing popularization of the idea in intellectual circles that college teaching can be a form of scholarship. The word obviously has not spread far enough, though, and the new era of online exposition surely requires the same kind of background and training. In any case, I am now helping to revise that online textbook (and am glad of it).

Advice on Textbook Writing - 2: The E-Textbook Model

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:09:00 +0000

Try developing your textbook manuscript using an e-textbook model. Think of your chapters as modules, your paragraphs as nested learning objects or "content". No need to draft in html; just construct a core narrative text (telling the story) and system of headings (organizing the story conceptually). Then tag or keymark the text for links to learning objectives, supporting web sites, examples, problems, articles, images, glosses, questions, activities, source citations, bibliography, etc. For each module keep a log of these proposed links and supporting materials and their sources as a sort of media log, similar to the permissions logs you would keep. (I model this process in chapters 9 and 10 in my 2005 book on writing and developing college textbook supplements, but already I see I must update! Readers' advice for revising that book is most welcome.)

I see several reasons for drafting to an e-textbook model, some relating to exposition and some to the realities of textbook publishing today:

1. Writing a core narrative is good discipline for saying what absolutely needs to be said in a minimalist (and infinitely expandable) way. Some might argue that this is a reductio ad absurdam exercise, and in some hands it no doubt would be. However, expressing what is most important--the key fact, the main point, the basic chronology, the critical argument or proof, the one thing to remember, the so what?--is an expository writer's duty to the learner. Your mission as a textbook author should be based on what you feel is most important for readers to come away with.

2. Core narratives let you draft a whole-book first draft, to schedule and to length, without being overwhelmed with details. At the same time, media logs let you choose the best and most efficient supporting material for your content for each use--in the print edition, in an electronic edition, and in each supplement, including what you can give to your colleagues, the classroom instructors, to help them teach the course.

3. Media logs let you plan for proving or enriching your narratives in limitless ways at many levels of discourse. These ways offer students and instructors greater choice in what they will use to learn and teach the course content. And this is the way education is headed today. For better or worse, knowledge is becoming unpegged from the minds of its creators--at once personalized and globalized.

4. A textbook manuscript constructed this way can be easily deconstructed and its parts repurposed for applications in web interfaces and e-learning or interactive online courses, in both open-access and for-sale environments. Educational publishing for all levels is headed this way. Publishers use particularized textbook and ancillary content as mix and match media assets. A manuscript that can be easily published in any form has clear added value, including in textbook publishing contracts where the granting of electronic rights has become mandatory for publishers even to begin to compete.

5. A manuscript written to the e-textbook model is easy to revise, as the core content remains largely the same except for any new research, facts, or interpretations. Finding new assets to support the content in a revision can be just plain fun, a playground for invention and creativity and also a way to incorporate the contributions of coauthors and students or other contributors.

There probably are more reasons, and I would like to hear them. There is a downside too, of course, especially for the traditionalists among us, but I'm rather excited by all the changes.

Advice on Textbook Writing

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:26:00 +0000

Well, here's a new series of posts with tips and advice on textbook writing. Some of the topics, such as the following, are ones I forgot to mention in my books, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements. Other topics simply will address my pet peeves, such as poor writing habits and, more importantly, the poor habits of mind that compromise textbook organization and content.

In my years of work with textbook manuscripts, I have noticed a pervasive voice-audience pattern that I think reduces the value and effectiveness of textbooks overall. To wit: Authors write as if they alone are teaching the course. Authors also often write as if students have no other information source or recourse for discovering or mastering course content.

That the textbook author tends to assume a godlike role and status should come as no surprise. After all, writing is an act of creation, traditionally performed in private and without interference for some imaginary audience that is both passive and captive. This kind of discourse replicates the lecture model of traditional classroom instruction. Add to this the well-known academic ego and it is easy to see how the authorial voice may become authoritative to a fault. The problem is that authors do not see themselves as adjuncts to flesh-and-blood teachers or their textbooks as instruments in another scholar-educator's work.

As a result, the instructor who adopted the textbook for use in his or her class may be ill considered or cut out of the process. The textbook says every possible thing that can be said about each topic, space permitting, leaving nothing to the imagination and little for the instructor to add! Even the instructor's manual that comes with the textbook has little of interest for the flesh-and-blood teacher to do other than assign the readings and show the videos the publisher provides as part of the package.

The instructors who adopt your textbook are an important part of your audience, not just the student readers. So, if you were collaborating with them to teach a course, one off-site (you, the author) and others on-site (the flesh-and-blood classroom instructors), how might your textbook writing and supplements change? This is interesting to think about. What could you do to help your colleagues in the trenches take the primary role in student course outcomes, teach well, and look good?

The same logic applies to the other part of the audience, the students. How can you help them take the primary or active role in their learning, learn well, and look good? In the 80+ textbooks I have reviewed, I came across only two that systematically asked students questions, required students to frame questions, or modeled any kind of inquiry process. But learning is as much an act of creation as teaching or writing. And students must rely neither on you nor on your classroom counterpart as "the" knowledge-giver.

Sharing power over the reader's mind does not come easily to academic authors, but there is so much information today that your textbook cannot stand apart as some kind of bible for the course for which you wrote it. In the last 10 years filling textbook chapter closers with URLs has become obligatory, but often Internet links are strewn gratuitously, with no clear direction for using outside information in constructing knowledge or skills. Consider, too, the rapid growth of collaborative online teaching, e-learning, and custom or wiki textbooks. Where and how will your textbook--as one source of knowledge and as one voice--take its place in this new world?

Workshops on Writing a Textbook

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:24:00 +0000

Well, I've been thinking about this for a long time. On my web site I even describe in some detail workshops I might give on textbook writing and development. Having no takers to date, however--not even queries from academic institutions, departments, or development centers--I have let the idea languish. I am aware of only one other organized effort on the subject, and that is Michael Spiegler's workshops on textbook writing, which he conducts through travel to college campuses and association meetings. Michael is a psychology professor at Providence College, a 4-year Roman Catholic institution in Rhode Island. He has cited my works and recommends my books to his workshop attendees (see www.atlanticpathpubishing.com), which I appreciate, but I have not yet met him or attended one of his presentations. He will be presenting at this year's annual meeting of the Text and Academic Authors Association (www.taa-online.net) at Harrah's in Las Vegas, June 19-21. I will not be able to attend but would appreciate hearing about it from anyone who does.

I am not at present an academic. In the past I had appointments at Boston University, Northeastern University, Salem State College, North Shore Community College, Vancouver City College, and other institutions, but the bulk of my career has been in educational and professional publishing. I've been particularly interested in the application of learning theory and cognitive science to the improvement of academic writing and instructional content. In addition, I've become fascinated with the culture of publishing, a much needed perspective for text and academic authors. A publisher/editor perspective may both complement and balance a professor/author perspective, and this is what I hope to offer in the online seminars I am presently developing. Anyone's input or advice on populating and conducting an online seminar on textbook writing is most welcome.

Open Access Publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 17:44:00 +0000

Well, here I am, back again after a long hiatus (a long winter's nap?). Now, with lengthening days at last, I'll pick up where promised, on the topic of open access publishing. The open access movement, which began in the mid-1960s, has gathered momentum, not only in academic circles, with Harvard University recently joining MIT in offering free online access to scholarship and courses, but even to commercial publishing. With the rapid growth and acceptance of open access textbooks, for example, traditional publishers have moved either to provide hybrid online custom publishing (such as McGraw-Hill Higher Education's deal with MERLOT) or to divest themselves of their soon to be unprofitable textbook divisions altogether (such as Thomson Learning).

Surviving higher education publishers likely will remain profitable only by reducing costs through digitization and electronic delivery and by taking advantage of the tremendous growth in online advertising. (Perhaps the second edition of my book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook, just out, will become obsolete! I think I'll start a revision of my other book, Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements, which has chapters on creating e-texts, or maybe I'll start a new book on creating instructional content for the digital age!)

The following paragraphs come from Chapter 1 of my second edition book:

"For participants in the open access movement, however, profitability simply is not an issue. Typically, the participants are scholars, scientists, researchers, and educators with funding from grants, endowed chairs, philanthropic organizations, institutional salaries, and the like. Publishing or self-archiving in an open access journal or repository is already paid for--that is, paying the bills does not depend on publishing revenues but on attracting funding from other sources."

"Research has hinted that the chief attraction of open access for academics (aside from the philosophical) is 1) the easy searchability of content through keywords and metatags, 2) the far greater number of “hits” one gets than from readership through library patronage or paid journal subscriptions, and 3) the resulting increase in citations, which boosts visibility, credibility, and standing in the grant-getting world as well as with one’s academic department, tenure committee, or institution. Scholarship criteria for promotion and tenure will have to change to reflect the new publishing model of open access."

"Other new publishing models include blogs—chronological personal writings, including researchers’ field notes; wikis—collaborative web sites that anyone can edit; and crowdsourcing—online publishing of content to which readers are invited to contribute. For better or worse, some social science researchers already are using crowdsourcing as a way to collect qualitative data. For a perspective on the Open Education Resource movement in higher education, explore the database and pages at oedb.org/, especially oedb.org/library/features/80-oer-tools."

Social bookmarking--saving bookmarks to a public web site and tagging them with keywords to share--is another new model that extends to academic publishing (see, for example, de.lirio.us and citeulike). That revered catchphrase in education--"Let us establish learning communities"--is finally taking on real meaning! Meanwhile, is anyone else besides me starting to feel panicky about keeping up with all these changes?

Academic Self-Publishing--3

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 15:56:00 +0000

If you are looking to self-publish without being in business as a publisher, here is a working list of subsidy presses: ArborBooks, AuthorHouse, BookLocker, DogEar, Falcon Books, Infinity, iuniverse, Lulu, Outskirts, Publish America, Trafford, Vantage, Vision Books International (VBI), Writers Collective, XLibris, and Xulon. You would need to investigate further to see which publisher would be right for what you want to publish and which would have the right terms and conditions for you.

There are in addition small commercial subsidy presses that focus specifically on academic authors looking to self-publish scholarly works or custom textbooks for classroom use. See, for example, senatehall.com, cjp.com, and brownwalker.com. Open access publishing is another whole subject, and I'd like to talk about that next, quoting from the second edition of my book, Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (Atlantic Path Publishing, 2008).

Academic Self-Publishing--2

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 15:24:00 +0000

Subsidy publishers vary in their approach to the lucrative self-publishing market. Some simply prey upon unwary authors; others straightforwardly explain how to use their services appropriately. Personal, family, church, academic, and organizational records, history, biography, and memoir are appropriate uses, for example, as the goal of distribution usually is non-commercial and the intended market is restricted or small. These self-published works do not even need an ISBN if they are not intended for distribution to the trade.

Some subsidy presses say they screen for quality and may or may not accept manuscripts. These houses may have sales catalogs and use books self-published under their imprint to build a branded reputation for their company, making screening a good idea. However, most vanity publishers, including companies billing themselves as “turn-key publishers,” will publish anything you send them, without comment. They may or may not offer extra paid services of copyediting, ghostwriting, or reviewing. Poor quality of content, among other things, is what has made self-published works unwelcome in the trade.

For academics self-publishing with vanity presses, however, the issue may be lack of professional peer review rather than of trade acceptance. Peer review is essential for vetting or sanctioning scholarly work as authoritative, accurate, etc. Print or online publications that lack any kind of review process tend to be ignored, justly or not, in the academic community. I'll discuss this limitation further in a subsequent post.

Some self-publishing houses say they offer marketing, promotion, and distribution services—which you pay for--and seem to be well connected. They make money at your expense, however, some offering you a royalty as little as 20% on your work in exchange for their efforts. Thus, a house can double-dip without making any capital investment at all. At no expense to itself, it can make money from you and then turn around and make money from your book.

Reputable subsidy publishers are direct and clear about what they can and cannot accomplish for you and your publication. Some claim you can self-publish for free. Disreputable companies claim they can profitably distribute your self-published book nationally or internationally and get you on Oprah.

Academic Self-Publishing

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 14:42:00 +0000

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.

Wiki Textbooks 5

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:46:00 +0000

The more research on wikis I do online, the more convinced I am about fundamental fallacies in the use of wiki-textbooks for content area learning. There is the question of standards of accuracy and veracity--editors can be anonymous or use fake names; one assistant professor even has his students VOTE on whether or not to accept edited content in their wiki textbook--and there is the question of the professoriate's role--the same assistant professor actually celebrates exchanging his role and status as an expert with that of gatekeeper! He has students write everything from the course syllabus to the exam questions (Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, 8/15/07, Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom; Stan Gibson, 11/20/06, Using a Wiki: A Textbook Case: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2061136,00.asp).

Even experts in IT, possibly the most relevant field for application, debunk wikis as just another form of groupware, prone to fall into disuse as burdens of information management displace knowledge creation (Steven J. Vaughan Nichols, 5/22/06, Wikis Are a Waste of Time: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965848,00.asp). Not to mention the potential for vandalism, e.g., the pre-calculus wiki-text containing ads for Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, Propecia, Phenteramine, and auto insurance (http://pc40s.jot.com/WikiHome).

But I also see that this is not an all or nothing thing. There IS a place for wikis: providing contexts for skill development. By creating wiki-texts students can develop search skills (how and where to find out all you need to know), thinking skills (how to evaluate what you find and where you find it), judgment skills (how to choose what to include and exclude and what to believe as true), and organizational skills (how to structure and interrelate information from diverse sources). In this use, which is certainly very important, specific content areas are not needed; any topic will do--even, for example, umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html).

Thus, I think I would have a wiki-text project as a course supplement cum cooperative learning activity rather than as the primary vehicle for transmitting course content. If I were a modern history professor, for example, I might have students write one chapter on "between the wars" to show contributing causes of WWII. In this instance the wiki-text is restricted in scope and integrated around a particular (albeit complex) question and serves a particular instructional goal. I have to wonder, though, if I would have the time to manage the project.

On practicality, a high school history teacher (Clay Burell, 4/12/07 http://beyond-school.org/2007/04/12/update-on-the-broken-world-wiki-history-textbook-project/) had the following to say: "The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.

To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)

Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.

They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).

So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.

Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.

And collaborating."

Collaborating can be forced, however. I recently discovered a wiki tutorial on how to write a textbook. It has glaringly uneven topical development with many unpopulated sections. It was created by an IT prof. in the UK and guess whom he cites extensively on the subject of textbook authorship: ME! Thank you, but now I have to think about editing that wiki to accurately reflect what I actually say in my books and completely cover the topic!!! Maybe I should ask him if he would like to coauthor a book (a real one) with me.

Wiki Textbooks 4

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 15:34:00 +0000

What Role for Instructors?
Wiki classrooms seem to turn instructors from imparters of knowledge into gatekeepers (and, necessarily, censors) in the global information network. Instructors provide the structure and tools for self-directed knowledge quests, and self-publishing professors and scholars help provide the theory and research that populate the web and constitute that knowledge. Potentially, everyone--and noone--is the expert. This raises an accountability issue.

For decades educators have been calling for nondidactic approaches to instruction, for instructors to be mentors and guides and sounding boards rather than "sage on the stage" lecturers. Now that the classroom is the Internet and the textbook is a class project, this change in job description is really happening for the first time. How does it sit with academics? Is it a relief or an imposition to not be accountable for what one knows or imparts to students? Are measures of teaching effectiveness to be reduced to classroom management skills?

I'm conflicted about this. On the one hand, I know that what I know is not a thing that I possess that I can just hand off to others. What I know is just as constructed from my thought and experience as students' knowledge is for them. The amount and quality of thought and experience is certainly different, however. How would that difference be reflected in a wiki classroom or a wiki textbook? When I try to imagine this, I see myself having to structure and direct investigations without imposing content. I see myself teaching critical thinking skills rather than my subject area. Wouldn't this make me more a technician than an expert or preferred knowledge source in my field? Is this to be the role of college instructors, and, if so, what outcomes might result in higher education?

I wish there would be some comments!

Wiki Textbooks 3

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 13:30:00 +0000

How Will We Know What to Accept as True?

I suppose we can have confidence in the currency and accuracy of information in students' wikitexts to the extent that instructors serve as the final arbiters--and to the extent that the instructors themselves are credible as authorities in the subject. In this context a wiki textbook is a hermetic product, no different, really, from the unique pedagogical dynamics of the classroom in which a particular instructor and his or her students perform their rituals and epiphanies. But what about online textbooks produced this way that are thrown out to the world? What is the authorship? Can we have confidence that the content is correct and that the ethics of authorship are observed?

Conventionally, authors and publishers of textbooks are authoritative, identified, and accountable for documented content that is periodically revised. In a public wiki document, however, authors are anybody and content constantly changes. What is true one moment may be swept away the next--by anyone. What is seen as politically incorrect or unfavorable to any particular entity (such as a group or government or corporation) can be cleansed--anonymously, repeatedly. Vandalism and deliberate misinformation are commonplace. Content is supposed to be self-correcting, as self-appointed experts police entries until the truth is fleetingly achieved consensually.

There is a demonstration site by Jon Udell--very effective--that shows changes to a wikipedia entry over time using the electronic equivalent of time-lapse photography with voiceover. It shows the progressive development and correction of information about the use of umlauts in the names of heavy metal bands (http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html). The demo shows how corrupt entries are removed within seconds of appearing, how accuracy is continually honed through word substitutions, and how organization is gradually imposed on information after it appears--a breathtaking view of bottom-up processing at work. I think the demo is intended to inspire confidence in wikis as reliable sources of information, filtered as they are through a meta leveling mechanism: the online general public, which collectively knows what truth it wants.

I am not inspired to confidence, however. It scares me to death. The online general public has decided that we should learn and care about heavy metal bands and why they use umlauts in their names. The online general public also has decided that "Hitler-like," "Nazi-inspired" and "skinhead-related" are all too strong to explain the typographic preference for umlauts. They have decided on "Germanic" and "Gothic" but cite no etymologies, primary sources, or theories that might enlighten us on the first use of the umlaut in a band name and why it inspired such a raft of imitators. Is this truth as trivia? Democracy as tyranny?

Wiki Textbooks 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:45:00 +0000

Well, now that I've had a chance to survey briefly some wiki textbooks online, I see some clear pedagogical benefits relating to the instructional models I mentioned in my last post. The students are forced to survey a variety of information sources in order to construct text, which means more reading and writing and further development of literacy and thinking skills. In most cases the instructors structure the wiki text in some way, by providing a detailed table of contents, for example, to show the sequence of conceptual and factual categories of information that students should fill. Some instructors further structure the collective textbook writing project by assigning individual students particular topics and particular roles in the creative process. Student A might have to write an explanation of hybrid vigor, Student B might then have to provide examples of it, Student C might have to peer review or fact check the piece prior to publication, and Student D might have to be responsible for monitoring and editing subsequent changes to the entry. I thought this was a good use of the medium. It also points out other clear pedagogical benefits relating to social interaction and peer-mediated learning. El-hi education literature has promoted cooperative learning since the 1960s--along with discovery learning, active learning, self-regulated learning, authentic (contextualized or situation-driven) learning, and technology-mediated learning. It's interesting to see these models actualized in higher education today through dramatic applications of the wiki software.

I say dramatic because I think the changes are and will be profound. They will affect what we know and what we think we know, how we talk about things, what we regard as important, who we regard as an authority or an expert. Standards will fall left and right (starting with grammar and punctuation--e.g., how I resent public disregard for the proper use of apostrophes). Talk about dumbing down! And the changes will be mind-bending as well. We will learn (if we haven't already) to accept reality as an illusory, factuality as relative, truth as interpretation, uncertainty as normal chaos. Meanwhile, however, I now really want to co-write a wiki text!

I keep thinking of students in a summer course I taught at a state college on U.S. History and Constitutional Government, 1865 to the Present. I was an anthropologist, assigned out-of-field, and had successfully taught a few semesters of world history. With my Henry Steele Commager and various other hastily compiled texts, I managed to stay slightly ahead of my students, who, alarmingly, proved to be high school history teachers taking summer courses for advancement! I.e., they undoubtedly knew more than I did on the subject. We met once a week for 3 hours--a lot of time in which to screw up. I studied day and night and took a tutorial on constitutional law (way more complex than I had imagined), but I was still worried about the 3 hours. About halfway through the course I asked the students to team up and take particular constitutional issues that interested them to report on. To my astonishment, they flat-out refused! One explained, "We know what group work is; we assign it to our students all the time. But we didn't pay money here to do the work ourselves. We paid money to learn what you have to teach us that we can bring back to the classroom."

So I guess those students would not have co-written a wiki textbook with me. Maybe undergraduates don't notice (or care) that with wikis they do the work themselves. Which leads me to the questions, How will be know what to accept as true? and, What will be the role of the wikitext instructor?

Wiki Textbooks

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 22:29:00 +0000

I'd like to explore a new topic and that is the application of wiki software to custom published textbooks. I have really mixed views on this and hope that comments on my posts will help me figure things out. On the one hand is the exciting prospect of creating a working text for a course through the participation of students with their instructor. This enterprise is the ultimate in custom publishing. At the same time it firmly supports and extends constructivist models of teaching and learning. These models feature students as active learners constructing their own understandings through their self-regulated development of knowledge networks. These networks are built up from multiple modes and sources of information, though primary source texts may be conspicuously missing from the discourse. Further, the networks are mediated socially through interaction with peers, experts, and audiences as well as through observation and experience. Because they allow students to construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct knowledge networks, wikis give whole new meaning, and new scope, to the concept and value of student interaction with text.

This can only be good, right? In addition to permitting global pedagogical nirvana, the process is a perfect reflection of technological potential in our promiscuous Information Age. It is also a reflection, I think, of post-postmodern sentiment, which seems to discard both idealism and realism in favor of interpretivism. In this view, both reality (metaphysics) and truth (epistemology) are separated from moorings of any kind and opened to a sea of equal opportunity interpretation. And what is a wiki if not a constantly changing seascape with dubious new creatures evolving among the more familiar organisms? Because a part of me says, no, there have to be baselines, there have to be standards, benchmarks, principles, authorities. There have to be limits, constraints, disciplines. There has to be quality control. Am I hopelessly old-fashioned? Am I favoring censorship? I'm going to answer my own questions (and you are welcome to answer them also), but first I want to actually read some wiki textbooks. (Maybe I'm just a tempest in a teapot.)

Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:41:00 +0000

Tests of student writing performance often show that students need more help in developing topics—using detail and citing examples (Newkirk, 1999). As a publisher (and former academic and textbook editor), I often find precisely the same problems in the writings of students’ instructors--manuscripts with page after page of unrelentingly abstract prose, excessive jargon, paragraph after paragraph on constructs with no hint that they have empirical analogs in the real world. This kind of writing does not raise or maintain intellectual standards; it prevents or impedes learning!

When asked to provide topical development with expository details and concrete examples, many academic authors are offended. They call it dumbing down. My beef is with academics who attribute dumbing down to textbook publishers as an excuse for their bad writing.

Revising expository writing to make it accessible to learners is not and should not involve dumbing down in either form or intent. Offering concrete examples is not dumbing down, for example. Concrete elaborations let readers imagine, visualize, or identify with representations or exemplars of an abstraction. This vicarious experience, in turn, engenders self-confidence in learners, who more readily rise to the challenge of grasping the difficult or complex idea in aid of which the concrete example was advanced.

A challenge with professors as authors is that many tend to regard their works as sacrosanct products of their intellect and standing, both hard-won. Frequently, then, they interpret requests for revision or development of their manuscript as the publisher’s nefarious effort either to abridge academic freedom or to dumb down a scholarly work. These are misconceptions. There are legitimate reasons, such as the following, that editors might ask textbook authors to change their organization or content.

• The book will be too long for its intended market or predetermined level of investment and has to be cut.
• Concepts lack adequate elaboration through concrete examples.
• Sources are not cited.
• Undocumented opinions are presented as facts.
• Undocumented facts seem inaccurate or misleading.
• Information seems outdated or lacks currency.
• Topical coverage seems unbalanced, biased, or unexpected for the course.
• Material is judged to be strongly offensive to some or all readers.
• Examples, language, or expression are inappropriate to the intended reader, course, or subject.
• Vocabulary level is inappropriate for the course level.
• The writing is ungrammatical, wordy, or full of “pomo-babble.”
• Digressions or redundancy compromise meaning or coherence.
• Material is too similar to that in competing textbooks.
• Material invites claims of plagiarism or copyright infringement.
• Chapters lack appropriate apparatus and pedagogy.
• The manuscript departs significantly from the previously agreed-upon book plan.

None of these reasons involves a request to dumb down. Thus, academic authors should not make this claim to excuse writing that is bad or inappropriate to their audience, course, or mission. Nor should they take it upon themselves to adulterate the knowledge they are attempting to convey. Students—whatever their state of knowledge—can detect gratuitously dumbed-down prose in an instant and are justifiably insulted. Dumbed-down prose is, in Orwell’s beloved cuttlefish ink analogy, insincere (Orwell, 1946).

In truth, textbooks need to be clear, coherent, and concise—the three C’s championed by William Strunk so long ago (1918). In addition, textbooks need to address their true readers—the actual students whose learning is at stake, not the professor’s dissertation committee, journal review board, or tenure committee, not colleagues, critics, or prize panels. On the other hand, meeting learners “where they are” in their intellectual development does not require leaving out either big words or big ideas, especially when glossaries or pronunciation guides are provided in textbooks. Rather, meeting learners “where they are” requires clarity, coherence, and concision of exposition. Knowledge about learning also is important, for in the end analysis, textbook writing is teaching.

The solution? I think institutions of higher learning, academic departments, professional degree programs, and scholarly publications should provide more opportunities (and more rewards) for academics to learn to write sound expository prose. We also can hope for a more balanced attitude toward textbook publishing as both a vital form of teaching and a valid form of scholarship.

Academic Authors Can't Write! --Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:26:00 +0000

Of course, it's an exaggeration to say that academic authors can't write. I say it in the the same sense that "white boys can't jump." But still, among the many academic authors I've worked with, only two or three of them would I say were good writers. Most are wordy and imprecise, inconsistent in style, unclear in exposition, inflated in jargon and ego, pedagogically unsound, and, worst, they lack an authentic and attractive authorial voice (the one true source of a textbook's success).

Many other observers have noticed problems with academic writing, such as the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s famous Bad Writing Contests (Dutton, 1996; see www.denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm). Canadian journalist Robert Fulford referred to academic writing as "pomo-babble"—“the tortured polysyllabic prose common in academic writing” (National Post, 7/15/03):

“Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don’t even know they are doing it…. Crimes against language are not victimless, of course. Academic life has become a publish and perish world: Professors publish, literacy perishes. Students perish too.”

I find it ironic that so few professors write well, especially for students, and that even fewer recognize this fact. Why is this? What are they doing wrong? And what can be done to improve the quality of writing for both scholars and college students? If you have thoughts on these questions, I hope you will comment.

The Academic Ego, Part 4: Pricing Outfalls

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 23:34:00 +0000

This is the 4th installment of a previously unpublished article I wrote for academic editors to help them gain a perspective on the authors they work with. Author perceptions about academic freedom and the transformations of the publishing industry brought about through digitization challenge academic editors in new ways. (Copyright Mary Ellen Lepionka 2007: All Rights Reserved.)

Pricing Outfalls
Publishers began addressing the issue of pricing only when the great success of the used textbook industry became known, and again following price revolts early in the 21st century. Students now can buy used, foreign, and pirated English-language copies of textbooks online, and some universities opt to rent textbooks to deliver by the chapter to students via their intranet servers. The publishing industry also has responded with streamlined low-cost or coverless editions and e-textbooks, uncoupled from their supplement packages. Nevertheless, textbooks that don’t do well—or that compete directly with the publisher’s more successful new acquisition—often are retired, and the academic ego is bruised again. "I got dumped for a bigger gun," one angsty author put it.

In academic and scholarly publishing, in contrast to textbook publishing, complaints about prices usually refer to the high premiums that libraries must pay for print and electronic journals that publishers monopolize. Library consortia have fought back to great effect, aided by online networking. In some well-publicized cases libraries have cancelled their subscriptions for the most expensive scientific, technical, and medical journals from companies such as Elsevier, Wiley, Academic Press, Blackwell, and Kluwer.

In addition, many scholars and researchers increasingly publish their work online, often using electronic clearinghouses for peer review. They make their articles available on a noncommercial basis, self-publish, and also generate increasingly popular blogs for academic discourse. These trends further challenge the publishing industry at the same time as they help stimulate the growing open-access movement in academe (Suber, 2002), such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Free Online Scholarship (FOS), and MIT’s Dspace.
Editors must be sensitive to the fact that authors have more options now than ever before. The road to successful projects must be paved carefully with information about the textbook publishing industry.

Freedom to Publish
Many academics champion the open access movement in the belief that it safeguards freedom of thought and expression. Academics take academic freedom very seriously and tend to believe that the publishing industry (and mass media) determine what gets published (or aired, etc.). They seem not to realize that publishers, like television networks, base their decisions on 1) market data, rather than on conspiracies sealed in closed executive meetings, and 2) shareholder expectations, rather than on megalomaniacal quests for world domination. In contrast with the realities, scholarly outrage over perceived threats of censorship or abridgement of academic freedom may be grossly oversimplified and thus tough for editors to deal with.

This outrage may stem in part from appocraphal imagery concerning mind control, perhaps from literature about cults or classic works such as 1984 or Manchurian Candidate. In textbook publishing, it also comes from the application of ideas about political correctness, in which, in Diane Ravitch’s words, publishers and editors become the “language police” in response to public pressure (2003). Editors requesting changes to a textbook manuscript may be thus accused. The authors of an introduction to psychology textbook who refuse to mention Sigmund Freud, because they do not approve of Freud’s ideas, for example, may fault the publisher for caving in to the demands of the prospective customers who teach the course! In this manifestation, the academic ego rests firm in the notion that people should know enough to want what the author is providing (and if they don’t, the hell with them).

Unlike editors of trade nonfiction, textbook editors routinely must ameliorate conservative, liberal, fundamentalist, Marxist, deist, feminist, existentialist, and other ideological “expository” prose to protect naive audiences and to avoid alienating the instructors who order the textbooks. Ufortunately, crusades in defense of Intellectual freedom may extend to moral claims about human rights to knowledge. A creator of prying and crippling computer viruses famously defended himself by claiming, "I don't publish viruses to cause a panic. I only publish to spread knowledge. I don’t think knowledge should be punished" (Zeller, 2005). Where knowledge is sacrosanct, then, so is the expression of it, and by extension the one who does the expressing. This is heady stuff, especially for people who live for what they know and what they think they know--the academic authors with whom academic editors must travel (like so many Sancho Panzas).

The Academic Ego, Part 3: Authors' Expectations

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 13:54:00 +0000

This is the 3rd installment of a previously unpublished article I wrote for academic editors to help them gain a perspective on the authors they work with. Authors often come with (largely unjustified) positive or negative expectations of publishers, which can become a huge problem for editors. (Copyright Mary Ellen Lepionka: All Rights Reserved.)

Real-world disdain among some academics (especially the princes of ivory towers) sometimes includes misconceptions about the publishing industry, including editorial values and practices, and about commerce in general. Animadversions about publishing as an evil empire abound in academe and appear to center on two themes: 1) disgust over what is perceived as a capitalist conspiracy for profit through economic exploitation, and 2) outrage over perceived threats of censorship or abridgement of academic freedom by media conglomerates. In the first, the author may assume one of two views, equally naive: that publishers exist to disseminate new knowledge and care about the development of academic disciplines, or that publishers exist solely for profit and do not care about anything else, not even what they produce (as in, “They could be making widgets”).

Some academic egos easily accommodate dissonant expectations, holding naive and cynical views simultaneously.
In any case, editors must manage to tread a middle ground in this minefield of expectations. The best houses support their authors’ careers and the academic disciplines their lists serve, while nevertheless remaining profitable—ruthlessly, if necessary, in light of capitalism’s prime directive.

Authors' expectations about income from publishing range from naively high hopes to outright cynicism (as in, “If I wanted to make money I wouldn’t be doing this”). Acquisitions editors often take shocking advantage of authors who think it is both a necessity and a privilege to be published and who do not expect material gain. On the opposite front is the textbook author who expects to retire on $200,000 USD annually for his or her introductory undergraduate textbook, or the scholar or scientist who expects to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of his or her popularization in cross-over markets. (And, admit it, every high-end trade book editor probably dreams of signing a Rachel Carson, Carl Sagan, Daniel Boorstin, Camille Paglia, Jared Diamond, etc.)

Then, in a class by themselves, are the “anarchists,” authors who claim that scholarship is a moral enterprise that should not be expected or required to follow the dictates of (filthy) capitalism. Just as ideas cannot be copyrighted, all knowledge, they say, including that in books, should be free. As with religious fundamentalism, alternative views and practical realities have no defense. Some members of this class may very well be the people who in their youth felt entirely justified in purloining books, magazines, records, tapes, or CDs from corner stores and malls.

Anarchists, or perhaps iconoclasts is a more contemporary term, tend to be righteous, and many are drawn swiftly to wikis and open access publishing. Editors beware! Iconoclasts who stray into commercial publishing can become authors from hell. Some continually agitate for far more investment than the book can possibly afford based on projected sales. Worse, some come secretly or incognito and tend to produce unsalable POV books or masterpieces of disinformation, the whole time thumbing their noses at editors too stupid or ill-educated to recognize what is going down.

In addition, authors may naively or cynically focus on "capitalist exploitation" in publishers’ contracts and publishing decisions. Complaints about contracts often target meager (or lacking) advances or grants, low royalty rates with infrequent payouts, befuddling royalty reports, and unfavorable terms, such as taking all rights and then failing to return them in a timely fashion. Grievances about publishing decisions tend to focus on “acceptable manuscript” clauses, unrealistic drafting schedules, and cancellation policies. Failure to revise or reprint effectively kills a book—a bitter pill for authors, regardless of the strength of their academic ego. But there is no middle ground here. Publishers everywhere struggle to unload losers while attempting to maintain minimum industry standards for ethical practice.

Academic authors typically do not understand why their books may be losers and have no concept of the costs and risks involved in publishing. They often evince amazement, if not outright disbelief, to learn how small the margins actually are. Wise editors patiently educate their academic authors on these real-world matters. For example, authors are not aware of all the direct and indirect costs of publishing over which the publisher may have no control. They also may not grasp the complexity of issues that on the surface seem obvious. For example, authors may not appreciate the role of instructors, college stores, and students themselves in the pricing of textbooks. Complaints about prices, commonly referred to as price gouging, are in sympathy with students, who dispense inordinate sums for their burdensome course materials, especially textbook packages bundled with mandatory supplements (now a thing of the past since "debundling" has become mandatory instead). In any case, students and instructors then contribute to higher prices and loss of royalties by selling back their books.

Academic Ego, Part 2: The Ivory Tower

noreply@blogger.com (Mary Ellen Lepionka) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:39:00 +0000

This is the 2nd installment of a previously unpublished article I wrote for academic editors to help them gain a perspective on the authors they work with. Authors come with (largely justified) ego, discussed in the 1st installment, and also with pressures surrounding textbook publishing, publish or perish mandates, and the constraints of ivory towerism. (Copyright Mary Ellen Lepionka: All Rights Reserved.)

Author profiles for acquisitions in publishing often reflect academic career constraints. Ideal authors for textbooks in higher education, for example, are associate or full professors, preferably with tenure, but perhaps not actively involved in administration. Active department chairs and heads of academic associations often are too busy with administrative duties to give textbook authoring projects their due. In addition, textbook projects may have low cachet in institutional or departmental qualifications for tenure, such that prospective tenure-track authors may feel they cannot afford to divert their time and efforts. Research institutions in particular may spurn textbooks as trivial, while at the same time applying immense pressure to publish.

The phrase "publish or perish" was publicized, if not coined, by Texas scholar Logan Wilson in his 1942 study, The Academic Man: A Study in the Sociology of a Profession (Hibbits, 1996). "The prevailing pragmatism forced upon the academic group is that one must write something and get it into print. Situation imperatives dictate a 'publish or perish' credo within the ranks"(197). Logan interviewed professors (overwhelmingly male at the time) in a classic study of their attitudes, beliefs, and values about their academic life. Now, as then, tenure committees emphasize refereed scholarly publishing of dissertation adaptations, original short-term research, and review articles, quantified through calculi such as aggregate citation rates and percentage of articles with sole or first authorship (Goh, 2002). In contrast to these harsh intramural realities, academic milieus often appear to be shockingly isolated and naive in relation to extramural life or practical requirements, a phenomenon widely known as “ivory towerism” (Fuller, 1969).

French literary critic C. A. Sainte-Beuve coined “ivory tower” in 1837, when the term had positive or mixed connotations of strength, purity, virginity, and imagination (as in flights of fancy). The term entered American English around the turn of the century with a negative connotation that reflects the profoundly pragmatist principles on which that nation was founded (Becker, 1997). In the negative ivory tower stereotype, scholars and members of academia in general are socially aloof, detached from reality, or unaware of or insensitive to worldly affairs. Like all stereotypes it is not true, but it has been employed in culture wars since the Progressive Era, especially to criticize academics who somehow fail to embrace the applied.

It is true nevertheless that intellectuals tend to hone their knowledge on campuses and in the sheltered workshops provided in academic associations, research facilities, and institutions of higher learning. Although the dichotomy between “pure” and “applied” study has all but disappeared, disconnection between academe and the real world in many cases has not. Witness, for example, textbook authors who resist writing to actual reading levels of students or providing pedagogy with real-world relevance or practical lay application. In an academic author, the combination of proprietary knowledge, intellectual arrogance, and real-world naivety or disdain may constitute an editor’s greatest challenge.