The Evolution of Textbook Publishing

Seth Godin stepped into the education ring with a recent post about the textbook model and how overdue for change it is. He rightly points out the fact that books are expensive and in the case of some subjects, quickly out of date.

Books are bulky, need to be stored, shipped and managed by several parties in the production and supply chain. Add the fact that a textbook run is going to be smaller than a mainstream novel, and you have a perfect storm – a $250 book at the retail level.

His suggestion of having profs build textbooks online does present some interesting possibilities. I think the challenge to that model is the balance of risk and reward.  College and University professors are facing considerable change they need to work into the curriculum. Will a full-time college professor be willing to take the risk in terms of their precious time and reputation? I could see part-time instructors doing this – my partner and I are a living example with the development of WhyHire.Me.

The challenge in stitching together chapterettes is just that. Instructors are going to need additional time to properly stitch them into something meaningul. Imagine hundreds or thousands of chapterettes on a web site. A teacher will simply become an editor in order to pull something together that is useful, meaningful and helpful. What percent of profs will do this? Don’t know.

There is value in someone taking an editorial perspective on lots of content. If this was not the case, then new services such as Twitter or the Huffington Post would not be so popular. I think today’s publishers are well positioned to do this. They simply need to rethink how they broker content into its final, bound form that ends up on a desk or computer screen.