The huge popularity of iTunes and other downloadable Music services has shown that there is a huge appetite for buying individual songs rather than full CDs. All too often a couple of great songs are padded out with less distinguished numbers to fit the established format and price point of the market, CDs that sell in stores for $10-$20.
Could there be an analogous situation emerging in the Educational Publishing market?
Thinking back to my college days, I remember buying multiple expensive textbooks for a course, with the professor only using a couple of chapters from each. Now I see the emergence of technologies that let college professors be the equivalent of DJ's for educational material, allowing them to easily custom publish their own textbooks exactly tailored to their course syllabus. One such site is O'Reilly Media's SafariU beta site, which lets a professor assemble his/her own customized coursebook (rather than textbook) from articles, chapters of multiple books and original content he/she has created and uploaded, and then custom publish it via the web, with short run printing and delivery to the college bookstore shelf in a matter of days. It also provides a Learning Object Exchange that will allow educators to share the electronic syllabi that they create. The recent Gilbane WhitePaper, The Reality of Web 2.0: O’Reilly Media’s SafariU Leads by Example by Leonor Ciarlone, provides an excellent overview of what O'Reilly is doing in this space, and the market forces behind it.
O'Reilly's focus is on IT textbooks and reference materials, but this is a model that can certainly be applied to other educational publishing domains. These custom textbooks can be delivered either as print-on-demand physical books or as eBooks, that could be part of an electronic bookshelf or be incorporated into a Learning Management System environment.
Will the 600 page, $90+ textbook as we now know it become a dinosaur even more rapidly than the music CD? There will certainly still be cases where the traditional textbook makes sense, but there will also be many cases where it does not. It will be critical for educational publishers - and educators - to fully understand the costs and benefits of both the traditional textbook and the tailored coursebook approaches, and learn where each model is best applied.
In any case, here's an interesting question to ponder: Is a custom coursebook the educational equivalent of a music play list?
Is the custom coursebook that can be created on SafariU really any different than the iMix play lists that customers create on iTunes, which can be purchased in their entirety or in part by other customers? In some ways they are exactly the same, but in other ways they are quite different. Answer this question for yourself, and share your thoughts!
Borrowing a phrase from the abovementioned Gilbane report, one thing is for certain: It's time to think outside the book!.
But if SafariU doesn't have copyright access to the materials you want to use, you're out of luck.
With music mashups, it's possible to create and spread a bootleg album, like Danger Mouse when he created the Grey Album as a mashup of Jay Z's Black Album and the Beatles White album.
For this to happen with textbooks, the content would probably have to be open-source. Somehow I don't see any bootleg textbooks working their way through LimeWire
Posted by: salas | February 20, 2006 at 07:38 AM