Further Thoughts on Textbooks: How did they get so big and what can we do about it?

People complain about the price of textbooks. Rising textbook prices diminish the affordability and availability of “Education for all.” I was pleased to receive emails responding to my first blog on textbooks.

Dan Rinn at Cengage Learning wrote that many factors have caused higher production costs for textbook makers and these costs result in higher bookstore prices. Dan pointed out Cengage’s ichapters.com provides lower cost digital access to textbook materials and is one way his company is addressing the high cost of textbooks.

How did textbook prices get so high? Art Bardige in his book New Physical Ideas Are Here Needed describes what happened in the textbook industry over the last 20+ years.

In the 1980’s elementary textbook publishers made most of their money from “consumable” workbooks sold each year for each new class of students, not the textbooks. In college, students were likely to keep their textbooks for their personal library so publishers sold new books to each class.

But in elementary schools, workbooks went out of fashion and out of budget around the same time schools could easily copy materials with high speed copiers. Profit from workbooks took a dive. Publishers added material to books for obscure state standards to win state adoptions and began making books more colorful and bigger.

In college, book prices reached the point where students could no longer justify keeping old class textbooks for their library so publishers started making new, bigger editions every year or two -- older editions were obsolete.

Bigger books means higher development, production, shipping, and warehousing costs to the publisher and higher costs to schools and students. The typical textbook today can be 4 times larger than the textbook 20-30 years ago.

What can we do to stop textbook bloat? Seven years ago I worked with the formation of a portfolio company called Classwell Learning. Classwell deliverd online assessments to identify a student's skill gaps and let the teacher select supplementary materials for each individual student under a single school or district subscription fee. The teacher clicked a button and a colorful, personalized workbook printed at the local Kinko’s. Each student had only the explanations, examples, and problems he or she needed.

This seemed like a great idea. But like other innovative ideas, it seems to have gotten acquired, incorporated and then diluted or forgotten. It was ahead of its time. Can we catch up now?

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com

No More Pencils – No More Books!

I was stunned. I was at the bookstore with my son to buy his college textbooks and was aghast that several of them cost more than $100 each! Why haven’t textbooks gotten smaller, lighter and cheaper over time the way computers and so many other things have done? And if textbooks have gotten more expensive, have they gotten better?

When I was in high school there were some math concepts I just didn’t “get.” My mother arranged for my teacher to tutor me after school. Within a month my tutor filled in those critical skill gaps and I finally “got it.” I could apply these skills in new areas – from algebra to physics, to chemistry, stats, etc. I was really unstoppable once I had this solid foundation.

What magic textbook did my tutor use? He didn’t use any textbook at all. He had a good sense of what I was supposed to know at that grade and he gave me some problems to figure out if I knew how to do those things. If I didn’t, he worked through the steps so I knew what to do.

Are textbooks better than other tools? In the last few years I have seen engaging software tools and resources that take learning to a whole new level. Simulations, animations and videos bring things to life in ways printed materials can’t.

While my math textbook showed me a few examples while modern day simulation tools let a student create an infinite number of their own examples and scenarios..

Should children continue to use textbooks? It’ss definitely easier to hand out a book and know each student can access the material at home, on the bus, in the library and the classroom without specialized equipment, connectivity or power. It’s nice to know exactly what each student is looking at on a particular page.

But can we reach a state where no one needs pencil and paper and instead, interactive computer-based tools bring fresher information with up-to-the-second corrections, unlimited examples and a sense of control? A book can’t learn what you’ve done and make recommendations for what you need to do next. A learning management system can.

Can we usher in a world of “no more pencils, no more books?” What are the advantages of a textbook? Do you think there’s a better way? Is there a way to implement this better way? I welcome your ideas and feedback.

John Stuppy, john@tutorvista.com