One of the least fun aspects of my job as coordinator of our Western Civ course is dealing with the constant stream of textbook reps that flows through my office door. They come to see me because our course enrolls approximately 1,500 students a semester, which means that if their book wholesales for $50 and all of our instructors assigned it, they’d be getting about $150,000 in sales just from this one course at GMU. It’s a guaranteed market, because every undergraduate at GMU must take the class to graduate.
Back in the day (2001) when I started running this course (which, by the way, is taught in sections of 25 and spans all of Western Civ in one semester!), we assigned only one textbook. The idea behind this one textbook decision (which predated my arrival) was that in this way all students at our university would share some sort of common intellectual experience. I was very uncomfortable from the beginning about this decision because (a) I don’t think textbooks provide anything like an ‘intellectual experience’ and (b) instructors like to pick their own textbooks. Well, we’ve dumped the common textbook idea and instead are now assigning a common historical monograph–something that is actually thought provoking rather than mind-numbing.
But it hasn’t stopped the publishers’ reps from knocking at my door. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all perfectly nice people and several of them are genuinely good at what they do. But there are two big problems with the product they’re selling. The first is price. Western Civ textbooks range in price at our bookstore from just over $50 to just over $80, with most clustered toward the top end of this range. Given all the other pressures on their finances, many of our students just don’t buy the textbook. Or, worse, they buy the textbook and then don’t buy the other books–the ones with real historical substance–because they can’t afford them.
The second, and larger problem with the textbooks, is that they are so out of sync with the historical profession. Here I’m speaking only about Western Civ textbooks, because I don’t read World History or US History textbooks. But Western Civ textbooks I know pretty well, both because I’ve assigned plenty of them over the years and because last year I thought long and hard about writing one myself. I even got to the tentative proposal stage and my proposal got very positive reviews from the dozen or so people who looked at it for the publisher. But in the end I decided that, as much as I wanted the riches that might flow from a successul book, it seemed like a black hole that would suck me in and never let me out.
So, what do I mean by “out of sync”?
Pick a textbook, any textbook, and try to find the historians in it. In fact, try to find the practice of history in it. Oh, sure, there are primary sources and suggestions for how to work with them, but try to find the disagreements among historians over what that evidence means. Try to find competing the narratives that are the stuff of what we do. Try to find anything other than the voice of God telling the student reader that this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and here are some reasons why it all happened this way. Historical scholarship thrives on uncertainty, but textbook writing thrives on certainty.
Have you ever met a historian who said, “Oh, I just love my survey textbook?”
I’d be willing to bet that one reason why you probably haven’t is the fact that textbooks are so certain about everything they present.
Okay, so this is not a new critique of textbooks. So why should the publishers fear asteroids? Have you visited any of their websites? The vast majority of the material provided there is five to ten years behind both developments in history in new media forms and at least as far behind (if not farther) behind advances in what we know about how students learn about the past.
Just last week one the eager sales reps in my office told me, in response to my question about what they were doing that was new and innovative, that the big new thing for them was e-books. E-books? New? Oh my.
So, like the dinosaurs before them, they publishers of these books better start thinking about new income streams before too much longer. Students are going to stop buying the books because they are too expensive, professors are going to stop assigning them (a) because they are too expensive and (b) because they just aren’t very good, and even if professors assign them and students buy them, they are likely to remain largely unread. Why? Because, in case the publishers haven’t noticed, our students avoid reading books as much as possible. And so if the book is expensive and the professor is unenthusiastic about it anyway, what possible motivation will the student have to read it.
I promise not to rant in my next post…
I’m a textbook publisher (not in Western Civ), but we face the same issues in music textbook publishing. First, many of our books are under $50, many under $40. But what’s not taken into account about your comments is the expense the publisher must account for to service you and stay in business.
To start, we have to deal with two levels of discounts. The first is for the rep, and the second is for the school bookstore. If the school bookstore is licensed out to another company like Barnes and Noble, we have to wait up to six months to get paid.
So let’s cost account your example. Out of that “$150,000” $30,000 (a minimum of 20%) goes DIRECTLY BACK to the bookstore who hires student employees. 10% goes to the rep firm. 10% goes to the author. 10% -20% goes to the printer. If a publisher doesn’t sell out of the print run within 24 months, that textbook is now inventory and taxes must be paid on it. Oh, and did I mention that unsold texts have to be warehoused in a damp-free environment?
And all of this money we take in? Most of it goes back to cover salaries, especially for printers since many texts are still printed here in the States.
And again, when do we see this money? Well, the bookstore sees it immediately. Unless we require pre-payment, we see this money in 6 months, and even then we have to chase B&N and other companies for payment.
That’s why we now require prepayment and request smaller orders of titles. When a school over orders, and then ships back the unsolds, some of the unsolds are damaged and can’t be resold. That’s a loss.
Then, there’s the situation of professors who ask for free “review” copies, never order, but copy materials for students. This is not exactly a fair use of the Fair Use portion of the Copyright Act. So now we have a policy that if you don’t order after the 30 days, we charge for the book.
E-books? They’re not new, we like to do them, problem is – the bookstores. We can put every book on CD and ship to order within 24 hours of getting the order, and getting it prepaid. But with e-books, keep in mind electrons aren’t totally free. The authors (usually fellow academicians) need payment, there’s the art and layout costs, costs for permissions, etc. The only thing missing from the e-book is the tree. Otherwise, all the numbers still must be cost accounted. The other thing with an e-book, which no publisher is bodacious enough to comment on, is that we don’t want our titles sent around the Internet for free.
You mentioned the rep. Well, here’s my side of the coin. We spend thousands of dollars producing quality training materials, so how do we tell you about them? Mail? E-mail? A live person who can give you good customer service? So how do we do our job? How do we service you?
To see prices come down requires some effort on the school’s part, too. Please consider some of these points before consigning us to asteroid bombardment, which unlike the neutron bomb, would also take out schools, along with publishers, reps, and whatever was left in Jurassic Park.
Cordially,
Peter Alexander
CEO
Alexander Publishing
Hi Peter:
Thanks for the thoughtful (and equally rant-like) response to my rant. I concede every point you’ve made here and will add one you didn’t. What about those professors who ask for review copies just so they can sell them back to used book dealers who haunt our campuses? I’ve known several such people over the years–some adjuncts just trying to get by, others who were paid far too well to engage in this practice.
So, yes, it costs an incredible amount of money to produce textbooks and so publishers have to charge a lot for them. And, as long as professors don’t demand changes in the content, publishers are likely to keep producing what they produce.
But the real problem–and the one my post mostly focused on–is the content itself. I don’t know about the books your firm publishes, but the Western Civ textbook publishers continue to churn out books that are completely out of line with both the discipline of history and with what we (and cognitive psychologists) know about how students learn about the past. Until that issue is addressed, I’m going to continue to believe that the textbook industry is doomed, at least the small corner of it that I deal with.
Mills