The MOOC and the Textbook

With Coursera’s recent announcement that it would be offering free e-books that could be used during the run time of some of its courses, the subject of textbooks comes to the fore.

In the interest of full disclosure, I need to admit that I briefly worked at one of the big textbook publishers (albeit overseeing editorial on a software product vs. a printed text).  And while this experience gave me insight into the hard work and dedication textbook writers, editors and publishers put into their products (and the many benefits these works provide to students), it also taught me the challenges facing an industry struggling with an outdated business model.

There’s been a tendency to cast the publishers as villains in the education storyline due to the rapid inflation of textbook prices.  But while textbook prices have shot up into the stratosphere, I’ve always suspected that publishers are serving as a surrogate for an entire higher ed ecosystem that has been raising prices at twice the rate of inflation for decades.  After all, it’s much easier for politicians and editorialists to rail against for-profit publishing companies than to be seen going after allegedly non-profit institutes of learning (even if the budgets and executive salaries at the latter are often higher than those in the former).

But even absent the negative press, publishers would still be struggling trying to push high-priced, high-margin products (printed texts) that fewer and fewer people want to use, containing material that can be found elsewhere for far less (often for free).

The key flaw in the textbook business model is that those making the buying decisions (instructors) are not financially liable for their choices.    Rather, they choose to adopt one text vs. another, and whatever choice they make becomes a required purchase for students taking a class.

And while instructors make their choices based on important factors such as content quality, loyalty to a particular author, series or publisher, or the availability of valuable supplements (such as classroom presentation and assessment material), the only downside they face when choosing a more vs. less expensive text is complaints by students (whose hostility can always be redirected towards the chosen publisher).

This inflationary spiral is also driven by consolidation of the textbook industry around a few big players, all of whom are trying to extract as much revenue out of a business they know cannot last forever in order to fuel “the move to digital” (an industry buzz-phrase meant to indicate a transition from printed texts to technology-driven content such as e-books, assessments and the learning management systems that tie together various digital assets).

The financial problems faced by virtually all the educational publishing giants illustrates the challenges of trying to get a big, profitable company to pull out of high-margin established businesses in order to compete in a world of lower-margin unknowns.  In theory, the ed publishers have the resources needed to lead digital education as assertively as they’ve lead older media (print) for decades.  But if theory were fact, we’d all be taking our pictures with digital cameras produced by Kodak and Polaroid.

And it’s not just that textbook publishers have priced their products so high that people are gravitating to alternatives.  For instance, many of the world’s most prestigious colleges (including those producing the most popular MOOCs) routinely assign individual readings drawn from online resources such as JSTORE vs. turning to textbooks where other people have made all the content-curation decisions.

Even in my kids elementary and Middle School classes, I see textbooks gathering dust while teachers make use of material they’ve found for themselves on the Internet.

New industries, such as custom publishing, have stepped into this market gap – allowing teachers to construct their own textbooks containing chapters from individual books or articles written by selected authors (including the professor him- or herself) into a custom printed or electronic text.  And while the big publishers lead in this market segment as well, newer players like Xanedu are rapidly filling niches in areas where larger companies cannot (or don’t want to) compete.

And then you’ve got renegades such as Flatworld Knowledge or Boundless that offer low-cost or free alternatives to popular texts that are leveraging the same momentum as MOOCs with regard to open learning.  But Flatworld’s move from free to cheap and Boundless’ search for a business model while struggling with legal disputes demonstrate that while textbooks don’t need to cost hundreds of dollars, the “real” price (i.e., the price which indicates their true value of a text to students) is probably higher than zero.

Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at what the value of textbooks might be for students working in an environment where other learning materials are increasingly available for free.