Letter from the Editor-In-Chief Digital Textbooks – Making Textbooks Affordable Russell L

The Journal of Effective Teaching an online journal devoted to teaching excellence

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief Digital Textbooks – Making Textbooks Affordable Russell L. Herman1 The University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC

In this volume of The Journal of Effective Teaching you will find articles on service learning, both faculty and student perceptions of teaching methods, and interactive learning experiences. We thank the contributors and reviewers for helping to bring you an- other issue of thought provoking discussions of approaches to university teaching. We look forward to more contributions from our readers and continue invite reviewers to work with us to provide more examples of effective teaching at colleges and universities.

The Journal of Effective Teaching began publishing peer reviewed articles online in 1996. In 2007 the face of this journal changed and the number of submissions and publications has increased. In fact, our rate of acceptance for the past five issues is 27%. Also in 1996 a Book Review section was started as part of The Journal of Effective Teaching. Dr. Merritt Moseley, Professor of Literature and Language at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, served as the Book Review Editor for over a decade. Dr. Moseley is stepping down from this position and we would like to thank him for his selfless work providing years of book reviews on teaching at colleges and universities. In the course of the next year we will look for a new book review editor so that we can continue to provide our readers with informative book reviews.

Digital Textbooks – Making Textbooks Affordable

Budgets are on everyone’s minds these days. We are being asked to find ways to cut costs by offering fewer and bigger classes, putting content online, rethinking technology needs and learning to think outside the box as we are encouraged to do more with less. One area that is getting much attention is the cost of textbooks. We are asked to find ways to cut back the rising costs to our students, such as ordering books early so book stores can get used books, or using paperback editions. Given enough notice, students can obtain used textbooks online through sites like half.com or even rent books. Publishers are offering digital versions of their big texts for many of the service courses. The discussion about the high cost of textbooks is reaching the media and academia needs to find constructive ways to address this issue.

On February 23, NPR’s "Morning Edition" reported that Northwest Missouri State is going “entirely book-free”2. By this they mean free from traditional paper textbooks. They

1 Author's email: [email protected] 2 Gross, S. M., (2009). Paper Cut: Missouri College Embraces E-Textbooks, NPR Morning Edition, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99961163 The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, 1-4 ©2009 All rights reserved. Herman 2

are going digital since their students are required to have laptops. Thus, instead of carry- ing several big textbooks around, or not at all, they carry their laptops and access the textbooks in the classroom. In this era of social networking and accessing news and mu- sic online, it seems natural for students to use digital texts. The cost of laptops has dropped and the appearance of netbooks and digital reading devices, like the Kindle, and could encourage the transition to digital content in the classroom.

On February 13, the Board of Regents of the University system of Maryland approved guidelines to make it easier to search for cheaper textbooks3. The January/February 2009 issue of Educause Review devoted a special section to “The Case of the Textbook: Open or Closed?”4. In a series of articles authors discuss alternatives to traditional textbooks, such as the e-books and ancillaries provided by publishers and efforts by some to provide digital textbooks under open access. Such Open Textbooks are often licensed to allow free and flexible use without express permission from the author.

Recently, the Student PIRGs ("Public Interest Research Groups") surveyed 504 students from Oregon and Illinois and 50 commonly assigned textbook titles5. They concluded that there are three criteria the e-books must satisfy: affordability, printing options, and accessibility. They also found that the e-books being provided through publishers do not live up to these criteria while Open Textbooks do.

Students reportedly spend $700 to $1,000 per year on textbooks. The Student PIRGs sought to determine if digital textbooks can be a solution to cutting these costs. The first criterion is that digital textbooks must be cheaper than traditional ones. On average it has been found that the e-books offered by publishers are not cheaper, as they cannot be re- turned and often students only can use them for a limited time. On average they cost the same as a new edition and twice as much as a used edition bought and sold back to the bookstore.

Digital books should be easy to print. 75% of the surveyed students preferred reading printed textbooks to digital textbooks and 60% would opt to buy low cost print copies over free digital books. Printing publisher e-books is not an option as students are limited to printing only a few pages at a time, making printing difficult and costly.

Digital books should be easy to access online or offline. Students want to store copies and use them in the future. The access that publishers offer is often restricted to either online or offline, not both.

The Student PIRGs have found that Open Textbooks seem to meet the criteria much bet- ter. Open Textbooks are textbooks offered online by authors, usually under an open li-

3 Kinzie, S., (2009). Washington Post, Thursday, February 19, 2009; PG03. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/17/AR2009021703592_pf.html 4 Educause Review, Vol 44, Number 1, http://connect.educause.edu/er 5Allen, N., The Student PIRGs, (2008). Course Correction: How Digital Textbooks are Off Track and How to Set Them Straight, http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org/newsroom.asp?id2=44596 The Journal of Effective Teaching, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2009, 1-4 ©2009 All rights reserved. Digital Textbooks - Making Textbooks Affordable 3

cense, such as the Creative Commons license6, in which permissions are given to allow use of the text without compensation, noncommercial distribution and other permissions granted by the author while retaining the copyright. The growth of this movement sup- ports the academic community’s belief in free access to information through sharing and the free flow of ideas.

There are many advantages to using Open Textbooks. Students can easily print the texts and even have them bound. Some authors also provide a low cost solution for providing a printed bound copy. For example, LuLu (http://www.lulu.com/), a self publishing site offering print on deman, provides tools for instructors to upload their texts and have them bound either one at a time, or more upon request. Copies of these textbooks can be pur- chased at a low cost and take on the appearance of a standard textbook. Thus, the cost of Open Textbooks to the student ranges from free (if downloaded or used online) to inex- pensive ($20 vs $100-150). Many instructors have resorted to publishing online because this allows for timeliness and quick revision so that cutting-edge subjects remain up to date. This ensures quality control. Also, one can add multimedia and the author retains copyright.

There are often complaints that standard large textbooks have not changed over the years and that publishers make minor changes and release new editions with an average 12% increase for each edition. However, the publishers claim to offer more than just the old textbooks from decades ago. In recent years more consideration of pedagogy and the in- corporation of new technologies have led to major changes in textbooks. Also, publishers have offered more services to their users such as online homework and quizzing tools, course management systems, multimedia CDs, etc. However, these services have also helped to drive up the costs. It is not always clear that all of the bundled extras are used by students. In this age of assessment and measurement of learning outcomes, publishers continue to increase such services, recognizing that such tools can lessen the burden faculty feel as their classes grow and the push for standardized assessment at every level im- pacts their teaching. Publishers have to reach out to many users and their models lend to a blend of print, digital, online, multimedia and interactive content.

What will the future “textbook” look like? Will textbooks still require paper and ink? Or, maybe we will make more use of audiobooks (http://audiobooks.com/), carry personal digital interactive texts, and have digital homework and exams. How will digital textbooks affect content delivery change? In this Web 2.0 era, we may see more intellectual content at sites similar to YouTube and open course sites, like MIT’s Open Courseware. How should Open TextBooks and other scholarly “publications” count in promotion and tenure decisions?

We would love to hear about investigations of these new tools in the classroom and how faculty and students are coping with the “doing less with more” mandates. If you have interest in further discussion of these topics or wish to offer some links to further information, you can contact us at [email protected] with subject line JET Textbooks. Should we

get enough interest, then we will set up and link a blog, or wiki, to the journal site http://www.uncw.edu/cte/et/.

In the meantime we leave you with some links to additional resources:

General Information

• Make Textbooks Affordable http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org • Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) http://cccoer.wordpress.com/ • Kindle Textbooks http://usedbooksblog.com/blog/kindle-textbooks/ at Used Books Blog http://usedbooksblog.com/

Books and Other Collections

• Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page • FlatWorld Knowledge http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/ • Textbook Revolution http://www.textbookrevolution.org/index.php/Main_Page • Open Text Book Repository http://www.opentextbook.org/ • Open Text Book Repository http://www.opentextbook.org/ • The Global Text Project http://globaltext.terry.uga.edu/ • Wikibooks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikibooks • Connexions http://cnx.org/ • Scribd http://www.scribd.com/

Other sites of interest

• Audiobooks http://audiobooks.com/ • CourseSmart http://www.coursesmart.com/ • Book Rental http://www.mybookhead.com/ , http://www.bookrenter.com/ • Campus Book Swap http://www.campusbookswap.org/index.asp • ManyBooks.net http://manybooks.net/ • Tech Books for Free www.techbooksforfree.com • MIT’s Open Courseware http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm