The future of textbooks. Part 4: Author-led publishing

In my final post on this topic, I put forward my view that the textbook publishing industry, unless it changes radically and quickly, doesn’t have a future. But I also think that we still need textbooks so how will these be ‘published’ and brought to the attention of potential users. In this post, I’ll discuss two possibilities

Open source textbooks

The idea of open-source textbooks is an attractive one.  Like open-source software, the ‘community’ would cooperate to create a textbook that would evolve and develop as people contributed to it. Like open source software, this could not be a free for all but there would have to be some ‘editorial collective’ that decided on which changes to accept and which established the general structure of the book. The Open Text Book repository has a number of open source texts but no indication of how many users there are.  The Connexions project encourages authors to submit modules which can then be assembled into ‘book’, tailored for a particular course.

I’d like to write a textbook on systems engineering, have quite a lot of material but have major gaps in my knowledge and no time to fill these in. So, I have wondered about an open source approach.  But having looked at the topics I understand from existing sites, the quality is not up to my standards and the danger is that with an open-source text I would spend more time moderating contributions than actually learning about and writing the material.

The distinction between open-source software and books is that books are not that large and one individual can produce a book in a reasonable time. I would never say that open-source is an unworkable approach – but I doubt if it will become the normal model for textbook production.

Author-led publishing

Publishers currently support book production, printing, distribution and marketing.  They also supposedly have some quality control functions which some publishers take seriously. Others, such as Springer, in my experience don’t even seem to read the camera-ready texts submitted to them.

Printing and distribution aren’t required for e-books. Software to support production is getting better and better.  Production support such as copyediting is mostly done by freelancers. This leaves marketing which, in my opinion, most publishers don’t do particularly well.

So, why shouldn’t authors do it themselves. They produce the books and take all of the revenue from them – and pay people to do the work.  Currently, authors get well under 10% of the cover price of a textbook – let’s guess £2 for a £40 text. Now sell it at £20 – authors get 10 times their current income. Costs will probably be at least 60% -70% of this – but authors are better off and more importantly are in control.

Of course, there are two arguments against this – firstly, authors are not interested in getting involved – they simply want to hand over their book and let someone else take care of everything. Secondly, it changes the balance of risk – from the publisher to the author. The publisher rather than the author takes the risk that the income from the book will not cover the costs.

The first of these objections is not really a problem. The publishing industry is increasingly a freelance industry anyway and there are lots of people with publishing experience who could set themselves up as micropublishers. We could also see the revival of individual university presses, funded by authors in a university. They key difference between this and the current publishing model is control – authors own their books and pay as required for services.

The second objection is very valid in a world where costs are dominated by printing and distribution. However, with e-books, the absolute costs of production are very small – authors may chose to get professional help with design, copy-editing, etc. but if they expect their sales to be relatively low then they may simply do it themselves. Equally, they may rely on personal contacts and social media for marketing.  For books where sales are likely to be higher, authors may be willing to take more risks and spend more up-front on their book.

Of course, with e-books, a hybrid approach is possible. Low initial investment but if sales generate sufficient revenue, then re-investment in the design, editing and marketing is possible.

In conclusion, the future of textbooks is likely to be one where there is much greater diversity than there is at the moment. I am convinced that e-books will dominate with print-on-demand if paper copies are required. I think it likely that some major publishers will continue to publish texts that sell in relatively large numbers. However, the future for publishers who currently charge high prices for specialized texts, sold in relatively small quantities looks bleak. And, for sure, current high textbook prices cannot be maintained. Prices will definitely fall as authors take control and cut out the middle man.  Those publishers who wish to continue in existence will have to radically rethink their processes to reduce overheads dramatically otherwise they will simply be unable to compete.

Part 1: Are textbooks obsolete

Part 2: E-textbooks

Part 3: Textbook publishing

Part 4: Author-led publishing

The future of textbooks. Part 3: Textbook publishing

Textbook publishers don’t have a good reputation. They are seen to be avaricious in setting high prices for textbooks, exploitative in bringing out unwanted new editions and (by some authors) uncommunicative and unhelpful.

Certainly, textbook prices have risen at a significantly higher rate than inflation in general and they are unaffordable by many students. This results in fewer sales and so publishers raise prices to maintain their revenue – thus perpetuating the vicious circle.

Yet, in reality – textbook publishing is not outrageously profitable; authors don’t make lots of money from their books and bookstores are closing.  Something is seriously wrong in the system. It is fairly obvious to me that the publishing industry have to look at the way they do things and find ways of doing them differently and much more cheaply.

From an external perspective, it seems to me that part of the problem is that very little has fundamentally changed in book production and marketing in the last 20 years. Obviously manuscripts are no longer rekeyed and are emailed rather than posted to the publisher (although my most recent contract had a clause about submitting a double-spaced single sided copy on paper – which I ignored). Apart from that the processes in producing the 9^th edition of my book were very little different from those in producing the 1^st edition in 1982.

There is enormous scope here for more agile, technology-enabled processes that could reduce the time from delivery to the bookshop by at least 50%.  Instead of a set of sequential activities, creating a decent collaborative environment for book production could make everyone’s like easier. But, if we have a decent environment, authors can work directly with freelance editors, designers and typesetters. Recommendation systems mean that authors can tell each other about good people to work with and the publisher middleman can be dispensed with.

But what about the publisher’s role in quality assurance.  Getting a reputable publishers to produce and print your book means you’ll end up with a high-quality product. Wishful thinking. Some publishers who specialize in small print runs, such as Springer, ask authors to produce camera-ready pages then they never read what’s produced before printing. The quality is dreadful. Some publishers do employ designers but the general standard of textbook design (even books that sell thousands of copies) is so bad that it’s difficult to imagine that anyone with even a modicum of design literacy was involved. Not a great value add from publishers here.

Maybe the problem is printing, inventory management and distribution. These are certainly expensive but they will disappear when we move to e-books.  So, another, currently important function of publishers will disappear.

What does this leave – marketing and sales. Some publishers (e.g. Addison Wesley) make a decent effort here but, like all others, continue to delude themselves that people read email. I haven’t had a marketing email from publishers for years as my spam filters pick them up and junk them. Other publishers are just awful at marketing and seem to make no effort whatsoever.

Certainly, there’s a real need for marketing and sales and maybe this one reason that some publishers will survive.  But maybe more specialist marketing agencies, working with authors and using modern tools could do a better job.

So, is there a future for textbook publishers? Unless things change quite quickly and they take on board that the world has changed, I really doubt it.  Maybe a small number of publishers who focus on high-volume texts will survive – but I predict that most of the current textbook publishing companies won’t be around in 10 years time.

Part 1: Are textbooks obsolete

Part 2: E-textbooks

Part 3: Textbook publishing

Part 4: Author-led publishing

 

Abstraction and complexity

I gave a talk recently about complex systems engineering at Stirling University where I discussed my notions that software engineering is essentially reductionist and we need to rethink software engineering approaches to cope with the complex systems that we are now building. I was challenged by a questioner who claimed that abstraction was an effective way to deal with complexity and I’m afraid that I dismissed this rather glibly without any real rationale of why it was inappropriate.

I have now thought about this and I now think that I can present a better rationale of why abstraction is ineffective for complexity management. In a nutshell, complexity arises because of the interactions between the elements of a system (see my blog post on complexity). Systems are inherently complex when these interactions are dynamic and where they change their nature over time and in response to environmental stimuli. Complicated systems are ones where there are many elements, perhaps of different types and where elements may have many distinct characteristics but where the relationships between these elements are static.  For example, a topographic map is complicated but it is not complex.

Abstraction, however, is a mechanism for dealing with diversity in the system elements where abstractions represent the essential (for that system) characteristics of a collection of elements. Therefore, if we are building a transport model, we may have an abstraction ‘car’ which has characteristics of size and speed – we don’t care about marque, colour, etc. This is an absolutely essential mechanism for understanding and reasoning about systems and for helping us create software – but it helps us deal with complicated not complex systems.

The future of textbooks. Part 2: E-textbooks

The current notion of a textbook as a sequentially presented, body of knowledge has been around for more than 100 years.  It will continue for some time yet but I take it for granted that the benefits of having an electronic, internet-enabled book are simply so great that paper books will, in the next 10 years, be supplanted by electronic versions.

What will this mean for textbooks – obviously it will change the distribution channel and it will offer textbook authors new opportunities to provide supplementary material alongside the principal text. Mike Hendrickson in his blog post has suggested that publishers may wish to hire producers to support their operations with books evolving into multimedia productions.

Well, this might happen for multi-million selling blockbusters but won’t happen for textbooks.  As anyone who has tried it knows, the effort and skills involved in producing high-quality video are do great that textbook authors simply don’t have the background or ability to do this. It’s hard enough to produce good, meaningful diagrams (which is why many textbooks have few diagrams) let alone multi-media productions alongside the text.

I think that the key benefits of e-textbooks are in 4 areas:

1. The book can become the focus of a community of readers. I think this is, by far, the most important benefit. Students using the book can see other students’ experiences, can answer each other’s questions and may be able to interact directly with the author. Authors can see what students find difficult and can provide extra material to help them.
2. Book reconfiguration. I’ve produced various editions of my book over the years and ever time I make a major revision I change the structure. The truth is that, for most topics, there is no single logical sequence of presentation and that the organization of material is best left to the course instructor rather than the book author. E-textbooks, if designed and written properly, can be loosely integrated allowing them to easily reconfigured to suit the needs of a specific course.
3. Incremental acquisition. Many courses taught in universities use part of a textbook in different years. But students have to buy the whole book even if only half of it is relevant to their course. An incremental purchasing model for e-books allows them to buy the chapters that they need, when they need them. They may be able to subscribe for updates so that these are pushed to their e-book reader as they are available. Such an approach makes it feasible for instructors to draw on a number of different books for their courses – it’s currently unrealistic to expect students to buy all of these.
4. Integration with ‘free stuff’. Although I have criticized ‘free stuff’ in a previous post, there is good material out there, especially research papers on authors’ personal sites and repositories. E-textbooks can link seamlessly to this, allowing some topics in a course to be explored in depth. Of course, the problem here is that lots of the ‘free stuff’ is ephemeral and likely to disappear as web sites are reorganized. But authors can work around this by caching local copies, etc.

An often suggested ‘advantage’ that I haven’t mentioned is the notion of continuous updating where the textbook is revised incrementally and readers always have the ‘most recent’ version of a chapter. I’m unconvinced by continuous updating (except, of course, for error correction) for 2 reasons:

• It makes it very hard to maintain links between different chapters of the book. References from one chapter to material in another are potentially unreliable and you may find that styles differ from one chapter to another.
• Instructors cannot rely on the material in the book. Say you teach from one chapter but by the time of the class exams, the chapter has changed. How do you relate what you have taught to what’s in the book. Pragmatically, instructors reuse material such as tests and exam questions in different years and really don’t want to have to continually redesign these.

We still have a lot to learn about how to write and design e-textbooks – simply re-interpreting the XML will lead to very ugly and unreadable books. But authors will go through this learning experience and e-textbooks in science and engineering will become the norm in the next few years.

Part 1: Are textbooks obsolete

Part 2: E-textbooks

Part 3: Textbook publishing

Part 4: Author-led publishing

 

How these books might be published and the problems of publishing will be the topic of my next post on the future of textbooks.

The Future of Textbooks. Part 1: Are textbooks obsolete?

I’ve recently read an interesting article on the future of the book, written from a publisher’s perspective and watched an excellent video of Margaret Attwood talking about the future of publishing from an author’s perspective.

This stimulated me to think about the future of academic textbooks, specifically books for a student audience, which are used to support teaching.  This is quite a complex topic so I can’t cover it all in a single post – this is the first of a number of posts on this topic.

I’m a textbook author so, obviously, I’m not unbiased. However, I have thought carefully about the requirements for a textbook and, arguably, the fact that my book has been around for such a long time means that I can’t have got things completely wrong.

Some people argue that textbooks, in the sciences at least, are obsolete and that faculty and students can get all the information that they need from free sources on the Internet.

Well, if you think this, try the following test. Assume that you are teaching a course on software engineering and you’d like to include some material on software testing. Google ‘software testing’. There’s lots of superficial articles defining testing terms (e.g. Wikipedia) and information about testing tools but nothing that actually tells you how to design tests. Hardly any of the material includes examples or explanatory diagrams. Maybe if you spend some hours searching and skimming you’ll find more material. But, much better to turn to How to Break Software: A Practical Guide to Software Testing , a short book on the subject.

The material on the web tends to be superficial and, almost universally, lacks the illustrative examples that are so important when you are trying to explain things to students. The reason why this is the case, of course, is that examples and good explanatory diagrams are time consuming to produce. People who spend the time creating a coherent description of some topic rightly want some reward – perhaps financial but more often with textbooks, some tangible recognition of the work that they have done.

As well as finding ‘free stuff’, there is also the problem of integrating material from a diverse range of sources into a coherent course. More often than not, you will find that material from different sources has overlaps, contradictions and omissions and you will have to work (as a reader) to reconcile these. Alternatively, the course instructor will have to sort out the problems and, almost certainly, do more work than they would have done with a textbook.

So I believe that textbooks, as coherent accounts of some topic, are not obsolete and that students and instructors will continue to use and buy them. But, for sure, they will have to change – they are too expensive,  monolithic and do not take advantage of the multiple channels of communication that are now available. What these changes might be will be the topic of my next post.

Part 1: Are textbooks obsolete

Part 2: E-textbooks

Part 3: Textbook publishing

Part 4: Author-led publishing

 

ACM considered harmful

The Association of Computing Machinery is the premier US representative body for computer science and according to its own blurb:

“serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences and career resources”

Well, yes and no.  The ACM may perhaps serve its members but for sure it does not serve the profession in general. It has copyright policies for publications which don’t respect the rights of members and it restricts information to those who are not members either explicitly or by excessive costs.

Firstly, the copyright issue. The ACM, in common with other organizers, requires those who have papers published in its journals and conferences to sign over the copyright to them. This means that you can’t republish a paper elsewhere and that the ACM can charge for your writing without paying you any fee. If you are not a member of the ACM’s Digital Library and you lose your own article, you have to pay to get a copy back from them.  Remember ACM don’t pay for articles but (as discussed below) don’t hesitate to charge – and as an author, you get no revenue.

Another area where the ACM’s policies are restrictive is in access to information. I tried today to access what I thought was rather a good idea – a tech pack in cloud computing, which is an annotated bibliography of articles in this area. But to access it, you need to login i.e. its not a resource for the profession but for members only.

Correction. I have been contacted by the ACM and it has been pointed out that you don’t have to be an ACM member to get a login to access the tech packs. I have included the full response from the ACM as a comment to this post.

I also tried to access the ACM Digital Library to get a copy of a paper that I had written in 1988.  This was interesting to me as a historical document but let’s be honest – it doesn’t have much to do with modern CS. Now, my university is an ACM subscriber so I could access it for free but the ACM actually ask for $15 for non-members for this (and all other) articles.

How can this outrageous sum be justified for articles, especially when only very limited information about that article is available. While I think that there is some rationale for charging a small fee (not $15) for very recent papers, all papers that are more than a few years old should be available to the profession for free.  I really can’t believe that this would have a significant effect on ACM’s revenue stream. The Computer Journal gets it right in making its articles available.

The ACM should realize that if they wish to be taken seriously, then they have to broaden their vision and truly serve the profession – this is how they can expand their membership.

Older readers will recognize that the title comes from Dijkstra’s famous letter published in the CACM in 1968 “Goto statement considered harmful”. You can buy this classic of CS literature for $15 from the ACM Digital Library. Fortunately, there are enough people who are willing to ignore ACM copyright rules – its available here for free.

Reductionism and Software Engineering

Reductionism is a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents (wikipedia).

This notion is the foundation for the engineering of large systems  – essentially, design a system so that it is composed of discrete parts which, because they are smaller, are easier to understand and construct, define interfaces that allow these parts to work together, build the parts of the system then integrate these to create the desired system.

Most researchers in software engineering have taken a reductionist perspective and their work has either been around finding better ways to decompose problems or systems (e.g. work in software architecture), better ways to create the parts of the system (object-oriented techniques) or better ways of system integration (e.g. test-first development).

At one level, this has been quite successful – for sure, the software systems that we can now build are much more reliable than the systems of the 1970s and 1980s. From another perspective, the approach has been less effective – there are no general interface standards that have allowed a software components industry to emerge, except perhaps in very specific domains.

Reductionism as a basis for software engineering is based on 3 fundamental assumptions:

1. That the creator of a system has control over all of the parts of the system and therefore can decide whether or not to do work to change a part or make it work with another part.

2. That the system is being developed in a rational world and the design decisions will be primarily based on technical criteria.

3. That the system is being developed to solve a definable problem and that system boundaries can be established.

Of course, we know these are optimistic assumptions in practice and the reality is that they are hardly every true. Consequently, there are difficulties and problems in constructing large software systems because they use unknown components, because decisions are driven by a political agenda and because the problem being addressed either hasn’t been properly defined or can’t be properly defined.

The majority of software engineering research is based on a reductionist perspective and new techniques are developed to decompose systems into their parts, construct and validate these parts and then assemble them into a system. A good example of this is model-driven architecture which raises the level of abstraction at which we design a system and provides some automated support for part implementation and assembly.

However, researchers are often disappointed at the slow take up of new methods in software engineering. The problem here is that they subscribe to the reductionist assumptions of rationality – because something is better from a rationalist analysis, they can’t really understand why it is not adopted. Of course, the reality is that we don’t live in a rational world and that most decisions are made on the basis of prejudice and evangelism, rather than rational analysis.

Nevertheless, reductionism has served as reasonably well. We can and do build large and complex software systems although these often take longer and cost more than originally estimated. But the larger and more complex the system, the less valid the reductionist assumptions and so reductionist approaches are less useful.

I now believe that we are facing a situation where the reductionist methods that have sort of worked for software have reached their limits and the type and complexity of systems that we are now building requires us to think differently about systems engineering.

But that will be the topic of a later post.