In the early 1990s, many in the publishing industry came to an important realization: the age of the bound, paper book was over and the age of the e-book had begun. They had found the Next Big Thing: “Books on CD.” These were not audio books, but text, meant to be read on a screen. It was a disaster. The groups that invested in it lost their shirts while Amazon made a fortune shipping bound paper books all over the world. Another attempt was made in the late 1990s by NuovoMedia’s RocketBook. The RocketBook fell out of orbit in 2003.
In June of 2011, my older son will graduate from high school having learned most of what he has learned from printed books. When he puts down his backpack for the last time, it will hold heavy, expensive, hardcover texts and dog-eared spiral-bound notebooks filled with his handwritten notes and homework. No digital reading device. What will be in my younger son’s backpack when he graduates in 2018?
I began to think about the emergence of online reading and e-books several years ago while listening to Will Richardson talk at a conference about the use of blogs in education. He explained how he and his colleagues write, post, and receive instant criticism from colleagues all over the world: peer-reviewed scholarship in a new form.
The creation of printed textbooks and educational material involves a similar peer-review process. A textbook is the product of not one but many minds working diligently toward a final version. Until now, that final version was printed and bound, with front matter announcing its authority; it was finished, static and stable. Online resources, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, and e-books are changing our notions of authority.
I took a sabbatical to study the ascent of e-books, online educational material, and how notions of authority are changing. A week into my sabbatical, Steve Jobs demonstrated the iPad. I felt I was about to witness a revolution from a front row seat. Hardware, however, does not create a revolution on its own. One of the rules I discovered during my research is that content is king.
The real revolution began on January 29, 2010, when a dispute between Amazon and Macmillan resulted in all Macmillan titles being removed from Amazon’s site. Amazon wanted to maintain the “reseller” business model for its Kindle store, offering all titles for $9.99. Apple was offering Macmillan the “agency” model, whereby the publisher sets the price and Apple acts as an agent between the buyer and the publisher. Within a few days, Macmillan relented and its titles were for sale again on Amazon under the agency model. The business of delivering content had changed fundamentally. Unlike its moribund predecessors, the new market for e-books was suddenly alive, evolving, creating new business models and generating competition.
In addition to this macroeconomic change, there is a microeconomic revolution happening: self-publishing. Amazon, Google, and other vendors such as Lulu give authors the ability to publish and sell content on their own with no middleman. Authors who take this path earn higher royalties on their sales but give up advances and marketing dollars that publishers have traditionally offered. But the budgets for marketing and advances have fallen on hard times, so many established authors are beginning to experiment with self-publishing and are enjoying significant sales. Some once-obscure authors, rejected by established publishers, are even having success.
Educational publishing, however, is a specialized market and is evolving more slowly than the broader market for printed and electronic books. A pilot program at my school, The Episcopal Academy (Pennsylvania), using Kindles in our 11th grade English course has demonstrated that the e-textbook is not yet ready for general deployment. The children were excited by the apparatus at first, but gradually grew disenchanted with its limitations and returned to using bound paper books.
Simply put, textbooks are created by teachers for teachers, whereas most books are created for readers by writers. In many cases, a teacher or college professor writes a textbook in collaboration with a publisher; the teacher then sells the textbook to students and uses it to teach. The relationship between creator and consumer is very close.
In the late 1990s, I worked with several colleagues to create a textbook that we sold to students and used in our classes. The royalties continue to trickle in. More importantly, the textbook works for our program far better than any other on the market and we continue to improve it. If we were doing this today, there is little doubt that we would publish it ourselves, earn higher royalties, have more control over the product, and offer both print and electronic versions for our students.
Our successful endeavor to write a textbook signifies more than does the lackluster results from our Kindle pilot program. The creative process will drive this revolution in ways that are far more significant to teaching and learning than the mode of delivery. Ten years ago — a long time in technology years — my colleagues and I wrote our book using Microsoft Word templates, styles, special fonts, and shared folders on our network. Typewriters, carbon paper, and file cabinets would not have done the trick; the task would have taken impossibly long.
The shared network folder that we used for collaboration was a harbinger of Web 2.0, which has created a global collaborative space. Most of that space is filled with debris, but the tools themselves have immense potential for the development of online educational material. Each passing academic year brings more material online, distributed around wikis, moodles, BlackBoard course pages, nings, and in old-fashioned shared folders. That material is no longer static or private like pieces of paper in file cabinets. It is on the network.
The mimeograph discouraged collaboration because carbon originals were stored in personal file cabinets for use by a single teacher. With a photocopier, one could at least make quick copies of good classroom material for colleagues. Online collaboration is in a whole different category. Teachers have quickly learned the power of working together to create experiences for students that are beyond the resources of a single teacher working alone.
The CK-12 Foundation provides an excellent example of the power of online collaboration on a large scale. It offers over 50 free or “open-source” “FlexBooks” for use in middle and high schools, written and donated to the foundation by dedicated teachers and reviewed by a community of teachers and writers. The foundation is currently working with California’s board of education to provide all state schools with free flexbooks in order to help allay the state’s fiscal crisis. Although CK-12 is a Web 2.0 phenomenon, the books, ironically, will be printed, not digital; offering them digitally would require that all California students have electronic reading devices, which is not currently feasible.
There are many smaller, more informal versions of such projects. The process usually begins with unmet demand: someone wants to teach something and lacks satisfactory materials. If there are enough resources or time available, a teacher or a team of teachers makes a coherent, sequential set of materials that satisfies the unique curriculum that is desired. The result is what I call a “cloudbook.” A cloudbook is a coherent unit of well-organized material that is easy to edit, and, most importantly, on the network. There is, ultimately, no need for a publisher of any kind.
Cloudbooks and flexbooks, however, will probably occupy the margins of all educational materials that our students will be using. In Books in the Digital Age, John B. Thompson, a sociologist at Cambridge University, gives a compelling argument for the future of the vast majority of textbook content: the printed textbook will become thinner while companion websites will expand. Students rarely develop emotional ties to their textbooks and eagerly unload them at the end of a course. If one draws out Thompson’s model to its logical conclusion, students will probably lease e-textbooks for the duration of a course, just as they now buy and resell paper textbooks. Sites like Chegg and BookRenter, which have no physical storefronts, buy and resell hundreds of tons of used paper textbooks every school year; it cannot be too long before that content is leased in digital form instead.
The initial force behind the change will be practical: e-textbooks will become cheap, easy to buy, and convenient. After they are adopted and embraced for expedience, we will begin to see broad changes in reading and learning that are difficult to predict now.
Some reluctance to give up bound paper books arises from an association between anonymous authorship and fraudulence. That association is dissolving. Most people now trust Wikipedia to offer “close enough” accuracy; many more use it to mine the bibliographies and references, which are often excellent and easy to authenticate. This transformation has not occurred without the strenuous efforts of Wikipedia’s engineers, who have developed heuristic algorithms that use crowd review to rate and weigh the trustworthiness of anonymous contributors.
Students and teachers are beginning to treat online resources with the same respect — or skepticism — with which they treat print. The challenge presented by this change addresses the very skills we want to build in our students: critical thinking and responsible research. We need to model this for them. My own experience testing the authenticity of a YouTube video may prove instructive.
I found a compelling piece on YouTube called “Svetlana and the Inaccessible Textbook” that tells the story of a how a university meets the needs of a blind undergraduate by unbinding bound paper books with a guillotine device, scanning them at high speed, converting the images to text using optical character recognition, proofing the text, and then printing it in Braille. The well-produced video is activist in nature and implicitly indicts the publishing world for locking content up in bound paper books. Everything about the video made sense to me: content, tone, message, quality, and even the need for anonymity. It all seemed right — “close enough.”
But close enough was not good enough for me. I posted a query to the video’s creator, “Molly S”: Who are you and how can I trust this video? The author responded quickly with her full name, where she worked, and why she made the video. I Googled her and found her name on the staff of the university where she said she worked with the email address from which she had replied to me. I even spoke on the phone with a colleague to whom she referred me. While the university believed that it was acting lawfully to fulfill its obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they were nervous enough about the vagaries of fair use enforcement for digital media to desire anonymity.
We will be doing our students a grave disservice if we do not nurture good investigative habits for the digital age. The hard boards of bound textbooks, like the gates of Roman towns, keep civilization in and barbarity out. Once past the book cover, the front matter — frontispiece, title page, copyright page, preface, etc. — we are inspired with confidence that we are safe and “authorized.” On the Internet, we mingle with the barbarians; we are unauthorized. We have only critical thinking to protect us.
The authority conveyed by the bound printed book is not the only factor keeping printers in business. To shift from a record player for vinyl analog records to an iPod for digital music is considered a change in technology, whereas a shift from print to digital feels to many like surrendering the actual thing for a virtual facsimile. The act of writing and reading on surfaces has existed since prehistory, whereas the preservation of sounds and visual images is just over a century old. Wax drums, record players and film cameras were always considered technologies and, as such, subject to obsolescence, but books predate the very concepts of technology and obsolescence. From an objective point of view, a book really is just another technology. But deep emotional and cultural attachments will sustain a vigorous market for printed books long past the actuarial calculations of technology futurists.
At this point, I should disclose that I am a classicist. Before I became an educational technologist, I taught Latin and Greek. A set of Oxford Classical Texts is enthroned in my barrister’s bookcase and shall remain there until the grim ferryman rows me to the other side. From a classicist’s point of view, the technological aspects of books are quite salient. A book as we know it — what classicists call a “codex” — offers the reader random access to texts; scrolls, on the other hand, limit readers to serial access. Kindles and iPads step slightly backwards from the codex toward scroll-like access, while stepping forward with search and bookmarking capabilities. A good understanding of the evolution from oral tradition to scroll to manuscript codex to printed codex is elemental in classical scholarship. I am comfortable with the concept of the book as a passing technological phenomenon; however, anyone who suggests that I give up my library for an iPad is itching for a fight.
School libraries have begun to evolve, as one would expect, at the same measured pace that books have. They have happily exchanged printed reference works for online subscriptions because of the significant advantages they offer. But there does not seem to be a fundamental move to replace the stacks with electronic resources.
An article in the May-June 2010 issue of Harvard Magazine, “Gutenberg 2.0: Harvard‘s Libraries Deal with Disruptive Change,” may help to explain this inertia. Harvard has dedicated vast resources to the preservation of both digital and nondigital resources. The Harvard Digital Repository hums with servers that store vast amounts of scientific data, replicated at two remote sites to ensure integrity and survivability. Another Fort Knox style facility outside of Cambridge, the Harvard Depository, houses the majority of Harvard’s physical books. Both facilities employ state-of-the-art technology; both face challenges with retrieval, preservation, and long-term maintenance; and both do an excellent job.
But information storage is not the sole function of a library. Many libraries provide seminar-sized spaces, smaller group-study spaces, and technology-rich annexes. Librarians are assuming new roles in the digital age as they face the challenge of teaching students how to conduct responsible research. They lend out laptops, preloaded iPods, and digital readers, and maintain specialized equipment such as posterizers, large-format laminators, large-format color printers, and the occasional Ellison Cutter. Managing e-reserves in compliance with fair-use policies will become increasingly important in secondary education as it has in higher education. With respect to storage, libraries are like general purpose tool sheds and quite different from the cold necropolis of the Harvard Depository, where books are just barcodes, stacked by size to make the most efficient use of space. A library will remain a place where people and information meet.
The transition to the digital textbook will be slow, confusing, and inevitable. In 2018, when my younger son graduates, I predict that I will find the following in his backpack: an electronic reading device, a paper notebook, a bound paper textbook, and a pencil. There will probably be more than one paper book and more than one electronic device. Full convergence into one device will likely elude us.
Teaching can seem to be a static skill. There is a certain mindset that goes like this: After about five years, you either know how to teach or you don’t; at that point, you either move on or continue doing the same thing for the rest of your career. Good teachers, of course, disprove this notion by finding ways to grow throughout their careers. If teachers begin to use networks, Web 2.0, and new forms of publishing to collaborate, produce, and share their work, teaching will become more creative and dynamic.
I conclude with two enduring images for the age of the digital book. One is the operation of a “POD” — Print On Demand — machine producing a bound paper book from a downloaded e-book in a matter of minutes. The other is the YouTube video, “Svetlana and the Inaccessible Textbook.” In both processes a mechanical guillotine-like blade is used: In the former, it finishes the edges of a freshly bound paper book; in the latter, the blade severs the spine of a bound paper book, liberating its contents for use in more flexible, digital form. For the current generation of students, at least, some content will continue to be bound in paper, but as school and culture adjust, more will be unbound.
