The Problem with Textbooks - or is there a problem?

I teach high school and adjunct community college physics and agree with your three points about textbooks. This semester for my college class the students pay ~$120 for half a textbook that they mostly use get the homework problems and formula hunt. I love using your text to help point them in the right direction for the concepts (since we're doing E&M, light and 'modern' physics they're limited to the vector and energy sections).

In the future I would love to use a combination of lecture notes, online resources (your site, hyperphysics, etc) and the older textbooks that we have built up in a small library to avoid them altogether. It would take a lot of explaining to the administration but I think it would be worthwhile and more students would be able to find the information in a form that they would be better able to digest.

I'd agree that the future of online content is going to supplant traditional textbooks in some significant way. I personally learn a lot better when I try to write about what I am learning. One can amass a lot of content doing this, and in a few years of hobby study I now have 1600 pages of pdfs about clifford algebra and its physics applications. Something like this nobody is going to buy in book form, but there is still personal value in producing it, as a learning tool. Once the content is produced, you may as well make it available for others to potentially use too.

There's lots of other examples of content just being made available without trying to figure out the harder problem of marketing. Chris Shiller's

http://www.motionmountain.net/

is a great example. He appears to have spend a lot of time exploring ideas of physics for himself in words. His own goal looks like it was to do a lot of this without mathematics (an approach that I have a hard time with), but having done that, he's just gone and made it available. Again, this is something of a scope large enough that it probably doesn't have a market value in the existing system.

One could imagine that somebody with more marketing saavy may be able to commercialize free content like this in some way. For instance there is a so much available for free right now, with levels of difficulty so random, there is probably market value just to attempt to organize free content into some sort of structured hierarchical form.

For the publishers, the problem of textbooks is resale and copying, and the solution will ultimately be to convince campuses to formally tie registration for courses with buying the course material. For a course registration to be valid, students will have to buy the texts at the school bookstore. This would allow textbook companies to make e-book editions without fear of piracy and make revised editions only as new content justifies it, as opposed to just reorganizing the chapters every few years to discourage used book sales. Professors could personalize the e-book editions sold each semester as they saw fit. University bookstores would stop losing profits to Amazon, etc. All around everyone would benefit - except the students, who would be gouged (even more) royally. I'm surprised it didn't start years ago.

the problem with textbooks (at least in higher ed) is that the academic market changes at a glacial pace. If publishers had their way, the market would be totally digital. Moving thousands of tons of paper and ink from a printer to a bindary,to a warehouse, to a college bookstore, then back when it does not sell is midieval in a digital world.

Textbooks are so expensive for a couple of reasons. the market demands very high quality production, development and ancillaries, but also supports a very robust secondary (used) market. Publishers must recoup all its development costs from the first student who purchases because after that most purchases are of used book. Publisher don't make a dime.
I am not sure about physics, but in the economics discipline, there is a very robust digital market. There are a number of online homework solutions that also embed the textbook within the program. These cost about half the price of a printed textbook and the market has embraced it. My guess is that about 30% of all principles of economics adoptions already use a digital solution (and that is growing significantly every semester) Most students who are in a course with one of these digital solutions never purchase a physical book.

In a digital world, prices go way down and the producer of the material can recoup their costs and make a profit by charging less, but every user pays the producer, not a free rider (used book companies).

What most people do not understand is why was the business of publishing ever developed. Publishers do not print and bind books (they have others do that). Publishers take information provided by authors, develops it into a form that instructors can best teach from and students can best learn from. Right now, most of the market is still demanding a physical textbook, but that is changing rapidly.

I think there will always be a need for publisher providing this.

One nice thing about the used market is that it can now bypass local students and the monopoly bookstore. One reason for using an "updated" edition is that used copies of the old edition eventually become too hard to find. Not so any longer. My students pay $5 to $20 online for old editions. The future may be digital, but the future is not now. The overwhelming majority of my students still prefer a hard copy.

Regarding the future of publishing, one resource I am happy to have my students pay for is online homework systems. The animations, hints, and instant feedback all provide value. Maybe this will be their best way to make money.

While I like the idea of digital content replacing textbooks, I think that we need to have a more natural and fluid way of interacting and playing with the digital content than is currently available (at least in the mainstream). As a minimum starting point there needs to be an easy way to interact with the text in ways that are currently possible/easy (e.g. to add your handwritten notes in the margins and the underlines/highlights of important text). But in order for digital content to really thrive, it must substantially upgrade from what is currently possible/easy. I really like the Microsoft Courier concept as a way of actively interacting with content. I could see students creating and sharing workbooks in Courier through some online share space (Google Wave?).

This online book is a great idea. I've said repeatedly in comments (but who listens to me, right?!) that the denizens of sci blogs ought to put together a glossary of terms, each contributing from their own discipline, so that any one of you just needs to link to the glossary instead of having to define a term repeatedlyas you blog.

In fact, I'm so pleased with you that I promise never to say your name fast so that it sounds like "Ritalin", ever again!

@IanW,

I like that idea. Maybe if we all had consistent use of tags that were cross listed or something? That probably wouldn't work though.

I am going to try to at least keep all my stuff organized (key word is "try")

The textbook industry may be evolving but it certainly isn't lowering any prices. Not even to battle the Kindle for market share. To combat these exorbitant prices I always use the textbook search engine http://www.bigwords.com They search all the online retailers and rental sites to find you the best prices.

I agree with most of the students.. The textbook prices are rising everyday despite the tough economical times. Personally I have saved myself a lot of money my comparing prices for free at: http://www.usedtextbookprices.com before buying or renting any book. Thanks

The problem with price is obvious. The larger part of the problem is that textbooks are too hard to use.

1.) The current state of textbooks is such that the pages are filled with splashes of color, illustrations, and sections that surround and interrupt the actual text. This makes reading them very tedious and interferes with the student's ability to concentrate. Incidently, printing on a four color press is more expensive than printing on a one or two color press. It also takes more manhours to construct complicated page layouts.

2.) Textbooks should be designed to double as reference books. This not only facilitates a student finding information not provided in the lecture, but forces the publisher to acturally make sure topics mentioned are actually explained. This insures that the textbook will remain valuable to the student after the class is completed.