§ Apple and the Price of Textbooks

January 23, 2012

Fraser Speirs for Macworld:

It’s worth noting, though, that the iBooks ownership model makes it possible that the education system as a whole will end up spending more on textbooks. Selling a $75 textbook for $15 is break-even for the school if their paper textbooks only lasted five years. Many schools have books older than that.

Very good observation there. Most schools (in Belgium at least) only switch textbooks when a new lesson plan gets released by the Ministry of Education. This whole cycle is in-sync with the publishers, even leading to jokes as “Oh wow, a new lesson plan, must be that the publishers need to make some money.”

A textbook has a high cost, but also a pretty long lifespan. As Fraser notes, a book easily has to last about five years, thus bringing down the cost (for the parents, mind you) a lot. Most schools even have rules that if the original price of a book has been earned back, the next students get it for free. In essence, they don’t think it’s ethical to earn money on a really old book.

This whole system has three motivations behind it:

• - Lesson plans don’t change all that often, making the profession of teaching more of a routine after a year or two, until the next lesson plan comes along.
• - Publishers only have to review their textbooks with every new lesson plan. While offering new editions with better and more recent pictures and events, most schools don’t pick up on these regularly.
• - Schools want to keep the cost down for the parents, I truly believe this, as a teacher myself. Spreading the lifespan pretty thin, keeps costs for books incredibly low from year to year.

What Apple tries to do is to make textbooks and its editing easier. Probably hoping revisions get made every year, expanding the knowledge that’s encapsulated in the book, while also keeping the material fresh and up-to-date.

This makes me think more of the teacher-created pages than of good-old textbooks.

For example, I thought some 15 year olds chemistry last year. I had the, albeit very sad, opportunity to devote all the things in the lesson plan to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. I had this opportunity, since I handed out every chapter at the start of that part of the course, and had a relative short lag to being real-time.

But I’m not convinced that one needs to have this in the base material, actually.

I used my contact hours to show video of things that happened only hours earlier, to have discussions of what they feared would happen in the coming days and reviewing those debates some weeks later to see how they felt then.

Let’s say one teaches a language, with most of the base material in the textbook, but using very recent books, movies and articles as practical examples.

Would it offer that much of an improvement to have that material in a ‘textbook’, while it is now already being done by giving the students extra prints? (It would be more ecological, but I’m not sure all those batteries and charging are all the rage for the real die-hard ecologists.)

So to, in a weird twist in this article, come back to my three reasons for the textbook publishing ways:

• - Lesson plans: They don’t change all that often, but the way and examples a teacher uses change from time to time (week, year, presidency…). The new iBooks offer a way for a teacher to update a textbook with new(er) examples on the fly, asking for greater flexibility from both himself and the student.
• - Publishers: They will (eventually) earn more money, as Fraser Spiers rightly pointed out. This could result in them making time for putting extra media inside the book, like videos and slideshows. I’m pretty sure they will never ever take the ‘real-time’ route and just publish one textbook every school year.
• - Schools would have to provide iPads, or ask of students to buy one. An extra cost, no matter the actual educational price Apple can possibly offer. (They will never do this for free.)

What it doesn’t solve:

• - The need for a teacher to have ‘some’ hand-outs next to the publisher’s textbook, those being either digital or just-paper.
• - The cost of education.
• - The staleness of the education model.

I would like to see Apple, or another third party, I don’t care either way, to embrace a form of ‘grow books’, in which the teacher (or the state) simply enters the most basic material that the students have to learn. In maths these would be the equations and formulas, in physics these could be the laws of nature, in a language these could be the different ways of staging a play. Students would go on a website and fill in the ‘textbook’ by themselves, in group or as a whole class, much like a Wiki offers now.

Students could bring their own experiences to class to end up in the grow book, having the teacher as a guide-of-learning, someone who himself learns from the whole experience.

We all remember that one teacher showing us a videotape of something we never even heard about to explain something. While, in our head, an episode of the Power Rangers were perfectly able to do the same. (You see, I could never use the Power Rangers in class now…)

With all the social and cross-medial abilities that the web offers right now, we can make this happen.

Education has no need of a company trying to change it, education should even shun a company for trying so.

Education has need of society to change it. Just like society has need of education to change it.