Textbook Goliaths: You're Dancing on Thin Ice

I agree that textbook goliaths are going down, but you didn't present the solution to the problem.

IMO, you should have included the basic description of your business at the end, instead of going all mysterious. Like from your website:

-Professors post course content.

-Bookxor collects feedback and analytics from students and colleagues.

-Professors use feedback to retune their content, share and collaborate.

It is not just the students that are pissed off. Walter Rudin wrote the classic book in advanced calculus, and when the publishers started playing games and jacking up the price, he fought them long and hard, and (as I recall) at considerable expense to himself.

And having taught calculus out of the umpteenth edition of one of these books -- they often introduce mistakes! I taught out of the eighth edition of a mainstream calculus book and they got the statement of Taylor's Theorem (which is a big theorem) WRONG. I think it could not be more obvious that all these revisions are useless to students and teachers.

I'm hoping that we'll see more of a shift towards individuals writing about more niche subjects. For example, those learning biology will learn from smaller books, or, more likely, ebooks that cover specific things, like "photosynthesis." These smaller books, in theory, would be written by better writers focusing on very specific things, which means each section or thing students learn about is a better experience, and written by people passionate about a smaller subject. These will be cheaper, though the big downside is organizing all these smaller texts into a "class," though I think the experience with the books would overall be better.

Big textbooks are just so... drab and generalized. The self-publishing revolution is coming, and I'm hoping a lot of passionate experts take advantage of it and write smaller textbooks that teachers can use and students can buy (for a lot less).

I hope the onslaught of good e-book readers and tablets will have a huge effect on Goliaths of the textbook industry. The things they currently get away with are nuts. If the industry doesn't go in that direction on their own then schools should try and lead them that way.