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June
13, 2007
New textbook
accessibility policy increases potential for copyright abuse
A March 2007
decision by the United States Department of Education's Office
of Special Education Programs to open access to the entire content
of the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center (NIMAC)
to certain groups that create specialized formats for the blind
and print disabled, increases the potential for copyright abuse,
according to The Association of Educational Publishers. In an
alert posted on the AEP website, the AEP states: "The new policy
of allowing all NIMAC files to be downloaded by the 'authorized
entities' ['a nonprofit organization or governmental agency that
has a primary mission to provide specialized services relating
to training, education, or adaptive reading or information access
needs of blind or other persons with disabilities'] creates an
opportunity never before encountered. The value added NIMAS file
set can be used to create versions of and manipulate the content
of instructional materials as never before, the portability of
digital files makes tracking the file nearly impossible after
the initial download, and the absence of enforcement increases
the potential for copyright abuse." Read the entire AED Alert
at http://www.aepweb.org/govrelations/quickhits.htm
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Boston
Museum of Science to produce HS textbooks
The Museum
of Science, Boston has partnered with Key Curriculum Press to
publish a new high school science and engineering curriculum,
"Engineering the Future: Science, Technology, and the Design Process."
The curriculum, developed by the Museum of Science's National
Center for Technological Literacy, and tested in more than 100
schools nationally, immerses students in hands-on design and building
challenges reflecting real engineering problems -- from designing
a testing a boat model to constructing a building prototype. The
"Engineering the Future" textbook, "Engineer's Notebook" and "Teacher's
Guide" will be available August 2007. For more information, visit
http://www.keypress.com/etf
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LexisNexis
Academic redesigned
LexisNexis
has redesigned "LexisNexis Academic" based on input from hundreds
of academic librarians. "Academic" will be moved to the same technology
platform as the "Nexis" service to provide the same professional-strength
search functionality available to government and corporate users.
The new search interface makes it easier for users of all levels
to get precise search results. It supports natural language searching
and relevance ranking, as well as precise LexisNexis search commands
that have become the benchmark for retrieval performance. NexisNexis'
SmartIndexing Technology has been integrated throughout the new
service to organize both sources and documents, and is incorporated
in the new Results Clustering feature that allows users to group
their results by publication type, subject, geographic region,
and language.
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ACSFA
report recommends establishing national digital marketplace
In its May
25 report to Congress and the Secretary of Education, the Department
of Education's Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance
(ACSFA) recommended the federal government play a role in establishing
a "demand-driven, college- and student-centric" national digital
marketplace as the long-term solution to the rising cost of college
textbooks.
The Committee
said its most important finding was that rapid increases in the
prices of college textbooks are symptoms of a structural flaw
in the market for textbooks and learning materials -- a market
driven by supply rather than demand: "Faculty select textbooks
from publishers, bookstores order them, and students must pay.
The end consumer has little, if any, direct influence over price,
format or quality of the product." The report found that faculty,
colleges, bookstores and publishers were victims of the failure
of this market, and should not be blamed for high textbook prices.
The Committee
outlined the current short-term solutions for curbing the high
cost of textbooks (used textbooks; better faculty involvement
textbook selection and purchase; textbook rentals; custom textbooks;
more financial aid for students to purchase textbooks; electronic
textbooks and other online resources) and said that relying on
these short-term solutions, without addressing the problem of
market failure, is "likely to undermine the affordability, quality,
and accessibility of learning resources in the future."
The national
digital marketplace, according to the report, "would provide a
role for all stakeholders, restore a consumer-centric focus, broaden
the concept of publisher and publication, protect copyright and
fair use allowances, and ensure a comprehensive institutional
approach."
Read the
full report: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-txtbkstudy.html
Read TAA Executive
Director Richard Hull's reaction to the report: Proper
evaluation of textbook costs begins with students
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Emory
partnership breaks new ground in print-on-demand books
Emory University
in Atlanta, Georgia is launching a new model for digital scholarship
through a partnership with Kirtas Technologies, Inc., a maker
of cutting-edge digital scanning technology. Once digitized, the
books will be made available on Amazon.com as well as other book
distribution channels.
The partnership
will enable Emory to apply automated scanning technology to thousands
of rare, out-of-print books in its research collections, making
it possible for scholars to browse the pages of these books on
the Internet or order bound, printed copies via a fast, affordable
print-on-demand service. The project is limited to materials in
the public domain (published before 1923).
"We believe
that mass digitization and print-on-demand publishing is an important
new model for digital scholarship that is going to revolutionize
the management of academic materials," said Martin Halbert, director
for digital programs and systems at Emory's Woodruff Library.
"Information will no longer be lost in the mists of time when
books go out of print. This is a way of opening up the past to
the future."
Emory's Woodruff
Library is one of the premier research libraries in the United
States, with extensive holdings in the humanities, including many
rare and special collections. To increase accessibility to these
aging materials, and ensure their preservation, the university
purchased a Kirtas robotic book scanner, which can digitize as
many as 50 books per day, transforming the pages from each volume
into an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). The PDF files will
be uploaded to a Web site where scholars can access them. If a
scholar wishes to order a bound, printed copy of a digitized book,
they can go to Amazon.com and order the book on line.
Emory will
receive compensation from the sale of digitized copies, although
Halbert stressed that the print-on-demand feature is not intended
to generate a profit, but simply help the library recoup some
of its costs in making out-of-print materials available.
Materials
in Emory's collections that are rare and unique to the history
of the university and the South are currently being digitized
as part of a pilot project. The university expects the print-on-demand
feature for these targeted materials to become available by the
fall semester. Altogether, the university houses more than 200,000
out-of-print volumes that were published before 1923.
Emory was
already on the leading edge of digital scholarship, as one of
the first universities to establish a major online peer-review
journal. In the two years of its existence, Emory's Internet journal
Southern Spaces (southernspaces.org) has grown into a dominant
force in the Southern studies field, attracting scholars from
around the world to its forums and interactive, multi-media features.
Visitors
to Southern Spaces can actually see and hear Southern writers
reading from their works, in the actual settings of those works.
A video of Emory's Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey,
for example, shows her reading "Elegy for the Native Guards" while
standing amid the dunes of Shipp Island, Mississippi, where the
poem is set.
"Mass digitization
and print-on-demand capabilities represent another quantum leap
forward for digital scholarship at Emory, opening up whole new
arenas of possibilities," Halbert said.
In addition
to making out-of-print books more accessible, Emory librarians
envision the university's mass digitization and print-on-demand
capabilities expanding the range of more current scholarly materials.
"The Emory
libraries plan to use the program to support an array of scholarly
publishing needs of our campus," said Rick Luce, vice provost
for libraries at Emory. "We will be providing new opportunities
for our faculty and students to disseminate their work, if they
choose to do so, under the Emory banner."
As chair
of the American Librarian Association's Digital Library Technologies
Interest Group, Halbert will be leading a panel discussion at
the ALA annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on June 24, entitled,
"Libraries as Digital Publishers: A New Model for Scholarly Access
to Information."
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New tools
for scholarly publishing
Science Commons
and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
(SPARC) have released new online tools to help authors exercise
choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly articles,
including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to
post them in online repositories.
The new tools
include the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, an online tool
created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing
and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting
from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form
to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached
to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to retain critical
rights to reuse and offer their works online.
The Scholar's
Copyright Addendum Engine will be offered through the Science
Commons, SPARC, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),
and the Carnegie Mellon University Web sites, and it will be freely
available to other institutions that wish to host it. It may be
accessed on the Science Commons Web site at http://scholars.sciencecommons.org.
Also available
for the first time is a new addendum from Science Commons and
SPARC, named "Access-Reuse," that represents a collaboration to
simplify choices for scholars by combining two existing addenda,
the SPARC Author Addendum and the Science Commons Open Access-Creative
Commons Addendum. This new addendum will ensure that authors not
only retain the rights to reuse their own work and post them on
online depositories, but also to grant a non-exclusive license,
such as the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial license,
to the public to reuse and distribute the work. In addition, Science
Commons will be offering two other addenda, called "Immediate
Access" and "Delayed Access", representing alternative arrangements
that authors can choose.
"The Scholar's
Copyright Addendum Engine will enable authors to maximize the
reach of their work," said Heather Joseph, executive director
of SPARC. "It's a significant leap forward in making it easier
for authors to effectively manage their publication rights."
In addition,
MIT has contributed to this effort by including its MIT Copyright
Agreement Amendment in the choices available through the Scholar's
Copyright Addendum Engine. The MIT Copyright Amendment has been
available since the spring of 2006 and allows authors to retain
specific rights to deposit articles in MIT Libraries' DSpace repository,
and to deposit any NIH-funded manuscripts on the National Library
of Medicine's PubMed Central database.
"The cumulative
nature of scientific discovery makes it imperative that unnecessary
barriers to the timely sharing of results of research should be
eliminated wherever possible," said Ann Wolpert, director of libraries
for MIT. "The MIT Libraries applauds Science Commons for its development
of tools such as the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine, which
enables authors of scholarly articles to ensure that they can
later reuse their works and make them widely accessible to other
researchers and the public. Timely and broad access to the scholarly
literature and research results is key to the advancement of science,
and we are pleased to participate in this important Science Commons
initiative by offering MIT's Copyright Amendment for inclusion
in the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine."
"Scientists
in many fields believe that progress can best be achieved by sharing
scientific information. Carnegie Mellon is delighted to be able
to host the addendum generator to help faculty balance their rights
as authors with those of their scholarly publishers," said Dr.
David Yaron, faculty senate library Committee Chair of Chemistry
at Carnegie Mellon University.
SPARC offers
a suite of materials, including a full color brochure and poster,
that introduce the topic of author rights on campuses and complement
the new SPARC-Science Commons "Access-Reuse" addendum. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/.
"This is
about authors' rights," said John Wilbanks, vice president of
Science Commons - a project of Creative Commons. "Right now, authors
trade the most important rights - like the right to make copies
of their own scholarly works - to traditional publishers. That
trade has led to an imbalanced world of restricted access to knowledge,
skyrocketing journal prices, and an inability to apply new technologies
to the scholarly canon of knowledge. Our Scholar's Copyright project
addresses this imbalance. Working with libraries and universities,
we are providing the Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine so that
scholars can retain rights to make copies of their own writings
available on the Web."
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NIH establishes
working groups to examine peer review
National
Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., announced
today the formation of two working groups — one external,
the other internal — to examine the NIH peer review process,
with the goal of maximizing its effectiveness.
"Peer review
is such a fundamental and critical part of the research process,
that it requires our constant vigilance," said Director Zerhouni.
"With the increasing breadth and complexity of science, along
with the increased number of research grant applications, we need
to take a comprehensive look at our review process, and make the
necessary changes to strengthen it for applicants and reviewers
alike. Although our peer review system is outstanding — and
emulated throughout the world — we want to make it even better."
Over the
last 60 years, the peer review process has been examined several
times with the goal of making sure peer review identifies the
best possible scientific research for NIH to fund. "NIH must continue
to adapt to rapidly changing fields of science and ever-growing
public health challenges. It also must continue to draw on the
most talented reviewers and fund the most promising research,"
Zerhouni said.
The two new
NIH working groups will seek input from the scientific community,
including investigators, scientific societies, grantee institutions,
voluntary health organizations, and from within NIH as well. The
groups will study the context, criteria, and culture of peer review
to make sure the most talented individuals and reviewers are engaged
in the process.
External
ACD Working Group on Peer Review:
- Keith R.
Yamamoto, Ph.D., University of California-San Francisco, co-chair
- Lawrence
Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial
Research, NIH, co-chair
- Bruce Alberts,
Ph.D., University of California-San Francisco
- Mary Beckerle,
Ph.D., University of Utah
- David Botstein,
Ph.D., Princeton University
- Helen H.
Hobbs, M.D.,University of Texas-Southwestern, Howard Hughes
Medical Institute
- Erich D.
Jarvis, Ph.D., Duke University
- Alan I.
Leshner, Ph.D., American Association for the Advancement of
Science
- Philippa
Marrack, Ph.D., National Jewish Medical and Research Center,
University of Colorado, Denver
- Marjorie
Mau, M.S., M.D., University of Hawaii
- Edward
N. Pugh, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
- Tadataka
Yamada, M.D., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Norka Ruiz
Bravo, Ph.D., Office of Extramural Research, NIH, ex officio
- Antonio
Scarpa, M.D., Ph.D., Center for Scientific Review, NIH, ex officio
Internal
Steering Committee Working Group on Peer Review:
- Jeremy
M. Berg, Ph.D., National Institute of General Medical Sciences,
co-chair
- Lawrence
Tabak, D.D.S., Ph.D., National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial
Research, NIH, co-chair
- Story Landis,
Ph.D., National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke,
NIH
- Marvin
Kalt, Ph.D., National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
NIH
- Roderic
I. Pettigrew, Ph.D., M.D., National Institute of Bioimaging
and Bioengineering, NIH
- Norka Ruiz
Bravo, Ph.D., Office of Extramural Research, NIH
- Antonio
Scarpa, M.D., Ph.D., Center for Scientific Review, NIH
- Lana R.
Skirboll, Ph.D.,Office of Science Policy, NIH
- Brent Stanfield,
Ph.D., National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney
Diseases, NIH
- Jane A.
Steinberg, Ph.D., National Institute of Mental Health, NIH
- Betty C.
Tai, Ph.D., National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIH
- John Bartrum,
Office of Budget, NIH, ex officio
- Jack Jones
Jr., Ph.D., Acting NIH Chief Information Technology Officer,
NIH, ex officio
- Catherine
Manzi, Office of General Counsel, NIH, ex officio
- Jennifer
Spaeth, Office of Federal Advisory Committee Policy, NIH, ex
officio
Results from
the ACD peer review working group will be presented to the full
Advisory Committee to the Director in December 2007. The internal
NIH steering committee working group will present its findings
to the NIH Director's Steering Committee during the same month.
Both working groups will meet in January 2008 to develop a set
of integrated recommendations for next steps.
The ACD advises
the NIH Director on policy matters important to the NIH mission
of conducting and supporting biomedical and behavioral research,
research training, and translating research results for the public.
Additional information is available at http://www.nih.gov/about/director/acd/index.htm.
The Office of
the Director, the central office at NIH, is responsible for setting
policy for NIH, which includes 27 Institutes and Centers. This involves
planning, managing, and coordinating the programs and activities
of all NIH components. The Office of the Director also includes
program offices which are responsible for stimulating specific areas
of research throughout NIH. Additional information is available
at http://www.nih.gov/icd/od/.
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Textbook
author suing publisher, university for copyright infringement
by Kim Pawlak
TAA member
Patrick McKeown is suing the Thomson Corporation and the University
of Phoenix for copyright infringement. According to a complaint
filed in U.S. District Court in Atlanta in April 2007, McKeown,
an emeritus professor of business from the University of Georgia,
alleges that Thomson and two of its subsidiaries, Thomson Learning,
Inc. and Course Technology, Inc., made unauthorized copies of,
and sold a customized electronic version of the second edition
of his book, Information Technology and the Networked Economy,
to the University of Phoenix -- even though Thomson no longer
held copyright for the book. The suit also alleges that the University
of Phoenix used the book's content as the basis for an online
course and resold copies of the books to its students.
The complaint
states that the University of Phoenix sold more than 23,000 copies
of the book, but McKeown's attorney, Stephen Humphreys, said that
according to Thomson's records, the University of Phoenix sold
more than 50,000 copies, with sales continuing into 2007. McKeown
first objected in June 2006 and Thomson informed McKeown and his
lawyer that they had ceased all sales and advised the University
of Phoenix to cease all sales by September of 2006. Said Humphreys:
"The University of Phoenix recently claimed that its revenues
of the sale of those books was only $35,000. They claimed that
this is the University's net revenue (after paying Thomson an
average of $4 per book). Students get access to the e-book by
paying the $75 e-resource fee, but the University claims that,
after subtracting what it paid Thomson, the University charged
less than a dollar extra per e-book out of the $75 fee (and may
show a loss on the e-book when its costs are deducted). The University
has so far not offered any details of where the other $70 went.
They are now trying to say these figures are confidential, but
it is safe to say from what we know by independent means that
Thomson sold the e-books to the University of Phoenix for an average
of $4. Students gained access to the e-book by paying the $75
access fee, and the University claims their net revenue is negligible
and their profit is zero or even less than zero.
"We do have
a serious concern that the potential damages from this action
are being lowballed because Thomson Learning is in the process
of being sold. We do not know if and how this action has been
disclosed to the buyers. We allege that we are entitled to 50,000
times the $75 e-resource fee, and the 50,000 times part of the
$1,500 tuition [for the online course based on McKeown's textbook].
That is not a negligible number."
The University
of Phoenix claims that it "at no time has ever knowingly violated
the intellectual property rights of Mr. McKeown," and that the
"University licensed its rights to use the textbook from a reputable,
well known publisher, that represented it had the appropriate
rights to the book." Thomson did not return requests for comment.
McKeown said
he learned of the copyright infringement from a royalty statement
he received from Thomson (in the Transfer of Rights agreement
Thomson and McKeown signed in 2004, McKeown allowed the company
to sell the remaining hard copies in its inventory, but no new
textbooks could be produced by Thomson without McKeown's permission).
"I wrote my editor to ask about it, and she said that Thomson
had sold a customized e-book version of the book to the University
of Phoenix," said McKeown. "I consulted an attorney and wrote
them [Thomson] a letter reminding them that the rights for the
book had been transferred back to me. The company called me and
said it was an 'inadvertant mistake' and that they didn't realize
that they had given me the copyright back. I told them that these
things happen, but that this is what it is going to cost them.
They refused, and have basically continued to do what they're
going to do even after they were made aware that they don't own
the copyright."
The complaint
also alleges that Thomson published a Chinese-language edition
of the book without McKeown's permission. McKeown has received
no royalties on the sale of that Chinese-language version. McKeown
said that other authors can learn something from his experience:
"If you own the copyright, you have the definitive rights under
copyright law to enforce that copyright. Be very good about holding
on to all correspondence with your publisher because you never
know when you might need it to enforce copyright." He said this
is the first time he has gotten the copyright back for a book,
and then "I find out they forgot about it."
Information
Technology and the Networked Economy was originally published
by Harcourt Brace in March 2000. Sales of the first edition were
good, and in 2001, Harcourt asked McKeown to write a second edition.
In the fall of 2001, the College Edition of Harcourt Brace was
sold to the Thomson Corporation. Thomson assumed Harcourt's contractual
obligations under McKeown's contract, including the contract to
write a second edition of the book. Thomson transferred the project
to its subsidiary Thomson Learning, and Thomson Learning delegated
the project to Course Technology. The second edition of the book
was published in August 2002 and was awarded a Texty by TAA in
2003.
Based on personal
experiences with the Thomson sales force, McKeown feels Thomson
did not provide adequate sales support for the second edition.
As a result of poor sales, his editor informed him that they would
not do a third edition, and at that time, McKeown asked that the
copyright be returned to him. In February 2004, Thomson transferred
all rights - in writing -- to the first and second editions back
to McKeown.
In October
2004, Thomson Learning and Course Technology asked McKeown if
he would be interested in doing a revised version of the book.
He reminded them that they no longer held copyright to the book,
and Thomson said that it might be interested in pursuing the project
regardless of whether McKeown had the copyright. No agreement
was reached on a third edition and Thomson subsequently published
unauthorized versions of the book and entered into an agreement
with the University of Phoenix to sell customized e-book versions
of the book without McKeown's knowledge or permission.
"I was surprised
that a book that had gone to a second edition, and that then did
not sell enough to go to a third edition, turned out to sell 45,000
copies," said McKeown. "Why did the second edition not sell nearly
as much as the first edition, and why were they so willing to
give me back my copyright?"
John Burleigh,
with Jacobs deBrauwere LLP in New York, said: "Assuming the facts
are as Patrick McKeown reports, this is an unusual and rather
extraordinary infringement. We cannot recall any reports or case
decisions describing such a situation (i.e., where a publisher
publishes a work in different formats, after having reverted the
rights in the work). It would appear that, unless the publisher
can somehow show that Prof. McKeown consented to the continued
publication - and we have no inkling at this point what its response
to the complaint will be or whether it will make that argument
- given the number of post-reversion sales and the apparently
substantial profits made, Prof. McKeown would be entitled to a
substantial recovery."
Stephen Gillen,
an authoring attorney with Greenebaum Doll & McDonald in Cincinnati,
Ohio, said: "It is easy to imagine how this might have happened.
A company the size of Thomson employs thousands of people to manage
various aspects of the acquisition and exploitation of thousands
of titles in countries across the globe. And, particularly when
it comes to rights management, the licensing out transactions
are handled by staff several administrative layers removed from
the folks responsible for having acquired the rights in the first
place. This all works very efficiently on a large scale for those
works that fit into the regular pattern. But it doesn't work so
well for the exceptional case -- like a title whose rights have
been reverted to the author.
"In this
case, it appears that the right hand licensed out rights that
the left hand had already reverted to the author. Inadvertent,
in all likelihood and not a part of some subversive scheme, but
a mistake nonetheless. If the facts are as reported, Thomson needs
to fix it right away because they will ultimately bear the cost
of any protracted wrangling."
TAA President
John Wakefield said that TAA supports authors who exercise their
rights to license their works under copyright laws, and who protect
those rights when they are violated, whether the violation is
inadvertent or intentional."
Download
McKeown's complaint as a PDF file
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Proper
evaluation of textbook costs begins with students
by Richard Hull
Editor's
Note: This column represents TAA Executive Director Richard
Hull's reaction to the Department of Education's Advisory Committee
on Student Financial Assistance's College Textbook Cost Report
(TAA Industry News section: click
here)
(full text of the study: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-txtbkstudy.html)
There are
several things to note about the ACSFA report.
First, text
prices have been rising at a rate approximately equal to the increase
in room and board, transportation and Consumer Price Index, but
equal to only a fraction of the increase in tuition and fees.
In 1989, tuition and fees, room and board, textbooks, transportation,
CPI, and other costs were approximately the same; in 2004 tuition
and fees were twice room and board, three times textbooks and
more than three times these other costs. Why, then, single out
texts? Because they are perceived to be vulnerable due to the
remoteness of their generative sources from the classroom, while
the classroom represents bricks and mortar, and the professor
the source of credit and grades?
Second, the
quality of pre-college preparation of students has generally declined
over the decades. Part of the reason is that more students are
seeking college degrees than in 1989, so that capital expenses
for classroom space and residential space has increased proportionally.
But part of the increase in tuition and fees is due to the lack
of adequate pre-college preparation on the part of students seeking
college degrees. More is now required at the level of remedial
preparation, with the post secondary cost of bringing students
up to the level of even freshman level comprehension often taking
an additional year or more. Much of this is due to advances in
knowledge: more needs to be mastered for the college degree than
did 15 years before, and more is presupposed by college courses
that has to be mastered prior to entry to college.
It is sad
to report as well, but the level of preparation of entry-level
students is not as high as it was 15 and thirty years ago. In
part this represents the increase in the percentage of the population
seeking college degrees; in part it represents the lack of superb
teachers in college preparatory courses; in part it represents
an increase in the quantity of information and skills required
to enter college well-prepared, and in part it represents the
decline in reading and other calculational practices that is typical
of entry-level college students who are of the television generation.
[An only partial offset of these declines comes from the increase
in computer literacy of entry-level students.]
This, and
not the greed of publishers, is the major factor in bundled materials
for course texts. Students require more visual assistance, more
practice tests and study guides, than did those of earlier generations.
One may rail against textbook adjunct materials, but the fact
of the matter is they would not be produced if there were no market
for them. We have reached a tipping point where the production
and availability ancillary materials is expected, and students
who have the need must bear the cost.
Paradoxically,
as the percentage of high school students who seek to enter college
increases, the pressures at the college level on grade distribution
have also increased, so that students expect to perform at levels
"above average." I'm reminded of Garrison Keillor's characterization
of the mythic Lake Woebegone, where everyone is above average.
The normal curve ought to describe society as a whole; but as
college student populations more closely approximate society as
a whole, the drift has been, not toward the normal distribution
curve, but toward the upper end of that curve. This in turn places
pressures on college professors to maintain their students in
the high end of a normal distribution, and the temptation to order
bundled adjuvant materials to assist in that effort is increased.
One additional
factor, related to perfectly understandable student behavior but
nonetheless highly significant, is the emergence of the secondary,
used textbook market. Given the parallel rate of growth of other
factors in college expense (housing, food, transportation, CPT),
the advent of used book buyers and resellers had no comparison
in these other areas of expense. A given printed copy of a textbook,
which 20 years ago might never be resold but be retained by the
student, now is routinely resold. While reselling behavior does
indeed greatly reduce the net cost, the reduction is ephemeral.
If a given copy will service, semester after semester, six or
more students with only the sale of the new copy to the first
user earning the publisher and the author any income, the incentive
to shorten the time until a new edition is issued becomes a matter
of economic survival. Bookstores and other resellers typically
buy at 25 to30 cents on the dollar and sell at 75 cents on the
dollar, which is a far greater profit margin that with the original
new copy. Every resale results in a substantial profit for the
bookstore or used book reseller, with no profit to the original
publisher. Textbooks thus become like any other transferable commodity,
the automobiles of learning, to be driven for specific purposes
and then resold for whatever their residual value.
There are
other values, however, that reside in our textbooks. First, they
represent the record of the student's intellectual development.
Second, they represent a record of the culture's belief's about
what is known, or accepted in common, at a particular time. Third,
they represent the individual student's reference library, to
be returned to should he or she have had the wisdom to retain
them, to refresh things known and forgotten, mastered and lost,
slightly understood and worth understanding further. So the selling
of one's texts as a means of reducing the cost of education represents
the selling of one's depth of knowledge, the exchange over and
over of what is known for what is not yet known, with an almost
constant realization of the once known as to be forgotten for
the next to be known, retained only so long as examinations require.
The tragedy
of this commons lies chiefly in the lives and education of those
that are seduced by its exchange premium. And students do not
understand that their short-term advantage leads to their long-term
disadvantage. For the only response that the textbook publisher
and writer can have to the reuse of the products of their labors
is bringing out new editions; not supplements that update with
the advanced in the field, but entire new editions that seek to
supplant in the orders of faculty and the campus bookstores those
editions that are being recycled. Because individual students
pass through this spiral and do not experience the cycles of recurrence,
they remain ignorant of their own role in that spiral.
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TAA
welcomes new member
TAA welcomes
new member Heather Buchanan.
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TAA sustaining
member
The following
TAA members renewed at the Sustaining Member level ($150): Allyn
J. Washington.
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Gift memberships
TAA member
Gary L. Musser gave a gift membership to Lyn Riverstone. Thanks
Gary! Welcome Lyn!
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TAAF donations
David Ellenbogen
and Allyn J. Washington each made a $100 donation to the TAA Foundation.
Thanks David and Allyn!
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Give
a TAA gift membership online
TAA members
can now give a gift membership using a secure online form located
in the TAA Member Center: Click
here
A TAA Gift
Membership is only $15.
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