Reinventing Textbooks: A Hard Course

A technology company announces plans to reinvent higher education by encouraging the creation of a new kind of textbook. Students will learn better, faster, cheaper. They will be spurred to new triumphs that will finally reverse the persistent decline in American education and the American way of life.

That is more or less the presentation Apple made on Thursday, but it is a song that has been sung before. Nearly three years ago, in May 2009, Amazon said much the same thing when it came up with   the Kindle DX, a souped-up e-reader.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, introduced the DX at Pace University, calling the device particularly suited to textbooks. Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western Reserve University, was quoted in the official news release as saying the device “holds enormous potential to influence the way students learn.”

Case Western, Pace, Princeton, Reed College, Arizona State and other colleges were involved in trial programs to make the Kindle DX available to students. The textbook publishers Cengage Learning, Pearson and Wiley, which were described as representing more than 60 percent of the United States higher education textbook market, were to begin offering textbooks through the Kindle Store within a few months.

It seemed like yet another instance of the way the tech industry explodes antiquated business models. But the plan largely fizzled. As Reed reported in early 2010 in a post-mortem on its trial, “students and faculty in Reed’s Kindle study were unanimous in reporting that the Kindle DX — in its current incarnation — was unable to meet their academic needs.”

How did inevitable triumph turn into a non-event?

The Reed pilot gave 43 students Kindle DXs and measured their progress in three upper-level undergraduate courses. Students basically liked the device and found it easy to carry and use. The faculty was happy that students using the e-reader in class would be less likely to goof off than they might with a laptop. But the device proved somewhat more cumbersome than paper texts. For instance, skimming was harder to do electronically, the students said. Quickly finding passages in the text to cite in class was also difficult.

Another issue was price. The Kindle DX sold for $489. While textbooks are a heavy burden on student economics, any early adapters would have to pay for the DX as well as textbooks until the digital transformation was largely complete.

Much of the criticism of the DX in the classroom might disappear with a better device — like, say, an iPad. But the Reed report noted that the eventual adoption of e-readers in the classroom would not necessarily follow the computer deployment model, where the college or university buys the devices, installs them, provides technical support and even requires them for specific degree programs. Instead, the report thought the devices would follow the consumer cellphone model, where the students, not the schools, make the decisions.

Cellphones, however, communicate over a standardized network. If I have a Verizon phone and you have T-Mobile, we can still make plans for dinner. But Apple and Amazon, to take the two most obvious examples in this market, are not particularly interested in making their platforms available except under the strictest terms. Apple explicitly said Thursday in its FAQs on the announcement that any textbooks sold through it could not be sold anywhere else:

Q. I’m an author (or publisher). Can I distribute this work on my own Web site?

A. You may distribute books created in iBooks Author free of charge on your own Web site. If you wish to sell your book, you must do so through the iBookstore.

Without either a universally accepted file format for textbooks, or the ability of e-readers to accommodate many different standards, the Reed report concluded that “faculty will find themselves faced with the prospect of selecting course readings based on their compatibility with a particular device rather than on the suitability of the material for the course. It is unlikely that faculty (or librarians) will tolerate such a restriction.”