This morning, I made a todo list. It was a very long, cumbersome list, but this marks a major advance in my life. For the past couple of weeks, I've been only dealing with whatever emergency was right in front of my face. It was impossible to think beyond that immediate moment.
One of the many crises that happened yesterday was dealing my father's textbook publisher.
My dad is the editor of a popular political science textbook. It's in its 20th edition or something. He and his co-editor pull together pro and con articles on hot button political topics, such as gay marriage or gun control. They edit the articles down to a manageable length, and then write introductions to the topics to guide classroom conversation.
He started off with a small fish publisher in the 1980s, which was bought out by a medium fish publisher, and then the medium fish publisher was bought out by a shark fish later in the 1990s. Well, it appears that this Big Shark Publisher is flapping around in shallow waters now.
His editor sent him a long e-mail with requests for technical work. She wanted him to scan these articles with his $50 copier/scanner, merge the files into one document, and then convert it from a .jpeg file to a .pdf file. My dad is 75 and never really mastered the concept of copying a file to a disk.
So, I drove over there and worked with him for a couple of hours. Then I got huffy and decided that this was a bad use of my his time. I told him to tell his editor to do it herself. That's why God invented underpaid editorial assistants. But my dad told me that the Big Shark Publisher has fired all of its editorial assistants and so they are making the authors do all the work. In fact, it had already moved its operations out of New York City and to Iowa, where costs are cheaper. Pierson, another textbook publisher around here, is moving to North Carolina for the cheaper costs, too.
Why are textbook publishers having such a hard time? My guess is that most students aren't paying full price for textbooks anymore and are instead buying used books through Amazon and other online sites. They were too greedy, so that spawned a huge used book market. Also, the quality of these textbooks have declined so greatly that professors are using their own course packs.
After we kindly told his editor to go stuff it, I went home to meet the next crisis. At some point, I would love to sit quietly and read a book. But until then, I have to locate the box with the aspirin.
Apt. 11d 
I bet we have one of those books somewhere in the house, possibly with an edition number in the single digits.
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Textbooks are like CDs. People thought they got a captive audience “willing” (forced) to pay $100/book, or $30/CD, and instead of keeping prices reasonable, they jacked them up so high that not only were kids unable to afford them, ripping the company off felt like sticking it to the man. When you make a large swath of young well-educated people who can get creative with technology mad at you, your days of selling an overpriced product are limited.
But…yeah. In terms of grunt work, I can’t believe they can’t find college students willing to be unpaid interns. My sister is a literary agent, and she gets Ivy League college students chomping at the bit for “work experience,” so she has some Harvard creative writing major make coffee for her every morning.
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High textbook prices are one of my issues. I actually allow students to obtain the readings in other ways instead of requiring them to buy the textbook. I don’t myself do anything that would violate copyright (i.e., I don’t copy/distribute essays or anything), but the students talk a bit amongst themselves. I really feel for these kids. Our lit textbook is over $100 new. I use that book for 10 weeks. How is that reasonable?
And don’t get me started on composition textbooks. I swear, our most recent textbook adoption isn’t much better than a comic book, what with all the graphics and short blocks of text.
I am so over textbooks.
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A lot of technical “progress” and computerized “efficiency” consists of forcing customers (usually) or suppliers (in this case) to do the work that used to be done by employees, e.g., filling out registration forms, formatting printed material, etc.
Of course, if you read Ulrich’s “The Age of Homespun,” you learn that 17th-century Colonial change (I don’t know if they called it progress) involved moving spinning and weaving away from professionals and turning it into domestic labor. So maybe it’s one of those plus ca change deals.
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“A lot of technical “progress” and computerized “efficiency” consists of forcing customers (usually) or suppliers (in this case) to do the work that used to be done by employees, e.g., filling out registration forms, formatting printed material, etc.”
Indeed. Somebody needs to work on the whole self-checkout process, because I’ve never seen one that wasn’t a train wreck.
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“But my dad told me that the Big Shark Publisher has fired all of its editorial assistants and so they are making the authors do all the work.”
So, what is Big Shark Publisher contributing to the process?
If your dad can free himself from the sticky web of his contract with these people (I realize there are probably some pretty scary things in the fine print), he could hire a copy editor and a crackerjack graphic design person and print in China and be way ahead of the game. There’s also the very interesting question of digital textbooks.
In related news:
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Students can rent their textbooks now! Even language textbooks and workbooks, which I thought were in essence “consumable” — crazy!
Oh, and as far as language books are concerned (mine, basically the only Portuguese one in the market is by Prentice Hall/ Pearson), they re-use the really bad art endlessly in the Spanish, Portuguese and I’m sure other language books. And some photos too… and the basic structure. It’s a huge industry…
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I was thinking of doing some Russian tutoring and investigated which textbook the local college department uses. It costs $170 (and the used prices were not substantially cheaper), so I didn’t buy one. Back when I was an undergraduate (20 years ago, admittedly), we used mostly Russian or Soviet-published textbooks that cost in the $10-$30 range (and they would cost far less than that overseas). There have been a lot of changes in technology and idiom since then, but for that sort of price difference, you can tolerate quite a few anachronisms.
My husband tells me that when he was doing his graduate work in math, students would buy Russian translations of English-language math books as a money-saving move, Russian being a language that mathematicians have traditionally studied.
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Academic journals are next.
Trade publishers have had a decade to watch the recording industry and learn from its mistakes. We’ll probably find out in the next few years whether they did or not.
Here’s the book you should read, post-aspirin.
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Every once in a while, I forget myself and click through to one of Amy’s links. When I do, it does not take me long to get to:
“Portugal, like most countries whose cultures were strongly influenced by Islam, had a streak of wife-abuse running through the poorer or more culturally backward classes.”
And not a single comment points out that Portugal gained control from the Moors in the 1200s and kicked all the Muslims out over 500 years ago, and currently has almost no Muslim residents after being dominated by the Catholic Church for the intervening half-millennium.
Pity the poor Catholics who, after 700+ years of exclusive control, and 500+ of exclusive possession, still haven’t found a way to kick out those pesky Muslim wife-beating tendencies. I’m thinking maybe if the Inquisition hadn’t been so wimpy and half-hearted . . .
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Portugal spent hundreds of years under Moorish control, just as Latin America spent a very similar amount of time under Spanish control. Even though Spain is long gone as a military force in Latin America, it’s entirely fair to point back to it as a cultural influence, and it will continue to be fair 200-300 years from now. As a rule, the areas of Southern and Southeastern Europe that used to be under Islamic rule are less prosperous than the parts of Europe that never were (and far more of Europe has spent time under Islamic rule than is generally appreciated–Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, etc.). Granted, those Islamic-influenced European countries have interesting architecture, food and music and so forth, but they do tend to be backward in a variety of different ways. Nobody’s wondering how to copy Albania’s education success story.
I can’t believe that that quibble about Portugese culture was all you took away from Hoyt’s very good piece on abusive publishers. She has so many interesting things to say, and so do her commentors.
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I have a junior colleague who’s spending a chunk of her weekend scanning a recent publication of hers, taking all those images and converting it into a PDF because that’s what the dean demands for her contract renewal. All publications must be submitted in PDF format.
Honestly? I’m technologically adept and I wouldn’t have an idea of how to do this task because it’s not worth my time. Good for you in convincing your father that’s not his job or yours!
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I don’t think I have any of my publications in anything but a PDF.
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People want PDF files? I just googled I hate PDF files, and everybody and his dog hates PDF files.
“PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online.
“For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn’t let go.”
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html
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That’s some guy who thinks a PDF messes up web page design not somebody who replaced a whole file cabinet with a thumb drive and can now search within an article.
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