Nov. 3

The Incredible Vanishing Book

Christopher Conway, with some of his books

We don’t know how soon it will happen, but it is happening and it will be consummated soon. The commodity of the book, as we have known it for the last few decades, is vanishing and being replaced by new electronic media. Paper-and-binding books have irrevocably begun to fade away as products of mass consumption and will soon transform themselves into curios like vinyl records. The age of the massive emporium bookstore is coming to an end under the crushing, virtual weight of the Internet. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader is doing well and it promises to get better and cheaper in the future. Textbook companies have developed publishing platforms, like www.ichapters.com, for textbooks to be digitally delivered to students through a price-per-chapter system. And worst of all, if you’re a paper-and-binding book lover such as myself, people are reading less paper than before.

In the diverse, mostly Latino first generation student population that I teach, responses to the paper-and-binding book are often mediated by practical economics. A few years ago I assigned Antonio Skármeta’s beautiful, hardcover children’s book about dictatorship, The Composition, to a Latin American literature class. The Spanish edition I assigned cost about $25, which I didn’t consider to be too much, especially because the total cost for all the books in my class was under $70. All but one of the books I assigned were books that I thought were beautiful as artifacts and as stories. These books, I believed, would command students’ minds and hearts to such a degree that students would want to keep them after the class was over. Most of all, Skarmeta’s book, with its color illustrations and poignant lessons about life and death issues was a book that I was excited to teach to my students. When we got to discussing the book in class, several of my students did not have the book, only black and white photocopies because they could not or did not want to buy the book. I felt a strange mix of powerlessness, disappointment and distance. I had conscientiously made my class inexpensive compared to other classes, but it was not inexpensive enough.

Lest you think that this was an isolated situation, a few examples from one of my current classes come to mind. I have one student who has not bought any of the books on the syllabus because he reads the 19th-century classics I have assigned off of the Internet on his laptop, which he brings to class for discussions. Another student has already begun returning the books we’ve read in class so far, after confirming that they would not be covered in the final exam. A third student, a talented and curious young man who arrives to class with an ipod plugged into his ears, is a graduating senior who had never read a novel before my class. They are all bright, responsible and hard-working students but they are not consumers of books. This is also reflected in the reaction that dozens upon dozens of students have had upon entering my office over the years and noticing my 5 or 6 huge bookshelves full of books. They ask: “Have you really read all of these books?” Which sometimes leads to an interesting conversation about my library, in which I explain which parts are my teaching reference and which parts are the books that I’ve read cover to cover.

The fate of the book in the university classroom is impacted by many factors: the use of instructional technology, the economics of textbook publishing and the pedagogical idiosyncrasies of professors, who either promote the disappearance of the paper-and-binding book or try to reinforce its value in the classroom. Let’s look at each one of these factors for a moment. Naturally, in some contexts and disciplines, it is relatively easy to teach a class without books thanks to the wealth of realia and sources on the Web, whether they be freely available, or available through institutionally subscribed databases. In fact, I find great material online and value its role in my courses. I think that we can agree that some material may be best taught off of the Internet.

The economics of textbook publishing is a little bit more complicated and ties in with the surprising choices some faculty members make as teachers. The bottom line is that a lot of textbooks are just too expensive for what you get. There are certain kinds of textbooks, ubiquitous in certain disciplines, that have become monsters of paper and color, a carnival of colored insets and attention-getting graphic design and layout. They are alternately exciting or stupid, but always exhausting. Worst of all, they are dreadfully disposable. The dizzying rate at which one edition substitutes another so that a publisher can make a profit or stay in business makes these books as valuable and as enduring as colored photocopies. This wasteful, pathetic cycle is the best argument for doing away with over-saturated textbooks altogether and going to an online, subscription model.

Other textbooks are more modestly priced and dispense with the graphic fireworks and multiple editions. These thoughtful anthologies or edited volumes are reasonably priced and straddle the border between textbook and stand-alone book. You can see their classroom application immediately but you can also see these books sitting on a public or university library shelf, and yes, even resting on your average reader’s night table. These books are the innovative work of professors, not a corporate marketing team, and are designed for other professors to use in their classes. Although reasonably priced, you would be mistaken to think that all professors value such books. Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are killing our own chances to have readers in the future or be remunerated for the scholarship we do. It’s not only about the modest royalties that faculty authors may or may not receive, it’s about the principle of valuing each other’s scholarship and editorial work. I order good, attractive and useful paper-and-binding books or textbooks for my classes because I want there to be a system in place to support my work as an author and editor in the future.

If the paper and binding book vanishes as a dominant commodity, as it seems to be, maybe the new virtual system of book distribution, reproduction and delivery will allay some of the problems I describe in relation to photocopies and PDFs. It is becoming increasingly easier to put together affordable ‘readers’ or anthologies culled from existing print material without bypassing rights and fees and without overloading students with unnecessary expense. If this wave of the future takes hold and becomes the new standard in textbook publishing, I think it will be good for all parties involved. But what about the paper-and-binding book? Say you are teaching David Copperfield by Charles Dickens and you had a choice between an excellent paper-and-binding edition by a major academic press, with useful footnotes and front matter, and an electronic edition that students could download to their handy e-book readers, along with selected secondary articles you have selected for them to read? What if their e-book readers had a stylus and/or a network that enabled the class to annotate those assigned texts, and share them over the class network? I don’t think anyone’s nostalgia for paper-and-binding can replace the pedagogical value of my not-so-fanciful or far-fetched e-book scenario.

And yet I am sad about the fading of the paper-and-binding book and I am not going into the good night without putting up a good fight. I am committed to making the cost of my assigned books affordable. I order my books with care and I try to use them in their entirety, so that students get affordable books that are actually used in the class. This does not mean that I limit myself. I do use the occasional supplement (or two or three) and I share with my classes my disagreements with the books or textbooks that I am using. I continue to pick books that I believe are worth keeping and treasuring, both for the words they contain and for their tactile beauty as works of art and design. I want the books that my students hold in their hands to have the heft of what is important and of what is beautiful. I want that student who never read a novel before my class to value the physicality of the reading a paper-and-binding book. This endangered act, after all, will connect him to a centuries-old, vanishing tradition that has touched the lives of millions and altered the course of history on many occasions. That’s just too good to pass up.

Christopher Conway is associate professor of modern languages and faculty co-chair of the University of Texas Arlington One Book Reading Program. He is currently editing a book designed for classroom use that will be very reasonably priced.

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Comments

Decline of the printed book

If there were more Chris Conways in the world, university press publishing would be a healthier business. He points out one of the key problems leading to the decline of the printed book: free riding. Those teachers who resort to using chapters, or even whole books, in their classes without paying anything for the privilege ultimately undermine the system that makes possible the publication of their colleagues’ books they need to publish to gain tenure and promotion. They may achieve short-term savings for their students, but the long-terms costs are the increasing scarcity of scholarly books at all. Unfortunately, as Conway no doubt realizes, publishing in electronic form is not any cheaper; one kind of cost is simply being substituted for another. So, to the extent that material in any form is not being paid for, the supply overall, both print and electronic, will dry up. And not only will we have no print books eventually, we will have no books at all.

Sandy Thatcher, Director, Penn State University Press, at 8:00 am EST on November 3, 2008

The incredible unvanishing book

A rich and provocative article. Since I disagree with Professor Conway’s conclusions, I have replied at length at dgmyers.blogspot.com.

D G Myers, Associate professor of English at Texas A&M University, at 8:30 am EST on November 3, 2008

best of both worlds

Consider McGraw-Hill’s Primus: Instructors can assemble their anthology on a website, approve the final mockup, and have it printed out by M-H’s subcontractor and shipped to the University bookstore. M-H handles all the copyright clearances and payments of royalties. The resulting anthology is less expensive for students than acquiring all the books (and probably less expensive than photocopying all their assignments).

Art Leonard, Professor at NY Law School, at 11:05 am EST on November 3, 2008

Knowledge as History

I still have my vinyl collection (33s) and a few 78s my father and I danced to when I was a little girl and a record player I can actually use. My reel-to-reel tapes, and susbsequent generations of sound are gone, gone with the rapid replacement revolution—shall we call it the RRR? Move over to the computer; how many evolutions have we experienced in the last twenty years? What has become obsolete? Do we think that the computers of today will remain unchanged, that information or comfy online book readers will be there for us to refer to when we want to find that book we need? We are caught up in the RRR, and some are willing to relegate libraries of actual books to the history books—oh, oops, there won’t be any of those! When I’m in my rocking chair by the fire, my cane next to me, I will happily relish those relics in my library and feel such sadness for the victims of the RRR, who, by that point, may actually never have been in a library of bound books, whose feel is akin to a living thing and whose death I will mourn.

Gillain Thorne, Dr., at 11:30 am EST on November 3, 2008

Arrogance and Utopianism

So would you, Chris, rather your students become readers because of the content of the books you assign or because you picked a version you think has pretty pictures? Do you think your students should have found the $25 to buy the Skarmeta children’s book because they are mostly Latino students? You seem to be judging books (and readers) by their covers...and hoping to profit from this inflated system. Do I think that too few good books are published? Yes! Do I think LOTS of lousy books are published in their place? Yes! But forcing students to buy books that are readily available online or at the public library is silly, wasteful, and arrogant. Continue trying to keep the costs down, but check your ego at the door.

Beth, at 11:35 am EST on November 3, 2008

there are books and there are books

There are a number of centers for book arts which attract lovers of “books". These are people who appreciate the type of paper, worry about type faces where only experts can see differences in fonts, dally over unances in binding techniques, cover details, inks and graphics. One finds these persons in the arts arena if found at a university at all. And often the graphics and bindings are not the authors’ choices but provided by a 3rd party who interprets the authors’ ideas.

These issues, which the professor spends time discussing are important but not to students who need 3 credits and where the test, which determines the grade, fails to elevate to a level of importance for students in passing.

Often these details are left to the publisher when producing academic texts. And here, the academic authors’ first concern, similar to that of the student, is to get such a volume into print, preferably by a publisher ranked by the academics’ departments. Pub/perish is not much different than passing the course for both parties.

In fact, some societies are even recommending that criteria for promotion and tenure be other than publishing scholarly material as a book, thus hoisting their members by their own petard.

Today, a student may have contact with a faculty member, often an adjunct, for “3 credits” collecting those credits like a stop on a treasure hunt for a degree. The book is but one victim in these steps to certification.

One is reminded of the Rodney Dangerfield saying, “I don’t get no respect". When classes stop being pit stops on the path and faculty become a university instead of mile posts, maybe we can talk about interdisciplinary appreciation for integrated knowledge and appreciation for learning.

tom abeles, at 11:40 am EST on November 3, 2008

I believe the problem is of a somewhat different matter. While the culture of photocopy is indeed an issue, as is students’ personal economies, the issue is more with textbook culture. In many classes (particularly sciences, intro classes and language classes) publishers have developed the habit of selling overpriced bundled textbooks, which include DVDs no one uses and multimedia material no one cares about. This material, though, is used as a reason for the press to charge 150-300 dollars for such books. Since they make editions by the year, to stop students from using used editions, and they are unavailable for any form of photocopy, students purchase this books at the expense of more accessible books for other classes. I would advocate teaching with “real” books, which are better and cheaper, and, as professors, stop feeding this industry. In my classes, I make a very strong effort to teach only these kind of books (fiction and nonfiction alike). As a result, a very large percentage of students do buy the book and, since they by and large like them, they keep them. The trick here is to assign full books. Students can handle them. There is a culture that believes that undergrads can only handle chapters. This is intellectually and pedagogically wrong and contributes to the problem laid here. If the University, as Prof. Conway points out, may be the only place where a student may read a book, we should at least work into letting them have the experience of teaching a whole book.

Ignacio, at 5:20 pm EST on November 3, 2008

Do We Really Have To Go There?

As an avid book lover and collector and as one who could easily spend the better part of the day browsing in Borders, I can’t imagine the world Professor Conway tells us is just around the corner. On the other hand, I spend so much time reading text from electronic pixels – but not books of course – I’ll probably be blind before we’re out of Iraq.

I have three comments ...

1. Professor Conway spends a great deal of time extrapolating from his own experience – “my students this and my students that” – without pointing us in the direction of research supporting his statements; e.g., “Paper-and-binding books have irrevocably begun to fade away as products of mass consumption and will soon transform themselves into curios like vinyl records.”

I would not dispute the claim that there are more than a few students who have as much affection for books as they have for a losing football team, but I would appreciate seeing evidence that all of these folks who are reading required assignments electronically would, otherwise, be potential book purchasers ... either while they are in college or thereafter.

2. How many books will a typical student purchase while in college anyway? I don’t really know, but I’d be surprised if its more than 50-75, and, historically, something on the order of 40% of college students never read another book cover to cover after graduation.

I will agree that publishing companies have completely botched up the textbook market by pursuing a remarkably dysfunctional and very expensive strategy for maximizing their profit, but I think it is important to separate this discussion into at least two segments ... textbooks (which any rational individual should attempt to circumvent) and all other books (which will definitely be challenged by Kindle-like products, but could be with us for a long time).

3. I am struck by the characteristics of Professor Conway’s students ... and I wonder if their “interesting” attitude toward books is something that is inherent in their backgrounds or is it a learned trait that is a function of the culture for learning in which they find themselves. I’m betting on the latter; i.e., neither respecting nor loving books is something “we” teach students by both our instructional policies and our example.

Finally, reading about Professor Conway’s students reminds me of that “famous” quotation (I think it was Zsa Zsa Gabor), “Don’t get me a book for Christmas; I already have a book.”

Frizbane Manley, at 5:20 pm EST on November 3, 2008

more to ebooks than just annotation and search

Ebooks are not only cheaper to produce but have the potential to put powerful functionality at reader’s fingertips. Search and annotation were mentioned here but accessibility to those with disabilities via screen readers and the like, cut and paste for quotations (and plagiarism), embedded live audio and video content, mathematical formulas that can be calculated with other applications or in the book itself. Of course, these things are not practical for publishers while they have to create both electronic and paper versions of books. The sooner we can go to an ebook-only situation, the sooner we can start really reaping the advantages offered by ebooks.

Paul, CEO at Design Science, Inc., at 5:20 pm EST on November 3, 2008

Great Stuff

This is right on.

Beth, your “pretty pictures” comment shows you missed the point. The author was communicating through the pictures, as well as the words. In that particular case, his message was incomplete without them. It was a children’s book, and needed to be studied as a whole.

Those students are selling themselves short and did not consider the fact that taking a class is more than just reading text — especially a literature course. It is a living, breathing medium for learning that is guided by the professor, using literary works as well as their authors as primary tools. When the vision of the professor — as well as the author’s of the textbooks he is using — is compromised in this manner, so is the learning process as a whole.

In their defense, those students may not have considered all of this at that point in their educational experience. However, those of us analyzing these issues should know better.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just the book that is vanishing. Good for you Dr. Conway. Thanks for not only trying to save the book, but also the learning process.

dj shanon, UTA, at 10:30 pm EST on November 4, 2008

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The Incredible Vanishing Book

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Comments

Decline of the printed book

The incredible unvanishing book

best of both worlds

Knowledge as History

Arrogance and Utopianism

there are books and there are books

Do We Really Have To Go There?

more to ebooks than just annotation and search

Great Stuff

Jobs Related to The Incredible Vanishing Book

Adjunct Faculty Credit — Speech Harper College

Adjunct Faculty — Humanities Harrisburg Area Community College

Adjunct Instructor, Humanities Lone Star College System

Senior Fellow for Faith and Scholarship Professor of Humanities in the Honors College Indiana Wesleyan University

Assistant Professor of Photography, Probationary; 9-Month Appointment* (Contingent on Funding) St. Cloud State University

2008/09 Teaching Specialist/Lecturer — Writing Studies University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

2008/09 Teaching Specialist or Lecturer: Geography University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Senior Professional Research Assistant University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center-Downtown Denver

Director of Arts and Humanities Area of the General Education Program James Madison University

Assistant/Associate Professor in Reading and Study Strategies in the Academic Learning Center St. Cloud State University