e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: textbooks

  • Lessons from the Boundless Copyright Infringement Suit

    On December 17th, the Boundless OER-based textbook startup issued a press release describing the settlement they had reached with Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan in the lawsuit those three companies had filed against the company. (Full disclosure: Pearson has been a client of MindWires Consulting.) Actually, a lot of the press release wasn’t really about the lawsuit, and the description of the settlement consisted of the following:

    Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve settled the lawsuit. In agreeing to a confidential settlement agreement, along with a public judgment and injunction entered by the Court, the parties have resolved the dispute. The resolution allows the parties to move forward and focus on their mutually shared goal of helping students learn. Boundless now has a clear path for building and marketing its OER-driven textbook alternatives without treading upon the Plaintiffs’ rights, and it is confident that it is in compliance and will not have further legal issues with the Plaintiff publishers. In turn, Plaintiffs have reinforced the strong protection they have in and to their copyrighted works and the related goodwill that they and their authors have established, and look forward to Boundless operating its business within the agreed upon framework.

    This seemed like a strangely muted ending to a strange story. It’s hard to tell from the press release what actually happened. But having read the consent decree and injunction, I have come to two conclusions. First, Boundless lost. Second, the suit and its outcome tell us very little about the future of OER but rather more about business strategy for ed tech startups.

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  • Four Key Questions for the Apple Education Announcement

    There is growing buzz online about Apple’s planned media event on January 19th in New York City. Most speculation is focused on Apple distributing textbooks through iTunesU, as described in a New York Times blog. The basis for most speculation seems to be the short comments in the Walter Isaacson official biography of Steve Jobs. This information, along with some additional inside sources have led the NYT blogger Nick Wingfield to suggest that textbooks might be offered for free. In a post on Mashable, Kate Freeman suggests a partnership with publishers such as Pearson Education.

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  • Textbook Publishers and OERs

    Not too long ago, The Chronicle ran an piece called “Publishers Criticize Federal Investment in Open Educational Resources.” The meat of the article was some quotes of textbook company executives on a panel at an SIIA conference speaking out against a provision in a United States Department of Labor grants program that requires course materials being produced for grant-supported courses to be released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Here’s a taste of their comments:

    “I think it’s very dangerous for them to be in the product business,” said Bill Hughes, vice president of business development and innovation at Pearson Education.

    “There’s no free lunch,” said James Kourmadas, vice president of strategic marketing at McGraw-Hill Higher Education.

    “I fear when big bucks from government is put into certain places, it actually stops pushing people to innovate,” said Kevin Wiggen, chief technology officer of Blackboard Xythos….

    “I think what the industry says is that we don’t see the point in the government collecting up taxpayer money and trying to rebuild an industry from scratch,” said Mr. Kourmadas of McGraw-Hill.

    To my esteemed fellow textbook industry professionals, I reply,

    Dudes. Seriously? (more…)

  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable: Part II

    This is a guest post blog by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” The Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.”

    The report relied heavily on two commissioned papers. Dr. James V. Koch authored “An Economic Analysis of Textbook Pricing and Textbooks Markets” distributed in September 2006. He made some suggestions how the “markets” for textbooks could be improved to provide lower prices. (He did not use the term “textbooks and other learning materials” later used in the Advisory Committee’s report).

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  • Making College Textbooks More Affordable

    This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull.

    On Friday, June 1st, the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance released their report “Turn the Page: Making College Textbooks More Affordable.” Responding to a Congressional concern about high and rapidly increasing cost of “textbooks,” the Advisory Committee was asked “to conduct a one-year study of the cost of college textbooks and to make recommendations on increasing the affordability of textbooks.,”

    The report was the well-referenced, thoughtful and realistic document and recommendations for which the Committee is known. Higher education should view the report as a warning of the “groundswell of criticism against colleges, bookstores, and publishers” Congress is receiving from constituents already concerned by high and increasing costs of college. Faculty should now be aware cost and effectiveness of learning materials and instructional methods will become an issue. Publishers should accelerate their effort for interoperability and cost reduction.

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