Bottom-Line Performance

I was reading the New York Times (on my iPhone, not the actual paper) and I stumbled across this article. Publishers are creating new digitial text books that allow professors and teachers to edit the books. Interesting concept! And, as any college student will tell you, fantastically cheap! The digital editions run around $50 vs. a print version of $130.

I immediately thought this was a great idea. I flashed back to a specific history class that had seven text books. Sometimes only one chapter was assigned from a particular text. So if my professor could have dumped in that chapter (using the correct copyright under fair use in education), I would have loved saving the extra hundred dollars or so. And another professor could have included his own law review article in the digital poly sci text instead of making 40 copies of an 120 page doc. The forest would certainly thank him.

When I shared it internally, one of my coworkers had a very different reaction. She was concerned about the reliability and accuracy of the text books once a professor started editing it. And she pointed out it was no longer really by the given author.

The whole discussion reminds me of the arguements for and against wikis. I hate admitting it, but research shows that Wikipedia has the same number of errors in articles as a common paper-based encyclopedia. I would guess the same might hold true for the digital text books.

What do you think? Is giving professors the power to edit books a good idea?

Tags: text books, wikis

This entry was posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 at 3:29 pm and is filed under emerging trends and technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.