Comments on Can Symtext Disrupt the Textbook Market?

• Symtext - accessible?
• Posted by Steve Carnes at University of Minnesota on June 10, 2010 at 8:30am EDT

• I scanned the white paper but, alas, again found nothing regarding accessibility. Has the drive toward putting books and journals on line forgotten, or just chosen to ignore, those who have different needs for accessing the "written word?"

• Everyone an eEditor
• Posted by Thomas Lawrence Long , School of Nursing & Dept. of English at University of Connecticut on June 10, 2010 at 9:30am EDT

• All well and good, but the proposed "platform" presupposes that all faculty are sufficiently educated, talented, and provided with sufficient resources (like time) to become editors of their own e-books.

  They are not.

  This comment is not to disparage faculty, but simply to note that the value-added of a textbook is the expertise of the editors and publishers assembling it.

• What's new?
• Posted by Sandy Thatcher at Penn State on June 10, 2010 at 9:45am EDT

• What's new here? Doesn't the CourseSmart consortium of commercial textbook publishers already provide just this kind of service for the nearly 12,000 titles it has in the system now? http://www.coursesmart.com/aboutus --- Sandy Thatcher

• Publishers: the new Middleman
• Posted by Gary Fitsimmons , Director of Library Services at Bryan College on June 10, 2010 at 10:00am EDT

• One reason publishers may be reluctant to change to the online format is that the ease of publishing in the format makes them little more than aggregators. With Syntext’s idea, they aren’t even that anymore; they become the new middlemen, performing little that the authors cannot do themselves. There is still the problem of credibility for self-published authors, but even that stronghold is beginning to crumble for publishers. Forget worrying about them not wanting “to share digital revenues with a middleman such as Symtext” they are fighting to keep from becoming totally irrelevant, and it is getting tougher all of the time. Syntext may not be able to force the their model on the market in time to make it financially, but the idea looks to me to be unstoppable.

• new publishing platforms
• Posted by Douglas Eyman , English at George Mason University on June 10, 2010 at 10:00am EDT

• One of the reasons I don't often read this blog is the narrow focus on educational technologies as developed by large corporations and ed-tech specific companies. This view misses out on a lot of the innovative work being done by faculty, students, and academic technologists themselves. This is a case in point -- there are a number of open-source textbooks and textbook series being developed, along with the infrastructures that mirror those described in the Symtext white paper. One example (among many) is Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (http://writingspaces.org/), which provides online creative-commons licensed textbooks for faculty to use (and, depending on the license, to disaggregate, rewrite, re-mix, or otherwise use in ways that are more flexible than the model proposed by Symtex, although it does require the faculty member to do the actual production work -- at this point in its development).

  I'd also point out that the notion that this is somehow antithetical to the textbook publishing industry indicates that no attempt has been made to find out what that industry itself is actually doing. All of the major textbook publishers in my field (rhetoric and writing) are themselves developing systems similar to those described in the white paper. In fact, the most pedagogically sound learning technologies I've seen recently (providing specific LMSes for writing instruction, focusing on revision and peer-review) have come from these publishing companies, not from providers like Blackboard (this is where you can see the difference between systems that focus on *management* and those that focus on *learning* -- Blackboard, is the former). Perhaps Joshua will consider looking outside the corporate world occasionally to see where real innovation (in pedagogical application, as opposed to marketing strategies) is taking place.

• Coursepacks - rehashed
• Posted by Dr. Pepper , Academic-in-training at Northeast on June 10, 2010 at 10:00am EDT

• When I was an undergrad my university would offer coursepacks, where faculty could specify what book chapters and articles they would be using, the university would get the appropriate copyright clearance and create packs for the students in that class. They stopped doing this by the time I got to my first master's degree and an external company did the same thing - the instructors told the company what readings they would be using and the company created a coursepack for the students in the course - of course when the private industry did it it cost the students three times as much.

  I see this company pretty much doing the same thing - just making coursepacks digital and expanding on the media used - I don't see anything new here. The biggest problem I see are the exhorbitant prices that could be charged for using a portion of this text, and a portion of another.

• Response to the comments
• Posted by Ian Barker , Founder at Symtext on June 10, 2010 at 12:15pm EDT

• Hello everyone,

  I run Symtext. It's good to see the comments on this post -- it shows that people are engaged in the topic. I'd like to take a moment to address some of the points, many of which of very good.

  What's New: Symtext is very different from CourseSmart. We work with content at a granular level, with more than just text, with educators' own materials, and with student generated content. The intention is to create a living, dynamic educational experience that is unique to each course in which Liquid Textbooks are being used. This is a very different proposition than an online bookstore.

  Publishers -- the new Middleman: I think the choice at stake here is to get involved with new models pertaining to content distribution, or not. As you say, Gary, the idea itself is unstoppable. If you are a publisher you'd want to be using Symtext as one of the ways to distribute your content. The alternative is to miss an emerging wave of new demand for content sourcing, packaging and distribution.

  New Publishing Platforms: There are, of course, many dedicated publisher platforms. That's well and good, and something healthy. But when one wants to mix content from multiple publishers and to provide this in a a more fluid, interactive environment, then it's not so easy. Imagine if you're in a Teaching and Learning role at a University or College and have to contemplate the use of doxens of different publisher platforms on campus. There are challenges down that road. So think of us as Switzerland -- the "Neutral" of content distribution. We're simply playing a role that's needed in the market but hasn't yet been properly fulfilled.

  Coursepacks - rehashed: These are good questions, particularly with respect to price because this is the obvious concern. But when one distributes content via a platform like Symtext, and during a time when content is more easily disaggregated, what you get is more choice. And more choice leads to fair pricing, not price increases. I should also point out that coursepacks don't contemplate any form of interactivity, they tend to be nearly as inflexible as books and they certainly don't contemplate the confluence of publisher, professor and student generated content. This blend is what leads to debate, discussion, engagement and even culture.

  Everyone an eEditor: This is a usability question. For sure, we can't expect all professors to become editors in this style, and we're not suggesting everyone will. But enough educators can and will do this -- and, regardless, we're here to help anyway.

  I should also address the suggestion that perhaps publishers are leery of this style of distribution. Our findings are quite different. There's broad recognition that the demands of educators and students for Higher Ed content are beginning to diverge from traditional offerings and that we need new digital content models. What we're saying -- that some portion of the educator market demands multi-source, multi-format, "granular" content -- isn't a threat, it's an opportunity. All that's needed is a mechanism to meet these requirements, and that's what we've done.

  If anyone is interested, I've blogged a bit more content over at Symtext: http://www.symtext.com/?p=890

• enhancing the learning/teaching experience
• Posted by Liquid textbook user on June 11, 2010 at 1:15pm EDT

• I used the Symtext software for two of my courses this past year. One, a 1st year introductory course with about 250 students, and the other, a 4th year undergraduate seminar with about 20 students. First, it was *liberating* to be able to use any material of my choosing. So rather than being limited to one text, or one publisher's content (as is the case with coursesmart software), I was able to choose chapters from different publishers. I also used articles and other materials that really enhanced the learning experience --podcasts, AV clips, current newspaper articles --which made this 'liquid textbook' a much more interesting course resource than I have used in the past, and a much more current resource (since I was able to continually update it with current news/events). The liquid textbook was significantly less expensive compared to the text I normally use as well. But for me, the main thing that made this method of disseminating course material so interesting was the ability to annotate the material, and to generate discussions and debates outside of class through the material.The major concern I have had in all my years of teaching is getting students to 'open the textbook' and read before class. With the liquid textbook, students were going to the text material, reading my questions, and points for debate, and I was pleased to see that they too, were posing their own queries, discussion points, and engaging in the text materials *before* we met in lecture. The level of analysis from students was much greater this year, than in the past, and I think it's because they were reading this material and actually engaging in the discussion by virtue of annotating. Also, some students who didn't speak up much in class, were more comfortable annotating, and I could see that having the ability to annotate provided them with another voice, other than in the classroom. I will use this software again.