Welcome to a new blog about course materials in general, textbooks in particular, and the transitions currently underway in the way that faculty adopt and students purchase these materials for their classes.

As a former academic with now ten years of experience growing a successful business helping schools effectively manage such transition, I’m hopeful that this blog can provide some useful guidance in thinking through the myriad issues that educational administrators and faculty face. I hope too that interested readers will post their own thoughts and questions, and that we’ll have a lively ongoing discussion.

Textbooks, or course materials generally (in the near future we’ll need new terms for these), occupy an odd position. By virtue of their content, they are fundamental to a school’s pedagogical mission—they are the stuff of scholars to scholars (or teachers) and their students; they represent the body of ideas and information that allows one generation to pass to the next foundational knowledge of a discipline or profession. In this sense, they’re part of the “noble” profession of teaching itself. At the same time, however, this content is produced, distributed, and redistributed (in the case of used materials) through commercial enterprises whose mission and purpose are usually quite different than those of the institution. This is perhaps best illustrated by the unusual separation between the adopter of the materials (the faculty, typically) and the actual purchasers of them (usually students).

The faculty consider, as they should, a text’s content, its quality, suitability, etc., before making an adoption choice; historically, the cost of the texts, the availability of used, and so on, have been of at best a secondary importance. Students too make determinations of value, but these are much more closely associated with the cash they need to make the purchases. “Do I need all the books?” “Could I share or photocopy what I need?” And all too often students forgo these purchases altogether—millions of them do, actually, each term.

Now, of course, students have far more purchasing choices than ever. The internet has not only allowed students to buy new and used books through third parties at lower costs, but it has introduced exciting new business models, most recently rental programs and eTextbooks.There is also a general feeling that eventually eReaders or tablets will be the devices that hold a student’s entire set of course materials. And it’s all moving pretty rapidly. These will be among the first set of topics, which I’ll post soon.

This blog, then, takes as its starting point both the contents of textbooks, and the many ways that students access them now and in the future, and the frustrations (especially over costs) that are propelling many of the new models.  Discontent is the spur of change, and both are evident in not-so-equal measure regarding textbooks as we begin a new decade. What’s clear, though, is that innovation now provides some welcome relief. The challenge is to determine what makes the most sense for one’s institution. Hopefully these posts will help.