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Textbook Publishing: An Ecological View
Steve Forman
| Imagine an ecosystem in which the major organisms are faculty, students, textbook publishers, and bookstores. As producers, consumers, and decomposers, they circulate the nutrients of higher education up and down the food chain. The system has sustained a long-term equilibrium, with change coming in gradual, evolutionary form. But in recent years, some of the system's core conditions have changed, disturbing that equilibrium. Some observers see a crisis at hand, a version of global warming in which textbook prices are rising to dangerous levels. |
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As a longtime inhabitant, I can confirm that the system is troubled. To judge from the current controversy, though, one problem is a lack of understanding of a producer organism in the system—the publisher. To restore the system's integrity, a measure of mutual understanding is necessary. Toward that end I would like to explore the physiology of that ungainly organism, the textbook publisher. |
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I must admit that my own perspective may not be representative. The organization that has been my publishing home for more than twenty-five years is an exceedingly odd, even unique, creature. In a publishing landscape dominated by corporate conglomerates, W. W. Norton and Company is one of the few independent publishers left, and the only one that is both independent and employee owned. What difference does that make? It means we enjoy an unusual stability, with continuity in decision making that aligns the books we publish into a profile of the house. It also means we subsist only on the money generated by the books we publish and distribute. The decision making at Norton is primarily editorial, but in order to survive and grow we must pay close attention to the ledger of costs and revenues. |
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Norton is a two-armed creature that relies on flexibility, quickness, and experience to compete with the megacorporations of publishing. Trade and college are our two main divisions, and there are strong connections between them. Authors often migrate within the firm, first publishing a trade book and then a textbook, or the other way around. Often a single title can succeed in both markets, such as Jared M. Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, or Jonathan D. Spence's The Search for Modern China, a textbook first published in the trade division and also a New York Times best seller.1 The differences between trade and college from an editorial point of view are instructive. Despite the allure of trade publishing, I have found in college books a more challenging set of problems and a richer array of opportunities for editorial enterprise. The college market also operates in a reassuringly rational way. Much like the long baseball season that allows the good teams to prove themselves over a 162-game schedule, the large, fairly discriminating college market enables textbooks that are well crafted to succeed over time. The trade market does not display such rationality: it is a short three-out-of-five series in which anything can happen—and usually does. Good books are too often sent home early. But even then the discerning college market can come to the rescue: some failed trade books enjoy long and successful lives as paperbacks assigned in colleges. |
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This rationality encourages college publishers to shoulder the staggering investments in time and money required to launch an introductory textbook—years of work, millions of dollars spent before a single copy is sold. The trick is developing and publishing a book that hits its target or creates a new target worth hitting. How do we do this? |
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