Macmillan Publishers plans to announce on Monday its entry in the battle: an unusual publishing platform for electronic textbooks that it hopes to lure other publishers to use as well (in exchange for a cut of their sales). And to entice faculty members to assign the books, the company will even pay some of them (if the professors enhance the volumes).
The system, called DynamicBooks, lets any professor make a customized version of one of the company's existing titles. That means that chemistry professors can take one of the company's chemistry textbooks, rewrite some parts, add their own papers or chapters, or embed videos or homework questions they've created. Any passage added or changed is clearly labeled as not part of the original book, so students know what is original and what is customized—a concession that was made to textbook authors.
Professors who customize a textbook have a chance to make some extra money. For each customized copy that a student buys, the professor who contributed the material gets a dollar. That could add up if a professor's retooled book becomes popular and is assigned by professors at other colleges.
The titles will underprice some competitors, and most of the 20 textbooks in the pilot version of DynamicBooks will be sold at less than half the price of the printed versions.
The effort joins a quickly growing list of souped-up textbook systems aimed at upending the traditional business model in the textbook industry. Last year, McGraw-Hill unveiled its own format for enhanced e-textbooks, called Connect. John Wiley & Sons recently started a similar line of books called WileyPlus.
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Another feature, likely to frustrate some users, is that these platforms have their own interfaces and formats that the companies control. Advanced e-textbooks from one company are not compatible with other companies' platforms, and each system has its own quirks and a learning curve for students and professors. [We think this could make for a lot of headaches for both students, faculty (including librarians), and staff.
See Also: One thing that libraries and librarians should be thinking about NOW is how a lot of unique content coupled with non-compatible platforms going to be controlled? Will each version on a campus be be closely indexed for "what's different," cataloged, and then placed in OCLC? How often will changes be made? Will the cataloging be kept current? Daily? Weekly? OR, will only the original text be cataloged and forget about the rest? OR, will none of it be cataloged in a traditional sense and the full text (original and customized) be accessible via a full text search after the book is crawled? We think these and related ideas are worth thinking about now.
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