From: "Hamaker, Charles" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 05:44:54 +0000

Jim's posting made me review  what is happening with UNC Charlotte's
ongoing eTextbook project.

Some of you know that last fall we realized about 31 titles we had in
two of our eBook package were also assigned as textbooks for classes
on campus.  When we recognized that from the bookstore textbook list,
we marketed them.

For Spring 2014, we consciously purchased a few titles that were
available within our purchasing guidelines, i.e. unlimited
simultaneous users, no DRM and perpetual access based on the December
bookstore list.  We ended up with about 51 titles.

That was so well received on campus as a pilot that for Fall 2014 we
created an "eTextbook" database, inviting faculty to select any of
about 200,000 eBook  titles that we owned our could purchase from our
publisher partners for use under those guidelines.

One of the surprises of the Spring semester was a graduate history
course, taught entirely using library e-resources, including 4
monographs from Oxford, Indiana, Harvard and Wesleyan Univ. presses.
The professor did not notify the bookstore of ANY titles, and did not
notify the library he was doing this.

For Fall 2014, the numbers of titles are about the same as Spring
2014, but I'm sitting here today in just one example watching a
faculty member who began on the first of July to select titles from
our database and today was still adding titles for a course she's
teaching this fall.  Again, I doubt she's notifying the bookstore, why
would that be necessary?  She is at the present up to 8 monographs
from various presses for a WGST class.

I've talked with faculty the past years, and some feel  a bit guilty
when they are asking students to buy 4 titles for class.  The free
availability of eTextbooks, however, seems to me to liberate  faculty
from that restraint.  There is no cost burden for the student if the
titles are, like these, part of library purchasing.  In addition to
saving students real dollars, maybe this kind of access changes the
potential and the practice of teaching.

I'm wondering how much - as Jim and others have puzzled in this thread
- a change in pedagogical and research practices will come about if we
can make more of these titles available for our faculty and students.
More reading, more targeted reading?  a broader range of exposure to
ideas and authors?

Maybe we are in the process of creating  tomorrow's scholars with an
entirely different perspective on books?  And the expectation of easy
access, and comprehensive coverage supporting a wide range of reading
- will it generate a new renaissance ?

Didn't  one person per book, the old dead wood model, tamp down access
or act as a funnel?  We may be opening - if purchase conditions
support them - the potential floodgates, not battening down the
hatches for humanities and social sciences literatures.

Chuck

________________________________________

From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2014 21:24:06 -0400

This is a fascinating topic to the practicing academic.  I can think
of a lot of good reasons why the interest in chapters would increase.
(1) We've always done it, but when it required taking the book
physically out of circulation for a semester and putting it on the
Reserve Desk, we probably did less of it.  (2) It used to be a lot
harder to assign articles for the same reason until the coursepack was
invented; so the coursepack got us used to the idea that we could do a
mix and match of half a dozen shorter readings a week easily.  (3)
Lots more "books" now are collections of articles.  We talk a lot in
my neck of the humanities of the growth and flourishing of the
companion, the handbook, and the volume of conference papers, to which
many of us contribute far more than we do to peer-reviewed journals.
That produced objects that pass as "books" in the world of publishing
and libraries but contain a disparate and uneven collection of
articles and make sense when assigned as such.  (4) And e-availability
makes the book chapter, at least in principle, exactly equal to the
article as a knowable, assignable, downloadable, useable intellectual
object.

So people like me assign more chapters and publishers and librarians
work to figure out how to improve the ways and means.  Well and good.
But .  .  .

The result of this thread is to make me make a note to ask my freshmen
this fall to look at their syllabi and tell me how many books they are
going to read in their first semester at University. Then I'll ask
them to break down between book-books and textbooks -- that is, omit
introductory language and biology and econ books written and published
to be used as the backbone of a course and list just books assigned
for reading and discussion.  My guess is that more than a few of them
will list the three books I'm telling them to read for *my* course and
none other.  That begins to be a worry for me.  How many of them are
going to the bookstore and buying a serious book and sitting in their
room or the library or under a tree and reading it from cover to
cover? Do I really want to know the answer to that question?

Now, many readers will ask, why does he care?  Why does this make him
nervous?  Two answers:  (1) We have a long history built up in the
production and consumption of what we now call "long-form
scholarship".  The notion of the "book" as something coherent and
important that is really qualitatively different from a series of
articles is deeply embedded in our culture.  I don't just use books, I
believe in them.  At a minimum, we should reflect on whether it's an
historical accident that there have been people like me around for a
couple of thousand years and whether it's essential to go on having
and reading such things; and even if we decide we can move on to an
intellectual galaxy defined by the bite-sized chunk, we should think
about how our students should be introduced to that older world even
if they are not going to be part of it.   (2) But we also still
require our rising scholars to produce these objects as a condition of
their prospective exaltation in rank and status.  If we're not
actually *reading* these things, then do we have another reason to
worry about why we require the writing of them?  Do we have a
collective cognitive dissonance we should be addressing?  Is the
crisis of the scholarly monograph perhaps *not* a function of rising
serials prices squeezing us out and falling library sales but
something entirely different:  a decline verging on collapse in
readership?

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.