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.