Our students do not purchase textbooks like we older folk
did. I love books, and I actually loved my old chiropractic texts, and each
term I was happy to put out the money to buy them. But with so many information
sources now available on line, the textbook market has changed in some highly
interesting ways. Here is but one example:
http://jblearning.com/custom/overview/.
Jones and Bartlett, one of many publishing companies, now
offers customized course materials. If you use Jones and Bartlett texts for
your course, they will provide you the means to build a custom packet of
information for your students, drawn directly from the text. When you are done
developing the text, which is easy to do online, it will generate either a
print or eBook edition. Put another way,
you can take chapters from existing Jones and Bartlett textbooks, select only
the ones you wish to use, put them in the order you wish to have your students
read them, add in some of your own material, develop your own cover for the
book, and then make either the print of eBook copy. You can immediately see the
benefit. Your students do not have to buy several textbooks because you need
them to read one or two chapters in each; you can just take those chapters and
put them in your course book. Instructions for doing so, and a short video clip
about this system, can be found at the URL I listed above.
We are seeing this kind of publishing more and more. Consider the old model, which I admit to
using in my own course. I assign a required text, in my case Haneline’s Evidence-Based
Chiropractic Practice. I lecture each week using PowerPoint slides drawn from
each week’s assigned reading. My guess is that few students actually acquire
the text, and likely never read the supporting assigned material. They miss the
richness of understanding that reading will bring to the material presented in
class. Call me old school, but I always read every assignment I was given.
Imagine now being able to use only the chapters you want students to have, at a
price reduced from purchasing full textbooks, and even available for their tablet
of smart phone? How cool is that?
Jones and Bartlett is hardly the only publisher looking at
new models for publication. Elsevier allows you to develop a book containing
all the articles you have ever published in Elsevier journals, as but one
example. This is not just a vanity project, but if you assign those articles to
a class, imagine how nice to have them all in one location, at reasonable cost.
And there is iBookAuthor, and other models that we have been
exposed to. Exciting stuff; new horizons for us to conquer.
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