In the current economic climate, even entry-level jobs in North America require a university degree as a prerequisite. However, as higher education becomes increasingly essential even for basic work opportunities, its inaccessibility only grows. Average tuition for universities in North America has strongly outgrown both the inflation rate and government subsidies (Odland 2012; Campos 2015). These trends reflect the increasing unaffordability of higher education and the rising financial burden students are saddled with, if they can afford the education at all. At present, the difficulties of achieving an accessible and relevant education are also integrally related to issues in the educational publishing industry.
Problems endemic to the publishing industry consistently impair students’ educational experiences. An oligopoly of five companies controls 80 percent of the textbook market (Senack and Donoghue 2016). Such immense market control renders textbooks price insensitive: publishers set exorbitant prices for textbooks and students must still buy them.[1] Simultaneously, publishers repeatedly produce newer editions of books, often with only minimal changes. The key consequence of doing so is that new students are forced to purchase the most up-to-date text at typically expensive prices because older editions become obsolete. Moreover, while each edition produces more revenue for the publisher, books may become outdated by the time they reach the shelves of a university bookstore (SPARC 2016). This inefficiency further disadvantages students at the time of purchase.
The Open Education movement provides an alternative to traditional textbook publishing and its shortcomings. This movement holds education fundamental to social advancement and asks that it be accessible for all (SPARC 2016). Educational resources championed by the movement include Open Textbooks, which are textbooks produced under a free and unrestricted license. Often web-native and largely distributed online, Open Textbooks cost significantly less than their traditional print counterparts. As an ‘open’ resource, these textbooks are available to students for free, meaning that students incur little-to-no expenditure[2] when accessing them. Creators can update these textbooks without the constraints faced by traditional publishers, thus delivering books to students much faster. However, Open Textbooks have not been widely adopted as yet: the lack of standardization in their production has resulted in variable formats, expectations, and review processes, which in turn makes these texts harder to market and adopt in any systemized way.
This report examines the production cycle of fifteen Open Textbook projects in the Rebus Community. The first section historicizes the Open Education movement, defines the Open Textbook, and assesses the current textbook publishing landscape. It delineates Rebus’ role within this landscape, and describes its objectives for open book publishing. Rebus’ incarnation of Open Textbooks provides the basis for the rest of this report. The second section focuses on the Rebus Community Forum and evaluates its implications for acquisitions and editorial processes. Moving along the Open Textbook production line, the third section examines issues related to peer review and accessibility. The fourth section foregrounds the life of the Open Textbook after initial publication, focusing on the experience of Rebus and other organizations to examine the marketing, adoption, and updating of textbooks. Finally, the fifth section summarizes the report’s findings and recommendations. It contextualizes these findings within reference to the textbook industry, adding detail to the discussion in the introduction. By honing in on key issues and suggesting methods for improvement, this report attempts to help us see how best to make textbook publishing a more equitable space through the use of Open Textbooks, and by re-asserting publishing as a service for the global community. Rebus’ attempt to produce Open Textbooks is a small but essential part of making education accessible for all.
1.1 The History of Open Education and the Open Textbook
Fundamentally, the Open Education movement aims to create and disseminate “resources, tools and practices that are free of legal, financial and technical barriers and can be fully used, shared and adapted in the digital environment” (SPARC 2016). This movement began emerging when David Wiley conceptualized “open content” in 1998 (Wiley 2006). Wiley’s concept was instrumental in expanding and popularizing the basic principles of open source software into the domains of education and content creation (Wiley 2006). Predicated upon the 5Rs—Retain, Revise, Reuse, Remix, and Redistribute—the Open Education movement redresses the tight content controls exerted on digital publishing by educational publishers, who act to the “detriment of teachers and learners” (Wake Hyde 2016).[3] In so doing, the Open Education movement strives to make education “more affordable, accessible, and effective” (SPARC 2016).
Given its wide-ranging objectives, the Open Education movement has emerged as a set of interconnected and diverse activities. Thus, after Wiley, the history of Open Education may be traced through a series of divergent yet complementary events. In 2001, the Creative Commons licenses were established, allowing creators and users of open content a set of flexible yet all-encompassing licenses for their works (Wiley 2006). In the same year, MIT started the OpenCourseWare initiative, which makes course materials available to prospective students free of cost (Wiley 2006). The term “Open Educational Resources [OERs]” was formally put into use at a UNESCO forum in 2002 and, in 2005, UNESCO collaborated with the Hewlett Foundation to set up a global community Wiki page (Wiley 2006). By opening up production of and access to Open Textbooks to a larger user base, these initiatives uphold the pillars of the Open Education movement: access, affordability, and quality. The movement’s broad focus is both its strength and weakness, as shall become clear in the subsection on the Rebus Community.
An Open Textbook is “a textbook licensed under an open copyright license and made available online to be freely used by students, teachers, and members of the public” (BCcampus 2012). Given the numerous limitations of traditional textbooks, the development of Open Textbooks is a prerequisite towards truly accessible education. Unlike traditional print books, Open Textbooks are free of cost, and easily updated over time. Over the years, Open Textbooks have saved students $174 million dollars relative to traditional textbooks (Merkley and Merkley 2017). They constitute a key response to the increasing inaccessibility of education, evident in news reports and also the viral #textbookbroke hashtag (Thomas 2016; Senack 2014). The further development of Open Textbooks is thus critical for making education more accessible education. An understanding of the present state of textbook publishing suggests the need to rethink its goals and aims.
1.2 The Publishing Market for Textbooks
The educational publishing industry consists primarily of an oligopoly that dominates 80% of the market. The Big Six international textbook publishers include Cengage Learning, Pearson, McGraw-Hill Education, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Wiley[4], and Scholastic. These key players hold immense control over the industry and are entrenched in the educational system. For example, Pearson also produces standardized tests for students and teachers, ancillary digital materials, learning management systems, and—in some parts of the world— runs schools themselves (Kamenetz 2016). In thus expanding the services they provide and capturing the marketplace, educational publishers are making themselves inseparable from K-12 and post-secondary educational experiences. This integration makes it difficult for Open Textbooks to replace the textbooks provided by traditional publishers.
The market dominance of publishers has intensified through cultural and economic capital. Pearson is nearing one hundred years in the industry, while Wiley has been around since the early nineteenth century, and McGraw-Hill Education since the late nineteenth century. These companies are now synonymous with the term “textbook publisher” itself, and their names are upheld by faculty, students, and parents as providers of quality educational materials. A study by the Babson Survey Research group shows that a significant portion of faculty members rated peers’ recommendation of a text and familiarity with its publisher as either important or very important (Allen and Seaman 2016). This social validation makes it easier for these publishers to convince professors to adopt their books in the classroom—a capability enhanced by the significantly larger amounts of funding such organizations can devote to the marketing and dissemination of their products. The massive marketing budgets of traditional textbook companies, and their wide recognition by faculty and students alike, create a serious barrier to entry for Open Textbooks.
However, even as publishers expand into complementary services, their market dominance is waning. Revenue has moved away from printed textbooks in recent years, pushing educational publishers to expand their product lines. Earlier this year, Pearson representatives reported a 30% decline in revenues, resulting in a mass markdown of their e-books as well the laying off of 4,000 employees (Straumshiem 2017). Pearson attributed this shift to lower enrollment in community colleges and the growing popularity of textbook rentals (Pearson 2017).
This decline in revenue and college enrollment constitutes an early signal that students are not consuming according to older patterns: they have begun to forego education altogether, or are circumventing publishers by renting and pirating texts, and by enrolling in courses with OERs that do not need to be purchased (Barry 2017). This demand for educational alternatives signals the pressing need for investment in OERs, both for the benefit of students and for ensuring educational publishing does not forego service-oriented business models in search of higher profits. The Rebus Foundation is playing a significant role by building “a new, sustainable model for making OER[s]” that relies on a community driven approach (Rebus 2016).
1.3 Rebus Community and Its Goals
The Rebus Foundation was founded by Boris Anthony and Hugh McGuire in 2016. The two Canadians had previously worked in the world of publishing, technology, and user experience, before they combined forces to contribute to open book publishing. The Rebus Foundation is a non-profit organization funded through grants from charitable foundations, including the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Rebus Foundation “builds new models and technology for open book publishing and reading on the web, to encourage deeper engagement, and to enable people (and machines) to use and build on books and reading in new and meaningful ways” (Rebus 2016). Anthony and McGuire are driven by the idea that books are essential to our intellectual lives. Texts constitute significant cultural objects and must be made available to the maximum number of individuals through more efficient and equitable systems of production and distribution.
While books have been central to knowledge exchange and social advancement for centuries, recent technological and digital shifts – particularly the world wide web – have dramatically changed our means of creating, consuming, and sharing books. Rebus reexamines what web-native publishing models could look like, to the effect of creating engaged communities of readers, writers, and scholars. In its first year, the Rebus Foundation has focused on researching scholarly deep reading ecosystems through the Rebus Reader and Personal Library project funded by the Mellon Foundation. In addition, the Foundation is also creating a scalable model for producing Open Textbooks through the Hewlett-funded Rebus Community Forum, which is the focus of this report. The founders hope this model will aid all sorts of collaborative publishing projects, such scholarly monographs, journals, textbooks, and anthologies.
The Rebus Community seeks to decrease the cost and complexity of producing Open Textbooks, to increase the number of discoverable titles produced, and to set standards for the publishing process and output formats. The Community Forum is not meant to be the site where the actual editing, layout, or formatting of content takes place. Instead, the Rebus Community provides users with tools for layout and formatting through Pressbooks, an open source book production software[5]. It attempts to integrate Open Textbooks into the social, cultural, and educational landscape by developing transparent, community-driven processes for publishing open textbooks. In so doing, Rebus is building open collaboration as an essential component of these processes and tools and encouraging volunteers to participate in the creation and use of Open Textbooks.
The Rebus Community is presently creating and studying fifteen pilot Open Textbooks (see Appendix). They take on each project in collaboration with project leads from various post-secondary institutions to examine aspects of the Open Textbook creation process such as reviewing, acquisition, and the problems of large-scale collaboration. In this way, the Rebus Community is exploring numerous problem areas drawing on collaborators’ diverse experiences to enhance the Open Textbook creation process. This report documents, evaluates, and reflects on Rebus’ experiences in an effort to improve current approaches to Open Textbook creation.
- The cost of textbooks rose 1041 percent between 1977 and 2015 (Popken 2015). Students’ annual spending on textbooks and classroom materials has also increased significantly, with average costs being and upwards per item (NACS 2017). ↵
- Given that Open Textbooks are a digital resource, access to computers, laptops, and a stable internet connection are still barriers to access for many students who want to use such books. ↵
- A more detailed description of 5Rs is available in Wake Hyde’s report, page 11 (Wake Hyde 2016). ↵
- Refers to John Wiley and Sons – a publishing company with no relation to David Wiley. ↵
- Pressbooks is an Open Source book formatting and production software. It creates book files in web, PDF, EPUB, EPUB3, MOBI, ODT, XHTML, XML, and WXR formats. For more information on the Rebus Community Press, powered by Pressbooks, see section 3.6 of Wake Hyde’s report (Wake Hyde 2016). ↵