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Ultimately, when it comes to textbook publishing, the consequences of a vibrant community of practice around Open Textbooks will result in a successful scaling of Open Textbook production that shifts the industry from content scarcity to content abundance, and traditional textbook publishers will find it increasingly difficult to extract monetary value from content alone. As a result, the emphasis will have to shift from providing content alone, to providing added value “atop” the content, which will require innovation and imagination, and will hopefully lead to an even bigger revolution in education. When the content is free and available to everyone, it will be teaching and learning methods that truly define education. And, fortunately, there is nothing that dictates that it must be for-profit companies who lead this innovation. With a vibrant Open Textbook community comes many stakeholders, from funders to educators to digital service providers, who will be ideally positioned to extend their work into building new services and experiences that utilise Open educational content of all types to improve educational outcomes. Some of these will certainly be paid services, but the cultural change that will come with Open content will hopefully help to keep the charges reasonable and, significantly, the content itself (the most important element) will remain freely accessible to anyone and everyone who wishes to use it. There is a risk of creating a new kind of inequality by excluding learners from this new layer of education, but so long as the content remains Retainable, Reusable, Revisable, Remixable and Redistributable, there will always be an opportunity for those who believe in the principles of access to education to develop affordable or free options that work for all learners.
This vision of the future is admittedly still a long way off, but the foundations being laid in the Rebus Community are a necessary part of its realisation and the fulfilment of the possibilities of the Open approach. To date, the Rebus Community design process has begun to detail a simple, specific set of tools and processes that can support collaborative publishing, taking the abstract ideas of collaborative publishing and turning them into a concrete plan of action. The Foundation has also put considerable thought into the needs of the people who will be using the tools, including needs that extend beyond software, and has implemented a pilot strategy to gather the insights they need to progress in a focused way that will best serve the community, mitigating the risk of launching a product that does not meet the needs of its users. The immediate challenge moving forward, however, is that the Foundation is only now venturing into the territory of turning thoughts and hunches into practice. The first two pieces of the platform that have launched, the forum and the press, were pre-existing tools adapted to a purpose, but the project management tool is a custom built piece of software, which comes with higher risks. The first active projects are the first real test of the Rebus concept. It must also be considered that the Foundation has set itself an ambitious set tasks, as alongside this first foray of putting theory into practice is the broader Rebus model of publishing. The webbook format, Directory, Reader and Library all enhance the Community offering, but do draw resources from its development, which will need to be carefully managed. The promise of further grant funding will mitigate this somewhat, and the Rebus team is confident that their “big picture” approach will benefit the development of each piece of the product stack, as the connections between them are always top of mind.
Finally, what can also be considered is that if the Rebus proves successful, there may be implications beyond just textbooks. For the publishing industry at large, the Rebus Foundation projects hint at what publishing might one day become. As discussed in the previous section, a model that sees a single organisation bring together different services for a community of people to collectively perform the publishing process could become the new concept of what constitutes a publisher. However, a more likely scenario is that the Rebus model will become one among many. The publishing industry does not just refer to the big five publishers, and has always included small and medium players, as well as many other varied stakeholders. As the possibilities opened up by technology have expanded, so too does the industry as a whole come to cover a whole range of different players, each with the opportunity to create a new way of publishing.
Significantly, it will be those with the most to gain from disrupting the current system who usher in change. Similar tensions that have created the demand for Open Textbooks are happening with other forms of academic publishing, and Open Monographs in particular could benefit from a system devoted to long-form text production, and they are likely to be a future area of interest for the Rebus Foundation. Self-publishers will likely continue to lead the industry their readiness to adapt to new approaches, and “traditional” authors may continue to transition into the self-publishing realm. Small publishers in Canada, whose survival is reliant on grants, could form collectives and share resources, and others still will have a new way to enter the market. Finally, institutions, from universities to government agencies, non-profit organisations, NGOs and even commercial businesses could, in a culture of Open, accessible content, share the value of their institutional knowledge with the world through simple publishing practices. While they have less investment in changing the status quo, many would surely take an opportunity to share the value they hold when the barriers to doing so are lowered.
Looking ahead even further, where the real and substantive change will occur is when the shift in book production has achieved what it needs to in order to tip the industry into content abundance, and new forms of consumption can emerge. Once that point is reached, it is exciting to imagine what innovations might arise to make use of content, providing new experiences and value for consumers and creators. The Rebus Foundation has already begun considering the consumption aspect of the model it is creating, with early conceptual designs of the Rebus Reader and Library thinking carefully about the value of reading and how to deliver that value for readers in a digital environment. These new possibilities will also be informed by developments in data analysis and machine learning, already driving development in other content industries, the influence of which is just beginning to be felt. It is difficult to imagine exactly what form the future of book consumption may take, but it is the promise of what could be that drives the pursuit of Open, abundant content production, on which that future relies.
The significance of the possibilities discussed in this report is considerable. Throughout more than 500 years of publishing history, the fundamental premise of the industry has always been to sell access to content. The impact of digital technologies and the internet on publishing is arguably the biggest provocation it has ever faced, as it poses a direct challenge to that central premise. However, the reasons publishing has survived 500 years and remains recognisable from its origins is because of the immense value it offers, and the role it plays in society. Knowledge, in the form of stories and information, has been passed down through generations in books, allowing each new age to build upon the experiences and lessons of their predecessors and to share in the common human experience. While knowledge and information may be changing in the digital age, books and publishing still have a place as the building blocks of society, and the opportunity presented is one to resolve the tension between intrinsic and economic values that has always been at the heart of what publishers do. The publishing industry must meet the challenge, and knowing the importance its work, work hard to ensure that books not only survive, but thrive in a new era of content. The Rebus Foundation is trying to do just this. In the grand scheme of things, it is starting small with the Rebus Community, but it it will take small, deliberate, considered steps to move forward in the right direction. It is these small steps that will begin to shape the next 500 years of publishing.
