2.1 Publishing & Technology

We now exist in an environment where technology allows anyone with internet access to become a creator and share their creative works with the world. The same conditions that enable creation at scale also mean that content consumers have more options than ever before in terms of where and how they access content. Attempts to adapt to this new environment, to lesser and greater degrees of success, have already been witnessed in music, film and television, journalism, and the magazine industry—those who have not adapted have perished. On the consumer side, Spotify and Netflix can be held up as two of the most successful examples of adaptation to content abundance. Both offer extensive access to content, as well as value-added features like personalised recommendations, content curation and, significantly, the kind of ease of use that has come to be expected by consumers who are immersed in a digital culture. On the production side, YouTube has benefited from the proliferation of video production and editing technology that allow anyone to produce a short film, music video or tutorial. It is inevitable that the same kind of challenge will be posed to publishing, and industry stakeholders must be prepared to adapt and move forward.

When it comes to book publishing specifically, little has been done to address the larger existential challenge posed by digital disruption. The introduction of the ebook format allowed some benefits of digitally mediated content to reach readers—mainly somewhat reduced costs, wide access to titles and the ability to access multiple books on a single device^[1]—but the format is complex to produce, often unattractive^[2], and essentially just “print on a screen”, with little effort being made to really advance what is possible with a network-connected digital format, which would come from proper integration with the web^[3]. Despite the fact that ebook sales have begun to plateau, or even decline^[4], major changes continue in parallel industries, indicating that it is likely that more is to come. Even though it is unlikely that print will ever be entirely replaced by digital books any time soon, there is still plenty more that can be done with books in a digital, connected world, both in terms of production and consumption.

One area where benefits such as lower barriers to entry have been felt is with self-publishing. Now that anyone can create an ebook or use a print-on-demand service and put their book on Amazon, anyone can publish a book. The result is an explosion of content. Bowker, the ISBN agency for the United States, reported in 2015 that ISBN registrations for self-published works had grown more than 375% since 2010^[5]. Looking to publishing’s counterparts in film, music, television, journalism and magazine publishing, it is reasonable to predict that this growth in content from sources outside the realms of traditional publishing will accelerate. It is also more than likely that other players in the publishing industry will recognise the success of self-publishers, and consider what opportunities are presented to them by technology, including how they might leverage those opportunities to build new models of publishing. The key for these players is not necessarily that they are naturally forward thinking or innovative, but that the traditional publishing system is not working for them.

Although this climate has created uncertainty for everyone in the publishing industry, an immense opportunity to redefine the system to work for different stakeholders is presented. Digital disruption may be a threat, but from any threat, the opportunity to innovate emerges. Importantly, aside from being well-resourced (although their market share and profits are already decreasing^[6]), the “big five” legacy publishers (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, MacMillan and HarperCollins) have no natural authority, right or advantage that says they must be the ones to move the industry forward, nor might they see the need to. This leaves the door open for new players to enter the market to encourage the flourishing of abundant content and to start building the value-added services that can elevate content to new heights.

Looking to the parallels between publishing and other content industries, it is rarely the legacy content producers in those other industries who succeeded in adapting most successfully. Instead, it is consistently digital-first approaches that empower anyone to become a creator, prioritise extensive access to content combined with added features, and achieve the most success in addressing the challenges to the industry. Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Buzzfeed, Amazon, Snapchat and many more major players were created outside the powerful centre of the industry (or industries) they have disrupted, not by major television networks, record labels or other media organisations. With that in mind, the publishing industry can no longer be conceived of as just the “big five” and other players following the same exclusive, commercial model on a smaller scale. Instead, publishing needs to be conceived as a more expansive set that includes those that may have once been said to be on the fringes, such as self-publishers, and others who have previously not held a clear stake in the publishing industry, such as web publishers and technology companies. All industry stakeholders, not just traditional publishers, are implicated in the challenges facing the industry, they should all be prepared to adapt to the new environment in which they find themselves and, where possible, take the chance to lead the way for the good of the industry as a whole.

2.2 The Rebus Foundation

One of the new players to emerge from the current publishing climate is The Rebus Foundation, The Foundation is a non-profit organisation funded by the Hewlett Foundation. It was founded in direct response to the threats and opportunities presented by digital disruption for books, publishing, and reading, as explored in the previous section. Founders Hugh McGuire^[7] and Boris Anthony^[8] share a belief that books are central to a flourishing society, and that “while they are no longer alone in our media landscape, [they] maintain their critical place in our culture as the documentation of human knowledge and experience”^[9]. McGuire and Anthony also share considerable experience in technology, a vision of the Open Web, and they see a bright future for books in a digital world. With a shared vision of the future of publishing and extensive experience with technology, they have joined forces to create the Rebus Foundation as a way to leverage the power and possibility of digital technologies and the web to build a new future for book production and book consumption.

The Foundation has a clear path to achieve its vision. It plans on creating a series of small pieces of technology that work together without being dependent on one another, which span production, format, distribution, deep reading and collection management. Each piece is intended to be used and adapted for multiple purposes. The planned pieces of technology, each its own project, are:

Rebus Community

The Rebus Community is an online community platform that connects people with the skills needed to complete every task in the publishing process, from creating content right through to checking metadata. By shifting expertise from an opaque, “service” model approach to a collaborative one, the Community disconnects the publishing process from the “publisher”, as it is traditionally conceived. At the heart of the platform is a project management tool specifically designed for this new model of publishing, allowing the community around the tool to manage projects themselves. The platform is being launched initially to serve the Open Textbook community, but the model is not necessarily limited to textbooks, and future iterations may include other Open academic publishing, self-publishing collectives and publishing co-operatives. This is outlined in more detail in Section 3.

Rebus Community Press

Based on Pressbooks book production software (see Section 3.6.1), Rebus Community Press is a book production platform that allows users to easily, cheaply and quickly create, format and design their books, producing multiple file formats from a central version of the content created in HTML+CSS. While Pressbooks is still currently a separate entity, the Rebus Foundation is investing in its development, and Rebus Press will one day be available to publishers of all sizes to drastically alter their production processes. This is outlined in more detail in Section 4.

Webbook Format

With the webbook format, The Rebus Foundation is engaged in the W3C^[10] process to develop a file format standard, which will allow them and others to build web-based reading and distribution infrastructure. The proposed format comprises three major features; a single URL for a collection of resources (together called a “publication”), a table of contents with a suggested structure and reading order, and a mechanism for files to live in an offline environment and sync with online versions. While much of what is expected to feature in the standard is already possible in native web formats, it has yet to be clearly delineated and defined as a standard for books on the web. A standard approach allows for consistency and reliability, so both human and machine readers know what to expect from a file. This format could significantly improve on the current dominant digital book format: EPUB, the standard for which was developed and is maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). There are significant drawbacks to EPUBs, particularly in the context of books on the web, as it is not structured to be compatible with web standards in the same way that web pages are, forcing it outside the web environment and limiting its connectivity.

Rebus Directory

The Rebus Directory is a catalogue (or series of catalogues) that will contain a central collection of texts with comprehensive, reliable metadata, eventually with a focus on books in the webbook format. In future, publishers may be able to create their own catalogues within the system to help them manage their distribution. A major challenge in a system of abundant content is discovery, which in a digital environment is driven by metadata. Like a standard file format, standard metadata makes content effectively accessible and distributable by humans and machines.

Rebus Reader & Rebus Library

Alongside the webbook format development discussed above will come the development a dedicated, web-based reader for books in the standard format. It will offer enhanced features and connect to the Rebus Library, though it will still be possible for a reader to access a webbook file without it. It is likely to be available as an app and browser extension, to automatically activate when a webbook is recognised. The library will offer collection management, with the ability to track, cite, annotate, show connections between books and many other extended uses, leveraging the webbook format and connection to the Rebus Reader. Similar to the relationship between Rebus Press and Pressbooks, some work has already been done towards the design of the library, with Boris Anthony’s Libra.re acting as a prototype, developed to manage a personal collection of several hundred ebooks. Although these are distinct “pieces” of the process, the Reader and Library are closely related. Both the Reader and the Library are designed to enable deep reading of digital and web based content, building in touchpoints and visual indicators that are currently lost when moving from print to digital, and which impact on reading comprehension and retention. They will be built with the specific intention to address the current challenges of digital reading, and to improve on what is possible with print, by allowing books the same advantages that other digital content benefits from.

Strung end-to-end, the result is an innovative, expansive, connected, diverse version of a book that, while still recognisable as a set of bounded content, is read, used and experienced in a multitude of ways beyond what is currently possible with print and ebooks. The Rebus product stack is ambitious, but based on considered assessments of the industry as it stands, and on an understanding of what is made possible by web-based technologies. It differs significantly from existing models of production and consumption in that every stage is designed to be web-first, rather than considering the role of web technologies as an afterthought, and the primary goal is creation of content at scale for free and easy distribution, not controlled quantities for sale. Importantly, it also comes from a place of belief in the intrinsic value of books as cultural objects. It is this belief, combined with the opportunity to create new technologies, that will be the pillar of success for the Foundation.

However, change is always met with resistance, and to date, the commercial publishing industry has demonstrated  reluctance to change how they do things. While Hugh McGuire’s web-based book production software (Pressbooks) has not broken into the mainstream publishing market, there is an important lesson in its successes thus far; it has gained traction with those with the most invested in working outside industry norms, namely self-publishers, academic authors, and academic institutions looking for alternatives to the traditional academic publishing system.  It is this motivation—investment in change, readiness to try something new and a very real need for a new model—that must precede the kind of revolution the Rebus Foundation intends to usher in. There needs to be a “chink in the armour” before something new can break through. The Foundation believes it has found their way in through the Open Textbook movement—a community whose ambitions for changing the way publishing is undertaken align with their own and who share a view of the value of content beyond any monetary value. This symbiotic relationship has allowed the Rebus Foundation to take the first steps towards its vision of the future.

2.3 Open Education & Open Textbooks

2.3.1 Open Education

Open Education is a philosophy founded on the belief that education is fundamentally important to advancing society and that educational systems should be built to provide every person the opportunity to participate^[11]. The Open Education movement can trace its roots to David Wiley, an academic at Brigham Young University in the late 1990s. Around that time, projects like the Internet Archive, Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg were promoting the idea that content should be free and accessible to all, and their projects modelling it in practice. In 1998, Wiley released the first open content license in education, inspired by the use of open licenses in the Open Source community to enable members to freely develop and share their work^[12]. This was soon followed by the 2001 launch of MIT’s OpenCourseWare, which saw the university make the materials for nearly all their courses available online^[13]. It was with OpenCourseWare that the Open Education movement truly began, promising the possibility of improved access to education worldwide, with reduced costs and lower barriers to entry. In 15 years, the movement has grown, evolved and expanded beyond OpenCourseWare to include Open Educational Resources (OER), Open Pedagogy and Open Textbooks. Those involved with the movement have consistently advocated for the use of open licenses and technology to help share information and inspire innovative use of resources^[14], and continue to innovate around education to ensure the best outcomes for all learners.

2.3.2 Open Textbooks

Textbooks have a distinct role in education, and have become a distinct area of interest for the Open Education movement. Advocates insist textbooks should be released under an open license: free to anyone to read and, just as importantly, free to anyone to adapt and redistribute. Undoubtedly, the biggest driving force behind Open Textbook creation and adoption is the desire to challenge traditional textbook publishers who heavily restrict access to and uses of textbooks, and who have overseen prices for access and use rising at an astronomical rate over the past few decades years. In 2015, NBC reported that textbook prices have risen by 1041% since 1977^[15] and costs have risen at a triple the rate of inflation between 2003 and 2013^[16]. During roughly the same period, production costs have dropped, particularly with the introduction of digital production and distribution methods, and the cost of recreational books has dropped^[17]. While the internet has made the used book market more efficient, leading to publishers having to recoup more costs in the original purchase price of a textbook^[18], traditional textbook publishers maintain large profit margins that increased at an average of 2.5% between 2003 and 2012^[19], demonstrating that the impact of online resales is perhaps not as significant as claimed, and that rapidly increasing prices are a function of the commercial imperative to increase profits year over year, regardless of the financial and educational impact on students. Legacy commercial publishers have created an industry where a few key players dominate the market, and textbook content is tightly controlled and inaccessible to learners who in post-secondary education are faced with an average cost of $300 per semester for textbooks^[20]. Furthermore, for those who do pay, it is often via student loans, contributing to already extensive student debt^[21], and many others who choose not to purchase their required textbooks risk seeing their education suffer^[22].

Ultimately, many commercial publishers have limited interest in the potential of digital technologies to expand access to content because of the threat it poses to their business models, and some such as Pearson have found ways to use digital content to reinforce their current hold on the market, particularly through the use of access codes that lock students into their system and remove any secondary market for content (see Section 4.2 for more on this trend). As discussed, publishers are already challenged by the availability of content in the form of second-hand book sales, and rely entirely on original sales to recoup costs and turn a profit. As such, the ease of copying and distribution of digital materials, is not an appealing prospect. Digital content is inherently easily replicated, widely dispersed and revised by nearly anyone, three things that many publishers have sought to control and limit to “appropriate” channels. As a result, traditional publishers moving towards creating digital content employ strict digital rights management (DRM) systems that ensure that digital content remains as tightly controlled as its print predecessor. This is to the detriment of learners and educators, who are denied the benefits of accessible digital content and the Open Textbook movement seeks to redress that balance. David Wiley, who, as mentioned, has been actively involved in the Open Education movement since its inception, has worked to define the best practices, known as the “5Rs”, for open content, which would open up the benefits of free, accessible content to all. These best practices help define the rights in terms of content that the movement believes everyone should have:

1. Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content
2. Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video)
3. Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language)
4. Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
5. Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)^[23]

As the movement has developed, a system has emerged, with large and small players, non-profit organisations, academic institutions and dedicated individuals all working towards the goal of making Open Textbooks the default model for education. As a result of their work, several significant milestones have been reached. From observing increases in media coverage, the positive responses to conversations experienced by those in the industry and the number of new initiatives launching, there is a sense that the higher education is at a tipping point, where Open Textbooks will soon take off and become mainstream. In September 2016 alone, prominent Open Textbook publisher OpenStax recorded 1.5 million students accessing their books^[24] and the governor of Rhode Island announced a US$5 million initiative to fund Open Textbook production and adoption in the state^[25]. Leaders like SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) work tirelessly to advocate for Open Textbook adoption, to shift the culture within higher education, and to help people recognise the benefits for both educators and students. Student advocacy has also grown, with #textbookbroke^[26] campaigns successfully raising awareness of OER on campuses across Canada and the US, with support from SPARC, BCcampus, and recently US Senator Dick Durbin, the co-sponsor of the “Affordable Textbook Act”.^[27]

As can be seen from the examples above, great progress has been made with gaining buy-in from students, faculty, institutions and some areas of government. However, a scan of the Open Textbook ecosystem today shows a much larger emphasis on advocacy than production. There are few major Open Textbook publishers, and though the number of textbooks being produced may be growing, the major barriers to adoption remain the lack of resources in a particular subject area, the difficulty of finding those that do exist^[28]. It is important to consider that as those involved in higher education begin to support the concept of Open Textbooks, the barriers to wholesale adoption of Open Textbooks become less about a preference for traditionally published textbooks, and more about whether Open Textbooks can meet their needs. Current producers of Open Textbooks have focused on subjects with the highest enrollments—a sensible approach—but soon this will not be sufficient, as faculty in less popular subject areas and at different levels look to adopt Open Textbooks alongside their peers.

What is more, as enthusiasm for Open Textbook adoption grows, so does enthusiasm for creation, as evidenced by Rebus Foundation engagement with advocacy organisations, individual institutions and faculty during the planning process. A growing number of academics want to write Open Textbooks. Professors are asking their post doctoral candidates to create a chapter on their area of research. Institutions are considering how they can start an Open Textbook program and support their faculty to write them^[29]. There is an active interest in producing Open Textbooks, and yet no clear model for how to go about doing so. It is this need that the Rebus Foundation seeks to meet with its first two projects; the Rebus Community and the Rebus Press.

2.3.3 Production Models

Currently, there are several production models in play, some with significant drawbacks. An organisation like Flat World Knowledge, which has published 129 digital first textbooks written by commissioned authors, touts an “extensive collection of peer-reviewed content and open educational resources”^[30]. But while content is remixable by professors, students are charged for access and the company is run for profit, which sets them apart from others in the Open Textbook sphere, who are actively trying to reduce the financial burden on students. Even though they are definitively a part of the Open Textbook ecosystem, for-profit publishers are a distinct group of industry players who have more in common with the legacy publishers, building their business model on selling access to content and as a result, they have little motivation in the direction of change or innovation. Their model is what the OER community is seeking to distance themselves from (i.e. commercial sales of content to students) and it cannot be considered truly “Open” without the fundamental principle of free access.

Others follow the traditional publishing model, hiring authors to produce a text, with the authoring, production and review processes taking place in-house, but are grant-funded nonprofits and all content is openly licensed. OpenStax, based at Rice University, employs this model and is a major player in the market, closely aligned with the principles of the Open movement. Since 2012, they have launched 25 high-quality Open Textbooks in a range of popular subject areas. Notably, their textbooks are delivered in formats that are not easily accessible to anyone wanting to revise, remix or reuse the content. These uses are permitted by the license and are technically possible, but they are not well facilitated by the set up, as the organisation’s focus is on driving adoptions. The textbooks bear an open license and are available free to students, but they do not entirely fulfil the 5R best practices discussed in above and do not offer many authoring opportunities (which is also desirable for the reasons set out above).  As such, they should not be considered the preferred model.

Other models tend to be government or institutionally funded and have a mandate tied to the jurisdiction of the organisation, though the books they create can be used worldwide. BCcampus has emerged as a leader in deploying this model. Funded by the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education, they offer grants to authors and have seeded a collection of over 40 new textbooks aimed at BC’s highest-enrolled academic subject areas, as well as skills and trades training^[31]. Moreover, they have developed resources for authors, adopters, institutions and librarians, and have seen their textbooks adopted around the world^[32]. Their contribution and leadership in the Open Textbook arena is commendable and should serve as an example to others. Alone, however, it would be difficult to scale to meet the coming demand due to their limited focus.

Several themes emerge from this sampling of existing models. Each of the organisations discussed has a limited purview, often focussing on a specific territory or institution and other roles, such as advocacy. They are also all producing textbooks on a limited scale, often in the range of a handful of books a year. Finally, many offer limited paths to authorship by commissioning authors for specific projects, rather than allowing authors to drive projects and welcoming anyone willing to participate and create. While there is immense value in what OpenStax, BCcampus and similar organisations are producing, as well as individual authors publishing alone in whatever way they can, existing models are not designed to produce content at the scale required to meet the imminent demand for Open Textbooks in more subjects, more languages and more countries, nor do they provide a clear path for authors or institutions who are looking to contribute their own content. It is these challenges that the Rebus Foundation seeks to address.

2.3.4 Into the Future

What is clear from the current environment is that the textbook publishing industry is poised for significant changes as new entrants enter the market with viable alternative approached to production. Arguably, this began with the very first Open Textbook ever produced, and will continue until a new equilibrium is reached. The Rebus Foundation aims to be one of these new players, and help build a new system of Open Textbook publishing. What’s more, though the cost saving benefits for students in that new system are an easy sell, there are other distinct advantages to going Open. An effective Open Textbook publishing ecosystem could offer radically reduced costs of production, a vastly increased amount of permissively licensed content available with clear, unrestricted paths to authorship for anyone wanting to contribute. This would include marginalised voices and those who require technological support for physical impairments. The tools and resources created would also have a view to the world, enabling those with limited access to technology, working in any language and potentially in environments without formal government or institutional support structures. Finally, the ecosystem would see the production of high quality, digital-first content that can be easily and quickly accessed, remixed and tailored to specific needs and engagement with digital native learners, offering them an experience of a textbook that is consistent with their experiences of other digital content. It is this vision of an inclusive, technology-driven, forward-thinking, adaptive industry that has informed, and will continue to inform, the Rebus Foundation’s projects. Not every point listed here is specifically addressed in the first iterations of product design, but all decisions are actively informed by the possibilities of the future, and do not shut off any avenues that are required to realise this vision of the future.