4
Inevitably, with big changes come big questions. If the Rebus model is successful, the publishing industry, for textbooks, other academic content and ultimately all kinds of books, will find itself in uncharted territory. Acknowledging that any grand proclamations can only be considered speculation, there are still some lines of reasoning that indicate what the future, or at least a future could look like.
4.1 What is the business model moving forward?
The Foundation is a non-profit organisation and has been able to launch the projects discussed in this report thanks to a US$500,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation. Other grants are being pursued in relation to other projects, including the Shuttleworth Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation for the webbook format, reader and library. Long term, once the tools and services have been developed, the creation and distribution of Open content will need to be supported by reliable sources of revenue in order to be sustainable but, at this stage, the exact business model remains uncertain. It must be acknowledged that this is the biggest challenge facing the Foundation’s proposed publishing model. The Foundation’s ethos begins with the premise that educational content has value as a public good independent of its value as a commercial product, which conflicts with the current dominant paradigm. However, the Foundation’s position is that there are other people, organisations and state actors who recognise that same public value, who are invested in the same outcomes in education, and as such, will support the Foundation’s work and Open Textbooks generally going forward. While educational content has not traditionally be considered a public good, education has been, as demonstrated by publicly funded education systems. While it may be some time before this approach becomes mainstream, the Foundation’s current funding allows it an opportunity to demonstrate the value of what it does, and there are several avenues to pursue that should allow the value of the work being done to become evident to others.
In the short term, relying on grant funding for the development phase allows for considerable flexibility, responsiveness and the freedom to concentrate on product development without any commercial pressures. The non-profit funding model with a start-up grant allows the direction of development to be guided by the needs of all users invested in the shift towards Open, abundant content, not just those who will be in a position to pay for the added services. This ensures an egalitarian approach and the freedom to remain committed to the social justice mission of Open Education. Another advantage is that this model allows for some measure of uncertainty around which services can successfully be monetised in future. Given that this model is untested for Open Textbooks, the Foundation can only work on “hunches,” and grant-funding allows areas of potential monetisation to emerge from development, rather than dictating it. The Foundation also anticipates the possibility of revenue streams from sources such as premium services to libraries, institutionally branded and integrated instances of Rebus Press, and other paid services related to the personal library. These streams are consistent with the model of services around easily accessible, abundant content can support the creation and distribution of the content itself.
It is also likely that in the educational and scholarly space, there will be opportunities for funding to be sourced from institutions, who already invest in publishing efforts by and for their stakeholders. Rebus foresees some funding will be sourced through library consortia and other institutional avenues as they move away from purchasing access to content from traditional publishers. A similar approach is currently being pursued by proponents of Open Access publishing, where there are efforts to shift the money currently paid by libraries for journal subscriptions towards production and other publishing costs, of which Open Textbooks could form a part. The Rebus Foundation team has also discussed the possibility of administering a funding pool for Open Textbook creators, sourced from governments or Foundations like Hewlett and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, which would allow some funding to be allocated to supporting the Rebus Community on a per-project basis. What emerges from this survey of potential revenue streams is that the Rebus Foundation will likely end up employing a combination of several different lines of financial support to form a hybrid business model, and it will continue to consider ways in which it can support the long term success of the system it is aiming to build. This allows for flexibility, and the engagement and support of non-commercial stakeholders, and in the long run will hopefully allow a new ecosystem to emerge.
4.2 What does this mean for existing textbook publishers?
If the Rebus Community, and the Open Textbook movement at large, are successful in their shared ambition, large, traditional textbook publishers could eventually have their current business models rendered obsolete. Those publishers’ current business models are mostly reliant on selling access to content, to which the introduction of high quality, free content into the market at scale is a threat. The Open model has the potential to become the most viable alternative for all those in the industry, but, admittedly, it will not happen quickly. Already, the response from traditional publishers to the looming challenge to their dominance has inspired a public relations response, challenging often cited textbook cost metrics with statistics showing a slight decrease in costs to students[1] and citing the risks to students of a “radical new type of instruction”[2]. They have also been working to create new revenue streams for themselves, by providing extra services to educators and in a concession to technological progress, which will likely make any shift towards Open content being the default even more drawn out. The strongest indication of this change is seen with many traditional publishers now offering improved digital textbooks and teaching resources, requiring a single-use, student specific access code.
A recent study from the Student Public Research Interest Groups (PIRGs) analysed the access code trend and found that their use is growing, with an average of 32% of courses in the US requiring them at an average cost around $100[3]. Leaving aside any question about the quality of these resources, this approach has the very intentional consequence of creating a new way for publishers to charge educators and students for access to content. Moreover, it actively shuts off previous alternatives to accessing educational content, such as second hand book sales, use of library course reserves or sharing with friends, increasing the financial burden on students yet again. In short, when access codes are used to restrict access to textbook content and tests and assignments, students ability to opt-out is eliminated[4]. It is more than likely that this approach will continue as traditional publishers close ranks. This demonstrates some level of adaptability in the existing system, but ultimately, the approach relies on a limited access paradigm, in a world that continues to move towards one of content abundance. In the end, the Rebus Foundation believes, such efforts can be undermined by moving towards an Open-first system.
It is also interesting to note that the market includes many smaller textbooks publishers, including associations and university presses. While it is the anti-competitive oligopoly of legacy textbook publishers that has ushered in the biggest issues with textbooks today, the “long tail”[5] deserves consideration as well. Textbook sales are an important revenue stream for these organisations and they will be just as, if not more, severely impacted by the shift to Open as the default. However, this presents an interesting opportunity. In the same way that many subscription journals have been convinced to transition to Open Access[6], so too could smaller textbook publishers (particularly those with non-profit mandates) transition to an Open Textbook model. It is beyond the scope of this report to consider all the challenges associated with this kind of change, but a tool like Rebus Press could already go a long way to reducing the cost of production, thus minimising the impact of the lost revenue stream.
4.3 Does this make Rebus a publisher?
The Rebus Foundation, Community and Press are publishers, but not publishers in the way that we currently understand the term. While they provide tools and platforms to produce content, they do not perform the tasks traditionally involved in publishing: acquisitions, editing, production, distribution or marketing. By only providing the scaffolding and tools for publishing, they have more in common with different stakeholders in the publishing industry. For example, Rebus is part production software provider (just as Adobe provides InDesign), and part distributor, collecting books from various sources together to make accessing them easier (much as Raincoast Books does). It is part community builder (similar to GoodReads), part technology developer (like W3C or the IDPF), and part service provider (like BookNet Canada). Given the scope of what Rebus intends to achieve in the publishing industry — drastically, radically changing the publishing process — it is normal to want to conceive of them as a publisher. And yet, Rebus performs very few of the tasks associated with traditional publishers. Rebus does not commission, acquire, edit, format, design, print, market or sell books and as such, it is not a publisher.
On the other hand, however, there is an argument to be made that Rebus is an early example of the publisher of the future. That kind of publisher may never have been seen before, but it could come to be the generally accepted understanding of what a publisher is, and what a publisher does: bringing together a community of authors, editors and other skilled participants to work collaboratively to develop books, using a system like Rebus Press to develop digital-first content that can be accessed and managed by a web-native reader and library, aiding deep reading in a digital context. This idea could be countered by the fact that the Rebus Foundation is not setting out to do this, with the true emphasis on creating the tools that others can use to be this new kind of publisher. In that sense, Rebus would be considered a technology provider, but the reality is that by launching its products using the Open Textbook industry as a very real test case, all intentions aside, it is acting as a model of its own vision of the future. If successful, it could one day become a model for many more in the publishing industry, and beyond.
- Association of American Publishers. Surveys Reveal College Students Spent an Average of $600 on Textbooks for 2015 - 2016 Academic Year. Business Wire, 10 August 2016. Business Wire, 10 August 2016. ↵
- Robbins, J. & Sullivan, J. Our view: Openly licensed educational resources pose a threat to teachers. Deseret News, 8 August 2016. ↵
- SPIRG. Access Denied, September 2016. ↵
- ibid. ↵
- Anderson, C. The Long Tail. WIRED, 1 October, 2004. ↵
- Solomon, D., Laakso, M. and Björk, B-C. Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences. August 2016. ↵