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10.10

By Donald Christiansen

That’s the question we often ask when roaming across and delving into the Internet. But now we must be aware that even textbooks that are ostensibly the work of one author may have been amended and rewritten by several others without the knowledge of the original author.

This became evident when Macmillan’s subsidiary, DynamicBooks, introduced electronic textbooks that are editable at will by professors and others to “customize” them for particular purposes. Chapters may be rewritten or replaced by alternate material. Paragraphs, equations and illustrations may be deleted or altered. Some academic faculty seem not to see any harm in this — many believing that changes will be clearly marked and their authors identified. The textbook authors themselves may think otherwise.

At this point I need to confirm that I have a dog in this fight. As both author and editor, I would object strongly to having anything bearing my byline rewritten or significantly altered without my involvement and approval.

In reaction to the new editable texts, college instructors note that publishers have offered customized print textbooks for some time, in which chapters could be reordered and complementary material from other sources added. Digital rewriting, on the other hand, can be done without any involvement of the author or even notification to the publisher. Thus if you were the author of such a text, different versions of “your” book might be found in use by different professors at different schools.

In a Wall Street Journal article entitled “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Author,” Gordon Crovitz responded to the Macmillan announcement by noting that “Mistakes can be corrected and new views expressed with the wisdom of crowds — or at least the wisdom of professors — [thus] improving the work of a single author.” Yet he wondered about the unintended consequences of the “authorless” new texts, speculating about the outcome if a text like Paul Samuelson’s Economics, which sold four million copies and was elegantly written and became canonical, were to be subjected to the alterable-at-will process. Jason Lanier, the computer scientist who popularized the term “virtual reality,” told Crovitz he thought the new process “appalling and preposterous.”

A Wiki-like Move

If you noticed that the editable-at-will texts take a page (no pun intended) from Wikipedia, you’d be right. Wikipedia is estimated to consist of millions of articles/items written collaboratively by volunteers who are presumed experts or at least knowledgeable in a particular topic. It is meant to project a neutral point of view and bans the inclusion of any original research. Its target users are anybody and everybody. Only “registered users” can create a new article, but anyone may anonymously edit the articles. This permits erroneous, nonsensical and openly biased material to be added, and prompts the equally anonymous experts to delete or re-edit the additions as quickly as possible.

The result is that many Wikipedia articles are well developed, current and accurate, while others are sketchy and of questionable value. Student research often relies on Wikipedia entries, although some professors disallow their use as references in submitted papers. Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, in 2007 remarked that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are the intellectual equivalent of a dietician who recommends a steady diet of “Big Macs with everything.” He expressed worry that online sources are discouraging students from learning from the more rare texts found only on paper or on restricted websites.

Among the most frequently viewed Wikipedia articles in 2009 were The Beatles (No. 2) and Michael Jordan (No. 3). Also among the top twenty were Adolf Hitler, Transformers, Scrubs, and Slumdog Millionaire, seeming to substantiate critics’ accusations of undue weight being given to popular culture. (In a 2008 report on Wikipedia content, technology and applied science accounted for only 4 percent of the Wiki articles, and mathematics one percent.)

The Future

Will e-textbooks become the mashups that characterize Wikipedia? I am not sure. Perhaps each professor will produce his or her own version of an e-text, cobbled from a variety of sources at little or no cost. Perhaps the professors will resell them to their students. Textbook publishers will then need to seek a new line of business. Authors of classic texts would then be found only in the pages of history. The incentives for and rewards to individuals to create such inspirational textbooks will have disappeared, supplanted by the anonymous activity of the hive and the homogeneous if perhaps bland output of the crowd. But wait. Today’s students may find the mashups more appropriate to their style of learning and even more inspirational than those ancient carved-in-stone textbooks. We shall see.

Resources

For more about editable texts:

“New Macmillan Subsidiary, DynamicBooks, Redefines Interactive Textbooks for Higher Education,“ Macmillan press release, New York, Feb. 22, 2010.

Rich, M., “Textbooks That Professors Can Rewrite Digitally,” The New York Times, Feb. 22, 2010.

Hardawar, D. “Macmillan announces DynamicBooks, allows instructors to edit digital textbooks,” venturebeat.com, Feb. 22, 2010.

“New Macmillan Subsidiary, DynamicBooks, Redefines Interactive Textbooks for Higher Education,” newsblaze.com, Feb. 22, 2010.

Crovitz, G., “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Author,” The Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com, Feb. 28, 2010.

For more about Wikipedia:

Kittur, A., E. H. Chi, and B. Suh, “What’s in Wikipedia,” Proc. of 27^th Int. Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

“The 50 Most-viewed Wikipedia Articles in 2007 and 2008,” The Daily Telegraph, London, Aug. 17, 2009.

Helm, B., “Wikipedia: ‘A Work in Progress,’” Business Week, Mar. 14, 2008.

Stothart, C., “Web Threatens Learning Ethos,” The Times Higher Education Supplement,                 June 22, 2007.

Hafner, K., “Growing Wikipedia Refines Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” The New York Times, June 17, 2006.

Zittrain, J., “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It,” Chap. 6, The Lessons of Wikipedia, Yale University Press, 2008.

Lanier, J., You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Alfred Knopf, 2010.

Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He is a Fellow of the IEEE. He can be reached at donchristiansen@ieee.org.