Two-thirds of all books purchased each year in the United States are bought in an educational context. Yet very little has been written about educational publishing in general and college textbooks in particular. This article presents a general discussion of college textbooks, covering their role in American higher education; the economics of textbook publishing; the ways in which texts are created; constraints on innovation in text publishing; and the concept of the “managed” textbook.
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References
1.
DessauerJohn P.“Books in Education,”Publishers Weekly206, no. 26 (30 December 1974), p. 27. See also, John P. Dessauer, Book Publishing (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1974)
2.
A Study of the College Textbook Market, prepared by Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., for the Association of American Publishers (February 1974)
3.
JovanovichWilliam“The American Textbook: An Unscientific Phenomenon— Quality without Control,”American Scholar38, no. 2 (Spring 1969), p. 227
4.
Jovanovich“American Textbook,” p. 230. Emphasis in the original
5.
The only recent example at the college level is Bronowski'sJacobThe Ascent of Man (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.1974)
6.
Only rarely does an unsolicited proposal or manuscript ultimately result in a book
7.
The Yankelovich study (pp. 53ff.) reports that in 1974, 79 percent of the instructors made their own decisions regarding book adoptions, an increase of 3 percent from 1972, continuing a trend that developed in the early 1960s
8.
Although the size of advances has declined since 1970, it still is common for a well-known academic to receive an advance in excess of $15,000. I know of several instances involving well-known academics in which considerably larger sums were advanced; the books were never written and the money never returned
9.
Within college publishing the acquiring editor has a higher status and salary than other editors and usually is a male. The editor who actually edits the manuscript is paid considerably less and usually is female. See, for example, Women in the Boston Area Publishing Industry: A Status Report, (Boston: Women in Publishing, March 1975)
10.
See, for example, HunterDavid E.WhittenPhillipThe Study of Anthropology (New York: Harper & Row1976); Michael McKee and Ian Robertson, Social Problems (New York: Randon House, March 1975); and The Study of Society (Guilford, Ct.: Dushkin Publishing Group, November 1973)
11.
See, SchneiderJoseph W.HackerSally H.“Sex-Role Imagery and Use of the Generic ‘Man’ in Introductory Texts: A Case in the Sociology of Sociology,”American Sociologist8 (1973), pp. 12–18
12.
Some of the reasons given for use of the word were: “‘Man’ is a short word”; “‘man’ has a meritricious suggestion of dignity about it for many people.”
13.
Publishers, however, do not seem to be alone in their ambivalence about sexist language. In a market survey conducted in October 1974 for Harper & Row, more than 500 instructors of introductory anthropology were asked whether publishers should make a conscious effort to eliminate sexist language in their anthropology texts. Only 61.1 percent said yes and 38.9 percent said no; at the two-year schools surveyed the response was even more dismal, with only 50 percent answering affirmatively and 50 percent negatively
14.
See, PetersonIver“College Textbooks Are Being Simplified to Meet the Needs of the Poor Reader,”New York Times, 7 November 1974
15.
FleschRudolf“A New Readability Yardstick,”Journal of Applied Psychology32 (1948), pp. 221–233. For a current application of the Flesch test, see, Barry Gillen, “Readability and Human Interest Scores of Thirty-Four Current Introductory Psychology Texts,” American Psychologist (November 1973), pp. 1010–1011
16.
See, for example, McLaughlinG. Harry“SMOG Grading—A New Readability Formula,”Journal of Reading12, no. 8 (1973), pp. 639–646
17.
A readability expert once advised me that the word anthropomorphic was too difficult to include in an introductory sociology text and advised substituting the word manlike throughout the book. The next time you come across the word person-like in a textbook, you may be assured that it was substituted for the original anthropomorphic by a liberated readability expert
18.
McLaughlin“SMOG Grading,” p. 639. The reading level of this article, for example, is 17; it might have been less if only the words editor and publisher contained two syllables rather than three
19.
Plus 20,000 copies of a trade edition averaging $10 above the text price
20.
Some of the books published by CRM and the Dushkin Publishing Group cost in the neighborhood of $100,000 for manuscript alone
21.
Managed book publishers have learned that the academic community demands the name of an author on the cover of a book. There now exist several successful managed textbooks whose so-called authors wrote virtually none of the book
