Future of the Introductory Psychology Textbook: A Survey of College Publishers

Abstract

Editors from 12 major publishing houses completed a survey examining 5 aspects of the introductory psychology textbook market: the current and future number of introductory texts the changing content of introductory texts, the effects of fewer introductory textbook publishers, custom publishing, and computer technologies. Editors reported that (a) their companies now offer and will continue to offer an average of 4–8 texts; (b) introductory texts will likely become more cross-cultural, biological, cognitive, and scientific in orientation; (c) the shrinking number of publishers will reduce the number of texts but increase their overall quality; (d) custom-published texts are unlikely to replace traditional texts; and (e) CD-ROM-based materials will be used more in the future and may eventually replace the traditional text.