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This Textbook Deal Could Change Education Publishing

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In a deal announced this week, OpenStax, the open educational resource initiative at Rice University, will publish the 10th edition of John McMurry’s organic chemistry textbook.

That may not sound like a big deal, but it is.

This one textbook deal may change the way textbooks and other education materials are made and used and could also have a big impact on publishing, teaching and even the cost of going to college.

That’s because open education resources (OER) are free – and not just free but open-source so they can be updated or revised regularly without licenses and permissions. OER books and other teaching and learning materials aren’t new. The idea of making educational resources free has been around for some time. In fact, OpenStax itself already has 57 free textbooks used by more than six million students annually.

What’s different about this book deal is that this textbook is already a best seller, the market leader in organic chemistry. And it’s about to be free. For everyone, for anyone. In the agreement, the book’s previous publisher, Cengage, is giving up its rights and revenue and McMurry, the author, is giving up substantial royalties in order to make their best-selling book free.

There are reasons, of course. For McMurry, it’s legacy and family. In the deal announcement, McMurry said he was moved to make the new edition free as a tribute to his son Peter, who died in 2019 after fighting cystic fibrosis. For Cengage, they spoke about “a commitment to providing affordable access to quality learning for students,” which there’s no reason to doubt.

But for OpenStax, and OER more generally, it’s monumental.

Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of OpenStax described the deal as “watershed” and told me, “OER had always been viewed as a really good idea but it has never caught on in mainstream.” Now, by landing a best-selling textbook used by more than a million students around the world, it is. “We’ve always taken our authors and worked to develop our own into market leaders. But now,” Baraniuk said, “a market leader is coming to us.”

OpenStax was, Baraniuk said, “founded for the expressed purpose of bringing this to the mainstream so we can disrupt the way publishing is done in education – get quality up, cost down, and make learning better.” And in turn, free books and resources would, “address the access crisis in higher education, the fact that textbooks and learning materials have become so expensive that students decide not to buy them and have worse academic outcomes,” he said.

As good as free textbooks are, the Cengage/McMurry/OpenStax deal may also foretell a big shift in education publishing, which some analysists have characterized as on the brink of collapse pretty much since the advent of the internet.

“I think this deal marks the end of the first phase of the shift in publishing,” said David Harris, editor in chief at OpenStax. “Publishers are right now trying to figure out fitting their core business into platform subscription models and direct to student models,” Harris said. “And we see traditional publishers as developing a shared mindset, giving up some control and being willing to share their IP and have the content and resources live on multiple channels with increased access.” OER, Harris says, “aligns with their goals of being a platform player, as having content and a platform.”

Part of merging content with platform is bringing targeted supplemental tools and teaching resources to the same place, aligned for common purpose – in this case, by “two of the most advanced courseware programs on the market” in Cengage WebAssign and Aktiv Chemistry, an in-class engagement and homework platform built specifically for chemistry courses.

“Historically,” Harris said, “you’d get a single author on a single publisher platform, that’s not efficient, it stifled innovation and raised costs but if you can develop an ecosystem of quality resources that support core content, it’s better.” Harris continued, “It’s just better if we partner with an organization like Aktiv that can support John [McMurry’s] work with their outstanding drawing tools, for example.” OpenStax says it as 82 ecosystem partners that can enhance and support textbook content.

But still, in this case, the traditional publisher and the author had to give up money to make the deal, which does not feel like a sustainable or repeatable path for OER.

That’s true, the players say, but the McMurray deal is unique in two ways. One, McMurray’s generosity. Two, that McMurry is a big exception in education publication, in a position that does not apply to many authors.

“John is in the five percent of authors who become best sellers,” Harris said. “Most make less – like ninety or ninety-five percent less. With OER, we pay during the development, authors are guaranteed payment. Royalties are a gamble so ninety-five percent of authors do better in our model from the start.”

“In fact, we know many authors whose revenue stream is negative, where publishers hold development expenses against future royalties,” said Baraniuk. “When we started, we had to go find people, explain who we were,” he said. “But that’s changed. This deal lays to rest any question regarding OER quality or sustainability – finally puts that to rest. And as it gets easier and easier to make materials available through publishers like us – OER are only going to get stronger.”

Will that change education publishing? Maybe. Will it save students real dollars? Yes. Will it change the books that teachers require or bring new authors and audiences into the market? Probably. And that sounds like a bid deal indeed.

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