Page 315 - Crisis in Higher Education

Creating High-Technology Learning Materials • 285

to many people is that these new high-tech tools should cost substantially
less than traditional textbooks.
The reasons why a high-tech approach cost less is easier to see when
Table 13.1 is examined. Publishing traditional textbooks and creating
high-tech reading materials have fixed and variable costs. For printed
books, authors engage in idea generation, and they write and create the
text and supporting materials, such as instructor’s manuals and study
guides. Textbooks are professionally edited, and suggested changes are
reviewed by authors. Page proofs, which put the book into the proper for-
mat, are prepared by the publisher and reviewed by authors. Once this is
done, the book is ready for printing. High-tech reading materials have a
similar set of actions that represent the fixed costs of their creation.
Over the past three decades, publishers have incorporated technol-
ogy into their printed textbooks by offering electronic study guides, test
banks, and other tools to reduce costs and improve learning. These online
efforts require software development as shown in Table 13.1. As publish-
ers move to interactive high-tech reading materials, software investment
is likely to increase to create more sophisticated tools. However, there
are economies of scale in software development if reading materials for
different subjects use the same platform. People can debate whether
the fixed costs of publishing a traditional textbook are higher or lower
than creating high-tech reading materials, but it is likely that the differ-
ence between the two is small. The real advantage for high-tech reading
materials is lower variable costs.
Production and delivery costs are much lower for high-tech reading
material because each copy of a traditional textbook must be printed and
bound, which consumes truckloads of materials and requires large fac-
tories full of printing equipment. Next, Table 13.1 lists 10 material han-
dling and transport steps until students walk out of the bookstore with
the textbook. Even if textbooks are sold online, many of these steps are
required, plus there is packing and shipping from the online retailer to
the student. For the unsold books, six steps are needed to return them
to the publisher. On the other hand, high-tech reading materials are
uploaded to the website so faculty and students can download them as
needed. It seems clear that this costs less than all the printing, handling,
and storing required for traditional books. Besides, most traditional text-
books have electronic support materials that must be loaded to a website
and distributed to faculty and students, so publishers are already incur-
ring many of these expenses.