Fighting over textbooks… More OA please?

People going undercover to get an edge in the bloody academic textbook market? Yup. According to a recent article in the Chronicle for Higher Education competition is fierce among book stores who are working hard to tap into our student loans.  Mytelka writes,

“The competitors for students’ textbook business are, on the one hand, several local independent booksellers, and on the other, the university bookstore, which is run under contract by the Follett Higher Education Group, the nation’s largest collegiate-bookstore chain.

It seems that a number of professors at the public university would prefer to give business to the local bookstores rather than to the Follett-run university store, so they provide their required reading lists — a prerequisite for ordering books ahead of time — only to the independent store owners.”

So theres another interesting side effect I’d have never imagined of making course reading lists available online well in advance. What really surprises me however is how little talk of open access publishing follows in the blog posts comments. Local book stores however might be hurt by OA publishing, unless they can be integrated into preparing course packs/OA material… I often prefer to have a hardcopy so I can read more easily in a cafe. Maybe they don’t want to turn into Kinko’s, but with all the OA material they could move in on the publishers terrain.

The discussion that followed the post points to the need for cheaper textbooks. One reader expresses his disdain for publishers strategies to fight the second hand book trade,

“Having worked my way through grad school at a local bookseller that carried textbooks, I need to chime in…the way publishers behave – new editions every year, homework websites with codes that can only be used once per book, and the like, I actually understand the impulse to pirate.”

Why pirate… At least when we get some more OOOAAA….

I enjoy sitting around in a bookstore so I feel for smaller bookstores who might benefit from the academic textbook system… At the same time, I really *hate* constant new editions of texts. Just update it online and make it available there. Bookstores might be able to find a way to thrive making OA material accessible in printed form.

Are publishers middlemen or drivers?

As I engage the issue of open access in anthropology, my position and views continue to change. I am one seriously biased academic, but this doesn’t mean I can’t change my mind often (several times a day even).

Having stalled out on the research front, I went back to some trusty sources to find inspiration. Blogs are a great place to find information, but its rare to find such extensive coverage of a topic as you do on Peter Suber’s Open Access News.

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Berg is an academic publisher that has been mentioned a few times in my interviews with professors. One of my professors regularly publishes books through them, and he spoke quite highly of the review process and the ability of Berg to publicize the books.

OA News points to a recent press release by Bloomsbury, a large publisher who recently acquired Berg. The press release states:

“Berg is a market leader in its field having pioneered the concept of fashion theory which is now a course widely taught at universities throughout the world. The company is in the process of creating a major online subscription-based resource, the Berg Fashion Library, for fashion students, lecturers and the broader industry. It is scheduled to be launched in 2010.”

It is interesting to consider the possibility that publishers are a driving force in the academic world, not just a middle man skimming profit from an economically exhausted academic system. Berg claims to have *pioneered* a field. The “fields of care” anthropologists spend time working on are dependent on a lot of different forces. How helpful is it to have publishers advocating certain kinds of research? I suppose there are two poles to look at this – one being that publishers restrict, funnel, and control academic topics – and the other that publishers encourage, promote, and develop academic topics.

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Bloomsbury will also be creating Bloomsbury Academic, a new “imprint” (hadn’t heard this term before), which will encourage open access publishing. They write:

“Publications will be available on the Web free of charge and will carry Creative Commons licences. Simultaneously physical books will be produced and sold around the world.

For the first time a major publishing company is opening up an entirely new imprint to be accessed easily and freely on the Internet. Supporting scholarly communications in this way our authors will be better served in the digital age.”

Can open access and capitalism get along? Maybe… just maybe.

[prior to internet publishing, publishers were essential for distribution]

[publishers can drive research fields]

[what is an imprint?]

[interrelationship between academics, disciplines, research topics, and publishers]   –>  possibly related to savageminds discussion of “fields of care”.

[I'd love to tie this into the kinds of fields Bourdieu discussed (my bourdieu readings are no longer fun at all, and I'm sort of lost. ) Thankfully Dr. Postill is hard at work liberating social fields from the archives of bad translations. I'm still too unsure of my understanding to make use of it (and I've read three Bourdieu books so far... + a number of essays), but i'm working on it]

[long live tags in brackets]