What was the revelation that hit me within two hours?

Until recently, textbooks needed to serve two purposes.

First, textbooks are meant to be learning vehicles, filled with pedagogical detail and guidance and explanation for people who have no prior knowledge of the subject. And hopefully written by people who have a degree of pedagogical content knowledge (ideas about teaching the subject that derive from understanding the subject combined with a utility belt’s worth of teaching strategies).

Second, textbooks were (note the tense) meant to be a bookshelf reference. Even as you were learning, if you needed to query the subject, you reach for the book and hit the index.

News alert for the 21st Century: no one reaches for a book to do this any more, not when the entire internet is a clever keyword (and key phrase) indexing system away and you carry it around in your pocket.

As I sat for the first time as a prospective author, I was faced with words and diagrams in the fifth edition of the Ege text that were bogged down in the world of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when textbooks serving two purposes were necessary. It’s only something you really see, I guess, when you are thinking about writing and what you want to say.

By 2015, I knew instinctively that I only needed to think about the pedagogical mission and not the reference mission, but the narrative of this 5th edition, whose basic foundation dated from a time when these missions were integrated, was simply falling apart as I even thought about editing the manuscript.

Surely this issue had been resolved in more contemporary texts?

Honestly, I knew the answer to that question, but I looked anyway. Book after book… all the same. Market pressure and the nature of how textbooks (and other commercial creative works) are created is central to this. Let me explain.

I never got past the initial conversation about authoring when it came up in my office, over and over during the years, because I am a strong Creator’s Rights advocate. Why does that matter? Because books are written as what is called “work for hire.” It’s the old press, studio, and gallery deal (the “We” who run the presses and own the galleries): We hire you to produce a work that We own and have complete control over. We cut you in for a piece of the action (royalties) but We retain ownership. If you do not want to edit something or revise something after We ask you to, then We retain the right to hire someone else to do it and they get their piece of the action, too. So the creators of Superman were paid their agreed upon fee and the company owns the property. And the Creators signed on from the outset (it’s called a work for hire contract). When Superman hits big, the Creators have no claim. Music artists who worked for a label; actors who worked for a movie or TV studio; and on and on. Many industries have come around (billion-dollar profits from films do not only remain with the suits), and production and distribution technologies (who can record, who can print) have loosened the monopoly previously held by publishers.

Throughout the years, my dinner conversations with publishers were short: I am happy to create a book, but I am going to finance it and own the property. I will provide edited and camera-ready copy. What I need you to do is enter into a licensing deal with me to print and distribute. Needless to say, those conversations were over even before the water glasses were filled and the bread basket was at the table.

Books are created by the suits, the suits want to sell as many books as they can. The suits cannot write books; they need to hire authors to generate the IP. Then they need the author as an employee who does what is asked based on market surveys. In my life, I met many textbook authors who went into text writing because of their intellectual and emotional enthusiasm to truly bring a personal vision forward. And in my life, the textbook authors I met were nearly always unhappy and frustrated by the process and how the product ended up.

And that brings me back to 2015. In less than two hours it was as clear as a bell that I needed to think about “design” in a big way if I wanted to create a textbook that was not bogged down by its mission as an on-the-shelf reference source at the same time it was serving its pedagogical mission.

And that took another 3 years.