One
of my motives in moving from a commercial textbook company to writing
through Amazon was the desire to write on a continuous basis. My
frustration with the commercial approach was that you ignored your work
for three years and then worked feverishly for 3-5 months in order to
generate the next edition. I saw there were two problems in this
approach. First, hard copy textbooks are out of date when first
published (at least when addressing technology) and it made sense to me
to take an approach that would allow me to continue to offer new content
(online) as soon as the content was relevant. Second, the hectic pace
of meeting a deadline does not allow for the best analysis and writing.
This was particularly the case for me as my academic job means I have
the most open time in the summer and this was not the time frame during
which the work had to be done. The commercial folks never disagreed with
my analysis, they just did not want to pay any amount for a future
edition and would not offer an advance.
You may or may
not understand how textbooks are financed. After the first edition for
which you should be able to secure an advance on sales, the company
decides whether or not a future edition will be offered and does not
offer an advance. Since you, as the author, do not own the copyright but
share it with the company, you are not free to suggest that a different
company might be more willing to support the authoring model you
propose.
Anyway, we have now exclusively held our
copyright for several years and I have been offering resources based on
this approach. We have a web site offering “supplemental” content
to our book since it was released and I plan to rework the core book
based on this content this summer. Since, the release of the latest
edition the topic of “computational thinking” (programming or coding to
many) has kind of returned to favor among practicing educators. You may
be aware of this trend or perhaps interest in the “maker movement” which
often incorporates programming skills. I have prepared a chapter and
supplemental resources for our the next revision of our book. Rather
than wait until this summer to make the “chapter” available, I am
offering the draft of this chapter on our web site. This content will be
available from the site until the revision of the book is complete. If
you are interested in computational thinking and would like to review my
take on the topic, access to our web site is available at no cost.
Beta content - http://learningaloud.com/grabe6/code/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment