Are textbooks one of the few mediums to still benefit from the old media bubble?
Seth Godin on why he thinks textbooks should die
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in pedagogy involved in writing a standard textbook. That’s what makes it standard. It’s hard, but it shouldn’t make you a millionaire.
They don’t make change. Textbooks have very little narrative. They don’t take you from a place of ignorance to a place of insight. Instead, even the best marketing textbooks surround you with a fairly non-connected series of vocabulary words, oversimplified problems and random examples.
They’re out of date and don’t match the course. The 2009-2010 edition of the MKTG textbook, which is the hippest I could find, has no entries in the index for Google, Twitter, or even Permission Marketing.
They don’t sell the topic. Textbooks today are a lot more colorful and breezy than they used to be, but they are far from engaging or inspirational. No one puts down a textbook and says, “yes, this is what I want to do!”
They are incredibly impractical. Not just in terms of the lessons taught, but in terms of being a reference book for years down the road.
In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it’s foolish to give me definitions to memorize. Where is the context? When I want to teach someone marketing (and I do, all the time) I never present the information in the way a textbook does. I’ve never seen a single blog post that says, “wait until I explain what I learned from a textbook!”
I’d disagree, our Organic Chemistry textbook actually made me want to do Orgo chem. Or Inorganic book was also quite well written. However I do agree that the prices are absurd.