In the academic world, professors and faculty often meet with representatives of textbook publishers. These book reps like to stop by, or send an email, every so often to ask what my colleagues and I are using. My university uses a textbook rental system, which locks us into a particular book for a few years. When a book comes up for new adoption, you will surely see a book rep encouraging you to pick one of their textbooks.
Let me be up front and say I like these book reps. They are nice people and I enjoy talking to them. Even after adopting a publisher's textbook, book reps often help out with extra material (like online supplemental material or instructor resources). However, I don't always agree with the sales pitch. Let me go over a few.
Textbook adoptions are a weird business. The physics faculty selects the textbook, but the students are the ones responsible for buying (or renting) it. I'm not really the consumer, but I am making the buying decisions.
The biggest problem in this three-party system (publisher-student-faculty) is that it's difficult for the faculty to consider textbook cost. If you haven't noticed, textbooks can be quite expensive. If I was buying a book for myself, I absolutely would consider the price---and many faculty do take this into consideration. But you could see how students could end up with a pricier textbook because that's what the instructor picked.
Another crazy part of this textbook adoption is that the publishers must market to instructors. This means that they must include things that teachers like, not necessarily stuff that students want. Ideally, the instructor should be able to choose what's best for the student---but clearly this doesn't always work.
This is my favorite point to discuss with book reps. They bring in a fancy new textbook and argue that I should use it because it's better. I respond that textbook A and textbook B are nearly the same. "Oh no!" the rep will say. "Ours is different! We have life science applications built right into the book!" OK, that might be true. That might even be different than other books. However, the core of the textbook is the same as other textbooks.
Part of the problem might be that instructors choose textbooks, not students. Often, professors will use a line like, "Well, when I took physics we had sound and waves, so this textbook should have sound and waves." Yes, sound and waves are great topics---but you can only do so much in a one-semester course. You could of course skip that part of the book, but it does add to "book bloat."
Or what if you want to make a textbook that is different? What if you want a chapter on forces and vectors before looking at motion and kinematics? This isn't a huge change, but I suspect some faculty wouldn't consider such an approach because it's not how they learned physics. I'm actually surprised that an awesome and different book like Matter and Interactions ever got published. In case you aren't familiar with it, this great textbook starts with a few fundamental ideas in physics and includes numerical calculations right there in the book. Here's my review from a couple of years ago.
When book reps bring in a new and different book, I tell them I use Matter and Interactions—and ask if their book is different like this book is different. In just about every case, their book is mostly the same as all the rest.
Yes, book rep, your book is different. Your book has:
- Real world applications and examples in the sidebar.
- Connections to other courses and preparation for the MCAT.
- Worked out examples in the sidebar.
- Summaries at the end of each chapter.
- Great online material students can interact with.
I'm still waiting for a pre-highlighted textbook (perhaps it already exists) so students won't have to waste time finding the best parts to highlight.
I don't think any of these things are bad things, I just question how useful they are. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what you include in a textbook (or online) if students never uses it. What good are real-world applications if a student simply opens the book to find an answer?
A textbook isn't the answer to understanding physics, it's simply a tool for learning. Students still need to do physics in order to learn physics. Could you imagine if publishers offered textbooks about riding a bike? Students would just open the book to memorize the bike-riding formula, but wouldn't actually ride a bike. That's occasionally how a classroom feels.
I believe teachers need more than just a textbook. Sure, there a few gifted individuals can just pick up the text and understand it. Everyone else will need help. That's where the instructor comes in. I like to think of myself as a physics coach: I will help you do physics, but you still need to do the physics. A textbook should be useful here, but I don't expect you to understand everything simply by reading it.
That's essentially the starting line for my physics classes.
