Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
News

New Digital Tools Let Professors Tailor Their Own Textbooks for Under $20

And that’s just one option, along with mix-and-match Web sites from big publishers and libraries of open-source content

By Alex Campbell October 9, 2011
Daniel Flint, a professor of marketing at the U. of Tennessee at Knoxville, used a service called AcademicPub to create his own e-textbook, priced at $14.95.
Daniel Flint, a professor of marketing at the U. of Tennessee at Knoxville, used a service called AcademicPub to create his own e-textbook, priced at $14.95.Courtesy of Daniel Flint

For his marketing course at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Daniel Flint wanted his students to read a white paper on public relations, a couple of case studies, an industry report, and a chapter of a forthcoming book.

So he created a textbook with just that—more than 100 pages of material in one customized package for his students.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

For his marketing course at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Daniel Flint wanted his students to read a white paper on public relations, a couple of case studies, an industry report, and a chapter of a forthcoming book.

So he created a textbook with just that—more than 100 pages of material in one customized package for his students.

Mr. Flint, a professor of marketing at the university, used a new build-your-own-textbook service called AcademicPub, which arranged payment of royalties and compiled the material for publication. His students were given three options for buying the book: Download a digital edition for $14.95, get it in paperback for $27, or go for the hardcover for $45.

The idea of customized textbooks has been around for years, but until recently use of the option was rare. But these days more professors appear to be taking a Frankensteinian approach to their textbooks—making something new from spare parts, thanks to new digital tools, rather than simply assigning an existing tome.

And professors have more options to do so, with upstarts like AcademicPub, mix-and-match Web sites from major publishers, and a growing libraries of open-source content that they can edit on their own.

“It’s sort of like a perfect storm for making real, substantive change” in the publishing industry, said Richard Baraniuk, a co-founder of Connexions, one of the first Web collections of free educational material. There are more and more cheaper options, with more and more credibility, as fewer and fewer students say they can afford traditional textbooks.

Indeed, price seems to be driving the move toward customization. Creating a textbook with only what a professor plans to use, or skipping textbook publishers altogether, can greatly reduce materials’ costs for students.

Some forces may limit the adoption, though, such as the limited libraries of some build-your-own-textbook services and a general reluctance by professors to try a new model.

A Publishing Upstart

AcademicPub started this April, and its leaders have expanded its library to two million pieces of content from 75 publishers, including Cambridge University Press, Princeton University Press, and Harvard and MIT’s business publishers. And instructors can pull in any kind of free content from the Web, said Caroline Vanderlip, chief executive of SharedBook, which runs AcademicPub.

As professors mix and match book chapters, case studies, and journal articles, the site keeps track of how much royalties are going to cost. Once the book is made, students have the option of buying it digitally or paying an extra $10 (with an additional 3 cents per page if the book is more than one hundred pages) for the textbook.

ADVERTISEMENT

The printed books are professionally bound in hardcover or paperback, and they can be mailed to students. Or, if professors want, students can buy them at campus bookstores.

So far, Ms. Vanderlip said, 80 percent of students using AcademicPub textbooks choose to order the printed version of their professors’ textbooks.

About 600 instructors have signed up for the service so far, but Ms. Vanderlip said that the company will be making its first big push for customers this fall, as professors plan their spring courses.

But professors are often reluctant to move away from their favorite textbooks, said Albert Greco, a publishing expert and a professor of marketing at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business. Price and convenience matter, but so do the DVD and Web extras that often come with traditional textbooks.

ADVERTISEMENT

And AcademicPub does not have licensing with any of the textbook publishers that Mr. Greco says make up the “Big Five"—Prentice Hall, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons, and Macmillan. Those companies control the majority of the textbook market.

Mr. Greco said AcademicPub was a “very important opportunity for instructors,” but “you need the Big Five.” Otherwise, he said, many professors will look elsewhere.

Ms. Vanderlip acknowledges that the industry’s giants “have their own custom-pub solutions,” but she said the market is big enough that she doesn’t need to aim for every professor. “It’s not my goal to have every piece of content ever written,” she said.

Slow but Steady Growth

Professors have long been able to tailor copyrighted textbooks, but in the past it had been a clunky process. Eric Frank, founder of Flat World Knowledge, should know.

ADVERTISEMENT

When he worked at Pearson, the company’s custom-textbook option often involved taking books apart and putting them back together at the production facility. “It’s kind of like surgery with a butcher knife,” he said.

Mr. Frank became interested in the growing amount of open-source online content, but he thought it was often lacking the quality of professional textbooks. So he created Flat World to bring curation to free materials. The company finds scholars willing to build peer-reviewed textbooks published under a Creative Commons license, which lets others edit and customize the books and allows students free online access to them.

Since publishing its first book in 2009, the company has seen its customer base grow to 3,000 instructors, who pick from 55 different textbooks. About 20 percent of Flat World’s customers end up customizing the books they use, Mr. Frank says, though he expects that proportion soon to grow to more like 35 or 40 percent now that the company has released new tools that make it easier to do so.

Mr. Frank sees his company as a disruptive force. “We’re going to go hard at the big guys,” he said. Its books are meant to be used for the classes that have the most enrollment nationwide. Flat World has focused on business and economics books so far.

Open-Source Libraries

Connexions has been working to expand the use of customized textbooks as well.

ADVERTISEMENT

The site began in 1999 as one of the first places for academics to share educational material for free online. It has accumulated thousands of users from countries all over the world. But a major difficulty for professors has always been trying to sort high-quality materials from less-reputable items.

So Connexions is pushing for work to meet higher and higher standards. It now coordinates with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to vet open-source engineering materials, for instance.

Mr. Baraniuk, the site’s co-founder, sees this as a big moment in part because he keeps hearing about students going further and further into debt, and traditional textbook prices becoming harder and harder for students to afford. He says he has heard from some community-college instructors who have complained that half or more of their students are unable to afford the assigned textbooks.

The cost crunch is why Washington State is adding its own open-source repository to the fray. Thanks to a $750,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the state is gathering community-college professors to build the Open Course Library, which will feature online course materials for the state’s 81 most-enrolled classes, with a price cap of $30 per course.

ADVERTISEMENT

Staying within that cost constraint has been a challenge, however, particularly with math courses, where free high-quality content can be hard to find online, organizers say.

The ‘Big Five’

The companies that make traditional textbooks have been increasing their custom-publishing offerings as well. Just last year, McGraw-Hill Higher Education unveiled Create, a Web service that lets professors pick passages from thousands of the company’s textbooks, as well as law and business case studies, to make a customized edition. “We think the more all this becomes digital, the more people will want to customize,” Ed Stanford, president of McGraw-Hill Higher Education, told The Chronicle at the time. “And we want to be able to do that.”

Macmillan Publishers has its own build-a-textbook service, too, called DynamicBooks, which offers instructors the chance to add their own material to the company’s titles. DynamicBooks also gives professors $1 for each student who uses a customized copy.

Traditional publishers still customize printed books, too. Melonie D. Rasmussen, a professor of mathematics at Pierce College Fort Steilacoom, in Washington, recently used a copyrighted statistics textbook for which she didn’t need all the chapters. So she contacted the publisher and asked for a shorter, cheaper book. “And they’ve been willing to do that,” she said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Ms. Rasmussen is also part of the state’s Open Course Library project, and she has been using open content for years, but so far she is part of a small minority.

The question now is whether customization could move into the mainstream, ending the one-size-fits-all model of textbook publishing.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Technology
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Brad Wolverton
Newsroom leadership
The Chronicle of Higher Education Names Brad Wolverton as Editor
Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
The Death of Shared Governance
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption

From The Review

Illustration of an ocean tide shaped like Donald Trump about to wash away sandcastles shaped like a college campus.
The Review | Essay
Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump
By Jason Owen-Smith
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a pencil meshed with a circuit bosrd
The Review | Essay
How Are Students Really Using AI?
By Derek O'Connell
John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin