Textbooks. Straight into the Day After Tomorrow. ComputerraOnline Column #2

As long as publishing houses issue textbooks by state order, the clarity, quality, and motivational capacity of a given textbook will remain secondary circumstances. I will tell two stories from my experience: one about a Ukrainian textbook, the other about a Russian one.
The first. We submit a textbook to a ministry competition, and believe me, it is a good one. At the very least, there is a category of teachers and students who very much liked the two previous versions of this textbook (they were published in microscopic print runs). Our manuscript “misses out,” and we receive mockingly illiterate reviews. We file an appeal. We lose. We relax. Then, suddenly, for another reason altogether, a scandal breaks out. A new commission, composed of literate people, rules that the winning textbooks cannot be printed, and that other ones should be printed instead, above all ours. Nice words are spoken to us... and yet they still publish the ones they supposedly may not publish. Our work remains in the wastebasket.
The second. A competition is announced for the creation of innovative teaching-methodological complexes. The winners (we are among them) conclude a tripartite agreement: customer, contractor, authors. We create the complex “Ecology. Constructing the Biosphere” (more about it here). A fair amount of money is spent on this. The product is made and passes pilot testing brilliantly. So many flattering words are addressed to us that it takes one’s breath away. Any day now our complex will be made available for free download by all Russian schools... Nothing of the kind. The contractor (a software firm) caught the customer on ambiguities in the contract and blocked the product on the basis of copyright law. The complex can be distributed only by someone who buys again an already paid-for product. It is impossible to recoup such money in the Russian-speaking world. That is it: the product “died.”
Officials do not know how to optimize the systems they govern simultaneously by many parameters, so they have to orient themselves toward very concrete economic expediency. I waved goodbye to writing school textbooks; I have no strength to pour soul into a large piece of work and then see it disappear in vain.
For many, it seemed that a bright opening had appeared in the transition to digital educational materials. Let us give every schoolchild a netbook and load a set of electronic textbooks onto it. Good? It may turn out in various ways. Much depends on how these electronic textbooks are made: by scanning paper ones, or in some other way.
The dominant business model here is as follows: the producer makes an electronic textbook, burns it onto a disc, protects it against copying, and sells it to consumers. I once participated in such a project: the discs received official approval, but no one bought them; instead they began copying them (and even that sluggishly). The publisher went bankrupt. It seems to me that if a printed book may or may not pay for itself, a textbook on a disc will almost certainly not pay for itself. Yes, one can make discs by state order (like our complex), but even there, little good shines ahead.
And what will the next step be? I think I understood. I pondered for a long time whether to reveal this secret to others. But after one conversation I realized that there is no sense in keeping it.
...Recently I was traveling on business (taking a report to the ministry) and found myself in the same compartment as the owner-director of a major publishing house. I had once worked with him, and later he explained to me something that was unexpected for me at that time. “Look, I’ve become convinced that you are a great author. But you are always running about with some super-idea: your book has to be made exactly as you conceived it. You demand from the illustrator something he is not used to. Standard layout does not suit you, and you torture the layout designer and the technical editor. When my editors correct you, you argue with them and point out their mistakes. I have to untangle all these conflicts, and the conveyor suffers from it. And when your book comes out, it brings me no more income than one made according to a template. So, as long as your ideas reduce my profit, I will respect you from a distance.”
Pelevin expressed the same thing in different words, though I cannot quite recall the quotation to the end: “We don’t need creators... We need cre8ors.”
So, talking to this publisher while standing by the train window, I became convinced that he considered this trend in textbook production obvious. If so, let me explain.
The schoolchild of the future will carry to school a tablet for working with methodological complexes from the internet. And they will work with specially created products making maximal use of the advantages of network nature: