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MacMillan DynamicBooks Let Profs Edit Textbooks, Open Room for Abuse

by Terrence O'Brien on February 24, 2010 at 02:50 PM

Macmillan's Editable DynamicBooks Leave Too Much Room For Abuse
Publishers and educational companies are struggling with how to best utilize emerging technologies for addressing the needs of schools while staying relevant in an increasingly post-print world. Macmillan thinks it has a solution in DynamicBooks, a new subsidiary that sells editable, electronic textbooks.

DynamicBooks allow professors to customize educational tomes by reordering chapters and uploading additional course documents, such as a syllabus. More importantly, and perhaps more worrisome, is their added ability to edit, delete, or replace entire sections of text in order to better customize it for an individual class. Made-to-order textbooks are nothing new, but they're often prohibitively expensive. By making the texts electronic and teacher editable, Macmillan has made custom educational resources accessible to schools that lack deep pockets.

Teachers will have the ability to ensure that materials have the latest available information on the subject, and students will benefit, too; the e-books will be about half the price of traditional textbooks, and will be accessible via any Web browser and downloadable for viewing on PCs, the iPhone, and of course the iPad.

While the low price and easy customization will certainly attract its share of fans, there are some serious concerns about the format. As Macmillan president Brian Napack told the New York Times, "they will go online... make whatever changes they want, and we don't even look at it." So, what is to stop a rogue biology teacher from pulling evolution, and putting in "intelligent design?" General manager for the subsidiary, Clancy Marshall, told the Times that Macmillan reserved the right to remove offensive and copyrighted materials, but that it would rely on students, parents, and other educators to report the content.

Unlike publicly editable reference sources, like Wikipedia, these texts will be altered by individuals and won't be subject to fact-checking by the masses; which is really what makes Wikipedia effective, in the first place. This is merely an invitation for controversy and has plenty of potential for abuse. [From: New York Times]

Tags: dynamicbooks, e-books, education, macmillan, school, text book, TextBook, top

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