IAT faculty and staff have been following the emergence of electronic publishing with interest and have begun dialogues with several publishers to discuss the effects of multimedia materials and electronic textbooks on the textbook industry. To help define some of the issues surrounding electronic publishing, we asked IAT director Bill Graves and humanities chair Jim Noblitt to shed some light on the topic. It can mean customizing the content of the traditional text and printing it on demand, as McGraw-Hill, the University of Southern California, and the University of California at San Diego are doing. If we look at foreign languages, for example, learners can put linguistic information into real life context by seeing and hearing speakers of other languages. Electronic publishing also allows the institution to offer students very current information.
Students are less and less willing to pay the high prices charged for four-color, illustrated texts.
Those who do buy them sell them back to the book store, and the market in second-hand books has reduced publishers' profits. Not at all. It's just that the industry is faced with diversifying its offerings. Multimedia instruction can do a better job in areas like illustration, visualization and interaction. The printed text book does a better job when it sticks to basic exposition and synthesis.