Even before the head of the University of Nebraska library began bemoaning how the pictures had fallen out of their collection of vintage agronomy ebooks, the Open eBook Forum conference on ebooks in education felt a great deal like a convention of cattlemen gathered to discuss the latest advances in treating animal ailments and increasing their milkfat percentages. The cattle, of course, are the hapless students, handily divided into K-12 & college lots. The publishing industry, with the help of the software industry, is doing their best to milk them for all they can.
The major image that came to my mind, however, was genetically modified corn. Genetically modified corn is theoretically a good thing: you get a bigger harvest of better corn. But! for the good of the masses – so it doesn’t get loose in the wild – Monsanto’s made their GM corn sterile. What this means for their bottom line: the farmers have to buy new seeds every single year. In short, what should be a renewable resource has become corporate property. And this strategy, more or less, is what the people at the Open Ebook Forum were most delighted about having hit upon. They’re selling coursepacks to college kids which expire at the end of the term, ebooks to libraries which only one user can check out at once, and more software to parents so their kids can do their schoolwork. Hopefully, this technology will let you, the efficient new school administrator, get those pesky teachers out of your payroll. Then: profit!
The future of the book looked incredibly bleak from the McGraw-Hill auditorium. One bright spot of enthusiasm: a few groups of people (including Geoff Freed from the CPB/WGBH National Center for Accessible Media and John Worsfeld from Dolphin Computer Access) working on making media more accessible to people with disabilities. Not coincidentally, they were the only people there not primarily concerned with making money off the students.