You may have noticed (or will soon notice) a number of
changes in your textbooks and I thought I’d note some of these here.
1. Quotations that often introduce our
chapters or that appear in margins will be a thing of the past unless they’re
very old; contemporary quotations will be gone. The reason: permission problems.
The same is true of quotations from research studies that occur within the
basal text.
2. Research instruments that have been so
common in our basic texts for illustrating the concepts and also for introducing
the nature of research (and something that I like to take credit for
introducing into our basic texts, tho’ I may be wrong here) will be gone.
Again, the reason is permission problems, especially the difficulty/impossibility
of getting digital rights. NCA journals, for example, will be off limits. You’re
likely to see “adapted from” as a way around these restriction but that
approach is not likely to prove effective in the long run.
3. References to other chapters in the
text are likely to disappear. The reason here is that custom books—the books
that instructors create out of existing textbooks and their own materials—are becoming
so popular that cross references will only make sense if the entire textbook is
used; they’ll prove incomprehensible when they refer to deleted chapters.
4. Third party URLs are being deleted because
of their unreliability. Although this system requires extra clicks for those
using a digital edition, the lack of permanence seems to have been the deciding
factor in eliminating all URLs except those of the publisher. When citing a website
article as a source, the organization, college, or agency rather than the URL
is given.
5. A more rigid organizational structure
with numbered Learning Objectives prefacing each chapter, repeated in the
chapter’s main headings, and again in the summary will become standard. I think
one reason for this is the assumption being made that it’s good pedagogy. Another
reason I’m sure has to do with digitizing and coordinating the varied materials
that now come with the textbook.
6. Cartoons will probably be cut back or
eliminated entirely, largely because of cost (they’re much more expensive than
photos) and digital permission problems.
Cartoons are also different in that some people really like them and
others don’t.
7.
Media
components will be increased. Online
videos, exercises, and vocabulary quizzes, for example, will become part of the
textbook package.
