Getting textbooks right is hard work – and expensive. The revelation that two major US history textbooks produced by Pearson have almost identical sections discussing the 9/11 attack, both Gulf wars and the 2000 Presidential election has caused protestations of outrage from the authors. A representative from Pearson described the situation as, ‘absolutely an aberration’.
What it also highlights is that to win adoptions in the hyper-competitive US textbook market, publishers use celebrity endorsement to help sell their new books. In this case the celebrities are well-recognised educational experts who get paid for putting their names on the covers of major new textbooks. This is also a variation on the badge engineering used by the car industry; think Morris Minor/Leyland and Austin Marina Honda Quint/Rover Quintet, etc.
Like all cunning marketing ploys using celebrities, there is a downside to their involvement. For major US textbook publishers, this is having to admit that their highly paid and publicly touted experts, whilst called authors, often have little to do with writing the books that bear their name. Some books even outlast their authors, and been reissued posthumously under the stewardship of a new author.
One well-known former educational publisher we spoke to (who was happy to be quoted, but only anonymously) blamed the situation on a misunderstanding of what the word author means. ‘An author is technically just the person who causes the book to be written, and not necessarily the person who actually writes the book’. So this means that a commissioning editor is actually the author of most books, and the name on the cover need not even be the writer – how confusing!
www.pearson.com
