What began in May 2005 as an assignment to completely redesign the entire product line for a major publisher's reading ancillaries finally finished this morning with the last 6,500 pages being piled into the back of a FedEx truck. While my involvement only goes back to about July of 2005, here's a quick summary of what the past year and a half have seen:
14 rounds of design revisions;
6 focus groups;
components from 878 individual books;
2 editions of the same books;
2 completely different production teams;
the assistance of 2 other senior Project Managers;
at least 30 different editors, and;
6 different client contacts.
All for a total of over 17,000 finished pages (which is actually 3 times that number, when you count earlier rounds);
If I wasn't so damn tired right now, I'd be out celebrating.
But even still...I'm pretty damn proud of myself and my team.
I'm sure going to miss them.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Just Following Up...
When I first begin working in a new industry, my habit is to start reading anything and everything I can get my hands on about the business – histories of the big players, industry trends, and as much background information as I can possibly put my hands on. In the course of some internet cruising, I came across this white paper, written by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation:
The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption.
I really wish I could find out more about the origin of this paper, because one early statistic really caught my eye:
"A 2002 survey of elementary and high school teachers found that about 80 percent use textbooks in their classrooms. Nearly half of student class time was spent using textbooks. And those numbers, from a survey sponsored by the National Education Association and the Association of American Publishers, most likely understate teachers’ and students’ true dependence on textbooks. Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered."
Granted, those numbers are at least 4 years old by now, so things could certainly be different. And I'm sure there's a pretty wide range across all the schools in America, but even if that's a high end of a range, the rest of the range is still pretty high. At first, I couldn't figure out why so much has been made of raising standards and raising students' chances of reaching them, and so little done about what seems like a major part of the process.
But then, I remembered something very important – the government is the consumer.
At my last job, I worked for an ad agency that specialized in military clients. Marketing to the US government, at any level, is one of the most bizarre and arcane processes that I've ever been involved in (including my current job). I still can't imagine how anyone would read one of the marketing pieces we produced and come away with any idea of whether they should buy the product being advertised or not. Add to that the layers of bureaucracy that a company needs to thread its way through in order to even be considered, and it's no wonder that a wrench costs $400. It wouldn't surprise me if that a break-even price.
So what are the odds that anything will ever change for the better? After all, it will always be the government doing the buying.
Hmmmm....
The Mad, Mad World of Textbook Adoption.
I really wish I could find out more about the origin of this paper, because one early statistic really caught my eye:
"A 2002 survey of elementary and high school teachers found that about 80 percent use textbooks in their classrooms. Nearly half of student class time was spent using textbooks. And those numbers, from a survey sponsored by the National Education Association and the Association of American Publishers, most likely understate teachers’ and students’ true dependence on textbooks. Shadow studies, which track teachers’ activities during the school day, suggest that 80 to 90 percent of classroom and homework assignments are textbook-driven or textbook-centered."
Granted, those numbers are at least 4 years old by now, so things could certainly be different. And I'm sure there's a pretty wide range across all the schools in America, but even if that's a high end of a range, the rest of the range is still pretty high. At first, I couldn't figure out why so much has been made of raising standards and raising students' chances of reaching them, and so little done about what seems like a major part of the process.
But then, I remembered something very important – the government is the consumer.
At my last job, I worked for an ad agency that specialized in military clients. Marketing to the US government, at any level, is one of the most bizarre and arcane processes that I've ever been involved in (including my current job). I still can't imagine how anyone would read one of the marketing pieces we produced and come away with any idea of whether they should buy the product being advertised or not. Add to that the layers of bureaucracy that a company needs to thread its way through in order to even be considered, and it's no wonder that a wrench costs $400. It wouldn't surprise me if that a break-even price.
So what are the odds that anything will ever change for the better? After all, it will always be the government doing the buying.
Hmmmm....
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Once Upon a Time...
I was cleaning up some old stuff this morning and I found a disk in the bottom of one of my long-neglected boxes. It was a disk I had burned of all my personal crap the first time I got laid off (yeah, the first time. Gotta love the media business, don't ya?). This image was buried in a folder full of Lord-knows-what.
It's amazing to me how completely we can forget entire parts of ourselves. For many years, an artist was all that I was. Sure, I did other things like music, but an artist was what I was. This image repesents the culmination of 15 years of dedicated work at my craft, of experiments both failed and successful, of butting heads with professors and other students, of everything that made me who I am. And I haven't done a thing since.
But even now, after about 9 years, I'm still quite fond of this piece.
Wonder where it is.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
The Wal-Mart Effect
Once upon a time, retail was a simple proposition - you buy a lot of a thing to get a good price, then you resell it in smaller quantities at a higher price. If you don't do anything stupid, you made money. Into this idyllic land came Wal-Mart.
Originally, Wal-Mart did a good thing. By using its purchasing power, it told its suppliers what it was willing to pay and gave them the option to meet that price or take a walk. Manufacturers examined their processes, discovered inefficiencies, and learned to produce their product more cheaply so as to meet Wal-Mart's demands. But then Wal-Mart's competitive landscape changed and it became a target for a host of new retailers. It had clearly staked out the "lowest price" territory in the market, so once its rivals began to match its costs, it had no choice but to squeeze its suppliers even further. Manufacturers began having to lay off workers and ship their operations to other places to be able to match Wal-Mart's demands. Now, the very people who are shopping at Wal-Mart because of its low prices are the ones who have been unable to find work because of Wal-Mart's practices.
Granted, that's a poorly researched and overly simple depiction of events, but it's true in essence. So how does this relate to publishing?
In America right now, there are only three major educational publishing companies - Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. Each of these school publishers is itself a small division of much larger media conglomerates. And thanks to their clout, they're taking a page out of Wal-Mart's book by dictating pricing to their myriad vendors, on which they depend to produce their products. Their outward goal is to reduce the pressure of competitive bidding in the production of their products, allowing them to focus on service. So what's wrong with that?
No matter what people in the publishing industry would have you believe, book production is not merely a manufacturing business. None of the logic of supply chain management applies. Imagine an auto manufacturing plant that must operate without any idea when parts will be showing up. Their delivery dates don't change, so if the parts show up a day before that date, they have no choice but to produce the order in a day. And if they complain at all about the lack of parts, they're seen as unwilling vendors, unworthy of working for the reduced prices that the car market has said their product is worth.
That is educational publishing. Our parts are the products of the authors and editors that produce the manuscript. And if you've ever tried to dictate terms to a human brain, you can see what I'm getting at.
Currently, the only way to meet these demands for reduced costs is to produce the work overseas. Most of the college and high school textbook markets have been over there for several years now. Primary school books are vastly more complicated than that and rely heavily on a carefully tuned cultural sensibility that simply can't be had overseas, and so have remained mostly in the hands of domestic vendors. But now things have reached the point where price is trumping all else and the only thing left to give in this system is quality.
Sadly, no one seems to care in the slightest.
Parents, read through your child's textbooks at the start of every school year. Go flip through them right now. Odds are, you won't notice anything wrong at all. And that's what allows publishers to get away with this nonsense year after year. Because the simple fact is that most people, unless they are shown two books side by side, will never recognize that anything is wrong. In the absence of what is right, what's in front of us will pass as what's "right."
What's wrong with education in America today?
What isn't?
Originally, Wal-Mart did a good thing. By using its purchasing power, it told its suppliers what it was willing to pay and gave them the option to meet that price or take a walk. Manufacturers examined their processes, discovered inefficiencies, and learned to produce their product more cheaply so as to meet Wal-Mart's demands. But then Wal-Mart's competitive landscape changed and it became a target for a host of new retailers. It had clearly staked out the "lowest price" territory in the market, so once its rivals began to match its costs, it had no choice but to squeeze its suppliers even further. Manufacturers began having to lay off workers and ship their operations to other places to be able to match Wal-Mart's demands. Now, the very people who are shopping at Wal-Mart because of its low prices are the ones who have been unable to find work because of Wal-Mart's practices.
Granted, that's a poorly researched and overly simple depiction of events, but it's true in essence. So how does this relate to publishing?
In America right now, there are only three major educational publishing companies - Harcourt, Pearson, and McGraw-Hill. Each of these school publishers is itself a small division of much larger media conglomerates. And thanks to their clout, they're taking a page out of Wal-Mart's book by dictating pricing to their myriad vendors, on which they depend to produce their products. Their outward goal is to reduce the pressure of competitive bidding in the production of their products, allowing them to focus on service. So what's wrong with that?
No matter what people in the publishing industry would have you believe, book production is not merely a manufacturing business. None of the logic of supply chain management applies. Imagine an auto manufacturing plant that must operate without any idea when parts will be showing up. Their delivery dates don't change, so if the parts show up a day before that date, they have no choice but to produce the order in a day. And if they complain at all about the lack of parts, they're seen as unwilling vendors, unworthy of working for the reduced prices that the car market has said their product is worth.
That is educational publishing. Our parts are the products of the authors and editors that produce the manuscript. And if you've ever tried to dictate terms to a human brain, you can see what I'm getting at.
Currently, the only way to meet these demands for reduced costs is to produce the work overseas. Most of the college and high school textbook markets have been over there for several years now. Primary school books are vastly more complicated than that and rely heavily on a carefully tuned cultural sensibility that simply can't be had overseas, and so have remained mostly in the hands of domestic vendors. But now things have reached the point where price is trumping all else and the only thing left to give in this system is quality.
Sadly, no one seems to care in the slightest.
Parents, read through your child's textbooks at the start of every school year. Go flip through them right now. Odds are, you won't notice anything wrong at all. And that's what allows publishers to get away with this nonsense year after year. Because the simple fact is that most people, unless they are shown two books side by side, will never recognize that anything is wrong. In the absence of what is right, what's in front of us will pass as what's "right."
What's wrong with education in America today?
What isn't?
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