Textbooks, Ownership and Access

Prior to my university studies, I took the privilege of free access to textbooks for granted. The high school that I attended provided students with textbooks to borrow for the duration of classes; I never spent much time thinking about this or realizing that it was a privilege. When I got to university and textbooks were no longer complimentary, my attitude towards them changed.

When I was purchasing textbooks for my classes, I came across something that I had never used before: textbooks that were traditional in the sense that they came in the form of a physical book, but that also had content and extra material in a digital format that was only accessible online. Access codes or keys were necessary to retrieve this online content, and they would come with the textbook if it was bought new or they could be purchased separately if the book was bought used. Unlike the print text they accompanied, these access codes could only be used once and could not be resold.

An example that comes to mind is The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, which consists of both print and digital components. The volume that I “own” covers the Medieval period through the Eighteenth Century. The print text contains prose, poetry, primary documents, and images of artwork, artifacts and maps from these literary periods. In addition to this print content is a wealth of online material. Users who have an access code can retrieve a variety of online content, including digital versions of selected works, additional historical information, and (what I found to be most useful!) an audio library that contains readings of certain texts. Although this digital material can be seen as supplementary to the physical book, I would argue that both of these portions make up the entirety of the text.

 A screenshot of the online portal to BABL’s digital content
(http://sites.broadviewpress.com/bablonline/)

In this case, the relationship between ownership and access is complex. Although one can own the material portion of the text, access to the online portion of the text can expire, can be lost, and cannot be resold as the physical book can. I have a conventional notion of ownership; that is, once you purchase something, it’s yours until you choose to discard it. With these print/digital textbooks, that holds true only for one portion of the text; the physical portion is much easier to own than the digital content, which you do not own but have access to, often only for a prescribed time.

In "Ebookness," Rowberry states, "Ebooks cannot rely on the physical aura of the object that helps to define books" (2). I generally agree with this, although I think that the example of The Broadview Anthology complicates this, as there is a material text that possesses a “physical aura,” but there is also a much more ephemeral, digital counterpart to the physical text. Perhaps Rowberry’s suggestion that these types of books be viewed as "liminal texts" (14) that "focus on multimodality" (16) is a useful concept for understanding texts such as The Broadview Anthology that contain both print and digital components.

Ownership and access don’t always go hand in hand. In the case of academic textbooks that also have an online component, you can independently own the physical book that you have purchased; with online content, in contrast, you only purchase the right to access which (and what you can do with it) is limited. You do not have as much freedom with online content that is controlled by access as you do with a physical textbook. Despite this disadvantage, I believe that online resources can enrich a physical textbook, and therefore have the potential to improve both the reading and learning experiences.

References

Broadview Anthology of British Literature Online. Accessed November 11, 2016. http://sites.broadviewpress.com/bablonline/

Rowberry, Simon Peter. “Ebookness.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2015): 1-18.

The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume A, edited by Joseph Black et al. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2011.