Exploring Our Options: Modern Publishing Alternatives for our Computer Programming Textbook

Abstract

Abstract The authors of this paper are also the authors of an introductory computer programming textbook used in several college courses. Due to the rapidly changing content, the textbook requires frequent revisions causing the shelf-life of each specific version of the textbook to be relatively short, sometimes being no longer than a single semester. In addition, the time required to actually print a new version of the textbook and make it available to students was too long considering the time-sensitivity of the content and frequency of revisions. For these reasons, traditional publishing of this textbook was an unsatisfactory option. In this paper, we describe our exploration of alternatives to traditional textbook publication in hopes of finding an easy, uncomplicated, and rapid means of textbook publication. Our findings on ease of content creation/revision, time-to-market, monetization, and digital rights management are presented in this paper. Finally, we present our criteria for a publishing option we think is needed for authors who publish textbooks on similar rapidly changing domain topics