Let technology restructures school book publishing industry

Let technology restructures school book publishing industry

This article was written during my first week after returning to Indonesia. I was pondering on some recent educational policies in Indonesia.

No one wants to keep the bad apples. The school book publishing industry has been accused of manipulating school book policy at school by luring teachers with incentives. The spirit of the five-year-book plan (the plan) is to prevent us from keeping the bad apples in our education system.

In recent mass media campaign by Indonesian book publisher association, many observers found that the plan poses more disadvantages than advantages. The plan might result in five full years of collutive contract according to one Jakarta based radio talk show. Didn't we say we wanted to keep the bad apples away?

The plan requires paradigm shift to be applicable. The one like what Unidah Roshidi of State University of Jakarta (Universitas Negeri Jakarta - UNJ) mentioned in the same radio talk show. She said that books are not the only knowledge sources in the classroom. It is true in two folds. The first reason is because books utilization in the classroom is still ineffective and inefficient due to lack of lesson plan utilization. The students are learning from its surroundings, there would be plenty of things that can be brought into classroom as alternative to book. By improving teacher's skill in using lesson plan, teacher can smoothly integrate alternative material into classroom. Thus, at the end, school can lower its dependability to book publishers. A simple business point of view, should the buyer lower its dependability to its supplier, the buyer will gain more bargaining power towards its supplier, and that is the second fold.

Though school cannot completely omit its dependability to books, a lot of stake holders can help improving school bargaining power. School books must be made open source like Linux. There are a lot of Good Samaritan teachers who are willing to write high quality school books and make it available for free. Students of Boston University School of Education Master Degree Program are asked to write school books that correspond to Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and their subjects. They keep their works as portfolio. We can do better than that. We can make it more into group effort. The teachers or prospective teachers from Educational Universities can work in writing the school books. There are also many Good Samaritan Book Designers who are willing to design it and convert the raw material into an electronic book format or PDF format ready for printing and copying.

For distribution, Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association (APJII - Asosiasi Pengusaha Jasa Internet Indonesia) must be more than willing to host a web for this purpose where anyone can download these school books. Ministry of National Education can distribute this material in CDROM so that these soft copies of school books can also reach schools in remote area. This is plan is in accordance to one-school-one-computer program that was launched a few years back.

Student can copy the material using whatever output affordable to them. Rich students can print it in high resolution color printer, while less fortunate students can make a copy from the cheapest copy quality. With approximately six thousand rupiahs for one hundred and twenty pages per copy of these electronic book compare to seventeen thousand rupiahs per book, the less fortunate students can still get the same content.

Every year, groups of end users - teachers and students - can give input for upgrade and a new group of writers and book designers can work voluntarily to modify it. Within five years, these free publications can be reviewed for its suitability towards changes due to the most current demand in education. This is the competitive edge that cannot be match by the school book publisher, that these electronic books are peer reviewed.

This group's effort can empower school and increase school's bargaining power towards books publishers. This effort has many advantages. It can cater whatever economies of scale then it will drive the price down. Even if this effort is completely funded by government, the capital required is still low. Adding this variable to school book publishing industry will increase industrial rivalry. Especially since this electronic book's distribution saves up a lot of warehousing and supply chain cost, all in all, these surely will increase school's bargaining power towards school book publishing industry. At the end of the day, government can provide supporting national policy as additional to the coming Five-year-book plan. This policy shall not kill the book publishing industry; it will drive them to be more efficient and forget about luring teachers with incentives.

What we are facing is a tricky situation. It is sure that the Five-year-book plan has its advantages and disadvantages. However, we must start take that first step into a thousand mile journey. This first step and many more steps in the future will keep the bad apples away.