The “Authors” » Why are the textbooks compiled this way?
With the market’s demand for current copyright dates, publishers do not have enough time to write legitimate books.1 Besides, these big publishing firms want to reduce their costs to get more profit, so they are “moving toward a writing-for-hire production system and abandoning the royalty-based author system.”2
The textbooks are not really written at all. They are “developed.”
John Hubitz, a researcher who conducted a study to review current middle-school science textbooks, summarizes the process: “An editor at the publishing house finds out the topics that the states require and, for each topic, assigns an in-house person to put some material together.”3
But this unscholarly approach is not limited to science textbooks. Gilbert Sewall explains that “some new secondary-level history textbooks have no authors at all.”4
What happens when a textbook has no author?
1 Rebecca Jones, “Textbook Troubles,” American School Board Journal (December 2000)
2 Sewall, Gilbert. “Textbook Publishing,” Phi Delta Kappan (March 2005)
3 John Hubitz, “Middle-School Texts Don't Make the Grade” Physics Today (May 2003)
4 Sewall, p. 3.