Tailor-Made Textbooks

When Marc Strausberg was an eager young salesman for Allyn & Bacon, he found that the college professors he called on were never quite satisfied with the textbooks they ordered for their courses. "They all wanted a little more of this part in the book or a little less of another," Strausberg recalls. His solution: "Why couldn't I offer to collect only those materials the professor wanted, get permission to use them and publish a custom-made book?"

Strausberg recruited his father, a retired printer, for the project. With $5,000 borrowed from an uncle, they leased an Itek platemaker that could produce low-cost offset printing plates in just under a minute. Strausberg struggled along for almost three years and then sold his little company, Selected Academic Readings, to Simon & Schuster. After getting into an argument with S. & S., he started out again as MSS In formation Corp. In four years MSS has published 700 books, and sales this fiscal year are expected to reach $800,000. In addition to Simon & Schuster, Xerox has now also entered the field of "demand publishing," and will have some 100 titles by the end of the year -- a development that leaves Strausberg unperturbed. Because of what he terms "fragmentation" in college curriculums, he says "there is room for hundreds of companies like ours."

"There are so many more courses that publishers can't keep up with them all," Strausberg argues. "There aren't enough books in women's courses or Afro-American studies or in certain areas of psychology or education. The big textbook houses have to stick to traditional introductory course texts that will sell in large amounts."

Professor F. Chris Garcia of the University of New Mexico, for example, wanted a collection of readings in Chicano politics. The materials he picked -- a jumble of the various original type faces and page sizes -- included three different articles from a quarterly titled Black Politician, a speech from the Congressional Record, an interview with Cesar Chavez in the Christian Century, and a dozen articles from periodicals as diverse as the Los Angeles Times and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.

MSS secured reprint permissions from the various authors, added a table of contents and preface by Professor Garcia, and published a 224-page soft-cover edition in six weeks. To date the book has gone through two printings, which is about the average for MSS publications. Xerox uses a different system that is somewhat easier for the professor: it issues three catalogues (in psychology, sociology and economics) listing 1,000 or more articles and other materials from which he can pick what he likes; he can then add to the book up to 20% of his own material. Simon & Schuster combines both methods, soliciting the professor's choices but also offering work that it has already collected on its own.

Demand publishing is not without its problems -- reprint rights are not always available, and color printing does not reproduce well -- but there are marked advantages. A professor can put together even the most esoteric materials -- The Target of Health in Ethiopia, for example -- at a cost of only about 2.50 per page. A 150-page book can therefore be sold profitably for $5 in editions as small as 100 copies, whereas standard textbooks need sales of 5,000 copies or more to break even. Demand textbooks can also be produced in as little as six weeks (compared with two years for standard books), so they can easily be kept up to date.

Demand publishing is still only a tiny part of the $360 million-a-year textbook business, but with its speed and flexibility, it offers remarkable possibilities. Xerox, which says that it does not expect to make any profit from such books for four or five years, estimates that demand publishing may eventually generate sales of $40 million.

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