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This sort of story has been replayed frequently in recent months. Earlier in the year, Oxford University Press bought McClelland & Stewart's college division (the list includes Greg Kealey's Canadian Social History series and popular textbooks such as Canada's First Nations, by Olive Dickason), and took over the agency for the Mayfield line, which includes anthropology, politics, and literature titles. Addison-Wesley, meanwhile, rounded out its offerings by acquiring college lines from Harper-Collins and Copp Clark Longman (Addison-Wesley and Copp Clark both belong to Pearson PLC, the U.K. conglomerate that owns Penguin). And ITP Nelson assumed sales and marketing responsibility for Houghton Mifflin's college division, which includes D.C. Heath Canada -- a deal that's a component of a wholesale shift at Nelson toward the publication of electronic information as well as books.
This spate of mergers is hitting the industry in two ways: on the employment side, the college sector has seen as many as 200 jobs disappear, the side effect of closings and downsizings at HarperCollins, Copp Clark, D.C. Heath, Times Mirror, M&S, and Houghton Mifflin. "I've been in the industry for 14 years now, and I've never seen anything like this," says [David Collinge], who did find a position at Prentice Hall, as manager of media acquisitions. Publishers like [Diane Wood] say the layoffs will mean a talent drain for college publishers. "You'll have lots of people consulting or spinning off related businesses, but I think there's still a big loss to the industry as a whole."
Consequently, over the past two years, the industry has been trying to determine what prompts a student to purchase a textbook, elementary though that question may seem. Interestingly, publishers for the first time are asking students, as well as instructors, for the answer. John Wiley & Sons recently conducted focus groups with undergraduates. Last spring, the Canadian Publishers Council surveyed about 1,000 students (as well as 700 faculty members) on this topic. And at Addison-Wesley, some textbooks -- like Principles of Economics by Michael Parkin and Robin Bade -- come with questionnaires asking students to itemize the book's positive and negative features, and comment on whether it had been used effectively. As incentive to reply, students can win books or cash if they respond, says Addison-Wesley's John More.