Textbooks and educational texts in the 21st century : writing, publishing and reading : Editorial introduction

One of the most remarkable features of Australia’s higher educational publishing industry is that it has not disappeared into the ‘internet trash compactor’ (Eptstein 2001). It is, in fact, alive and healthy. Higher educational publishing comprises a significant percentage of Australian national publishing outputs. Of this, textbooks are an important component. In tertiary education alone, some 3.1 million textbooks were published/sold in Australia in 2011. In that year, tertiary sales of textbooks and professional materials reached A$155 million. Tertiary educational publishing currently represents about 30 per cent of Australia’s publishing output. Furthermore, spending on textbooks remained fairly constant from 2007 to 2010 despite the increasing quantity of digital resources developed by universities in Australia.