The results, as some of you may have noticed, were some intermittent outages all day today.(I believe we were down about an hour total, in about four separate incidents.)

I applaud those of you who braved the elements and stuck with us, including Dzenana looking for Macroeconomics homework help on market equilibrium, and those who even managed to keep a sense of humor.  You're the real storm troopers.

I ran across it this morning while running a Google search, and thought I'd post it here for you. Here is the Periodic Table for the cell phone.

Just click on these links to get the latest buzz on blog posts, notebook entries, and member logins/communities.

All for you!

Professor Cram 

Want your own Cramlets to help you study for finals? Create your own Notebook entries and we'll take it from there!

•  Cramlets: Most online resources do a poor job of explaining topics, or end up explaining way too much. Our Cramlets focus on a single topic, letting you choose what you want to learn and when. Want an example? Try one of these:
• Periodic Table of elements
• Balance Sheet financial statement
• Factoring Trinomials tutorial
• Multi-Step Income Statement tutorial
  
  
• Search bar: Looking for help in a particular topic? Type it into the search bar above and find out what learning resources are available and who created them. You'll get Professor Cram's blog entries and Cramlets, plus icons for any other students or study groups that have resources that could help. For example, search for "Periodic Table" and you'll find Cramlets in Astronomy, Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. Below them are articles from Professor Cram plus suggested alternate tags below that.
  
  
• Tag cloud: Like the Search bar, click on any term in the tag cloud to find out what learning resources are available about that term, both from Professor Cram and from your fellow students. Be sure to tag your own creations well so other students can benefit from your wisdom too!

Just click here to sign up for free and start getting better grades faster with College-Cram.

• Search bar: Just type your interests into the search bar to find others that are interested in the same things. Search for "vegetarian" to see folks interested in a meat-free lifestyle, or for "Brian" to see who has that name.
• Study Groups: Also called Communities, these are collections of students interested in a topic or theme. For example, type "Astronomy" in the search bar to find users and groups, and click the Astronomy icon. At the top of the left-hand column you'll see a link to "Click here to join this community" (if you're logged in). Click it -- that's how easy it is to join up.
  
• Professor Cram's Study Groups: As a bonus, these groups have hundreds of Cramlets and tutorials in their notebooks. Once you've selected the group, just follow the "Notebook entries" link at the bottom of the left-hand column. Here are links to these groups so you can go join right away:
• Business
• Accounting
• Business Math
• Economics
• Finance
• Science
• Astronomy
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Math
• Algebra
• Pre-Calculus
• Trigonometry
• Languages
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Other
• Mythology
• Trivia
  
• US Government
• World History
  
• Blog entries: Once you've joined a Study Group or community, you can start posting in its blog and commenting on others' posts. Just use the "Community blog" link on the left-hand column to get there.

Just click here to sign up for free and start getting better grades faster with College-Cram.

• Profile: As with any social network, College-Cram lets you describe yourself in your profile. You can upload a photo and identify your skills, interests, and more. Best of all, you can control who can see every bit of this information - anybody, only people who log in, only members of a particular study group or community, or nobody but you.
• Class Notes: Once you log in, you can add class notes in the "My Notebook" section. Just click the link at the menu bar on top of the screen. (Want an example? Check out this tutorial on the Accounting Cycle.)
• Blog entries: What social network would be complete without a blog? Follow the "Blog" link at the menu bar on top of the screen (once you've logged in) to share your thoughts or ask questions of your fellow students.
• Study Groups: Join your friends in an online study group, or organize fellow students around the world into a community discussing a topic you hold dear. Study groups can be whatever you want!

We combine the communication and collaboration tools of social networks like Facebook and MySpace with learning resources like... well, like the textbook publishers would (if they really cared about helping you). Create your own class notes, connect with your friends in an online study group, and learn from our resources (we call them Cramlets™).

Sign up for free to get complete access to all of our educational tools and Create/Connect/Learn your way to better grades in less time.

Don't Just Listen to Us!

Currently, three publishers control some 85% of the college textbook market -- Pearson/Prentice Hall, McGraw-Hill, and Thomson Learning. (Chances are, most if not all of your textbooks this semester were produced by one of these three.) There are others, like Wiley and Worth, but they hold small market shares in a handful of subject areas and cannot compete with the Big Three across the board.

So how did the Big Three grow so big? Over the past twenty years or more, each of these goliaths swallowed up smaller publishing companies like Dryden, Longman, Addison-Wesley, Irwin, etc. That's how they showed their shareholders growth -- they'd grow 5% by buying a company that had 5% market share. It was an effective strategy for many years, but one that is no longer viable -- they've run out of significant companies to buy!

So how does this affect the average student? Well, here's how. They can't grow 5% per year by buying up companies anymore, so how do you expect them to deliver that 5% growth to their shareholders? That's right, they jack up the textbook prices.

This worked for a while, until about five or six years ago when students started rebelling against the unreasonably high textbook prices. Since then, overall unit sales have been in decline -- in other words, students are buying fewer books. So, again, how do they deliver that 5% growth to their shareholders? That's right, they jack up the textbook prices even higher.

This background on the state of college textbook publishing is important to understanding the Thomson sale's possible outcomes. As I see it, there are three ways this sale could go:

• Another textbook publisher buys the whole thing - This is highly unlikely. The other Big Two would face a prohibitive amount of regulatory barriers, and the smaller competitors just can't swing the $5 billion price tag. This is a non-option.
• Thomson sells off pieces to other textbook publishers - Difficulty in finding a buyer could, as time progresses, cause employees and authors to start abandoning Thomson. (Face it, would you want to stick around?) This will put downward pressure on the sale price, and ultimately force Thomson to sell in bits and pieces -- the Chemistry list here, the Business Math list there. The bottom line here is that the Thomson imprints get absorbed into the remaining publishers, meaning less players and fewer choices for you the consumer.
• Investors outside the publishing industry buy the whole thing - If the business is sold intact, this is the only way it will happen. How likely is this scenario, though? I mean, Thomson is currently the #2 college textbook publisher in the world and they're still looking to bail out of the business. Given the economics I described above, and the continuing trend of lower unit sales, who in their right mind would want to do this?

Out of the three scenarios, two of them have the same affect: Thomson ends up walking away from this market with a few billion dollars of your money, and you'll end up with fewer choices and higher prices. The third could be a new player in the market (possibly a Web 2.0 company?) with a different agenda of market disruption, which could ultimately be the change we are looking forward to, cheaper books. The first doesn't sound like a treat to me, but the second might be a disguise worth waiting for.

College textbook publishers are experiencing a similar situation regarding the Internet. Like the early TV producers, today's publishers continue to make textbooks, and convert them in some fashion into Internet components as an afterthought - vaudeville and theater are replaced by E-books and web sites that offer static illustrations and text. None of these are specifically produced for the Internet, and deviate only slightly from the traditional textbook publishing paradigm.

By its very nature, the Internet is capable of providing far better (and less expensive) learning tools than those currently provided. College students are clamoring for these tools, but the textbook publishers have been inadequate to this task. Clearly, it is up to someone else to deliver on the Internet's promise.

We like to think that that The Smartacus Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas is one such company -- a "cinderella story" that delivers the goods with our College-Cram.com website. In many ways, our study programs (or Cramlets™) are more effective learning tools than traditional textbooks.

• Lower cost - College students spend $120 or more on each new textbook. Publishers, who get no revenue from "used" book sales, regularly publish new editions every three years to force more "new" book purchases; often these new editions are little changed from the preceding edition. College-Cram.com offers hundreds and hundreds of its popular Cramlets™ for free.
• Focused learning - Every study program in our library focuses on a single concept, such as calculating sales tax or the structure of the human heart. Students know which concepts they need to study, and need a way to get to them quickly without slogging through other concepts in the chapter that they already understand.
• Effective teaching techniques - Study programs in the College-Cram.com library are presented in ways that best convey the intended concept, often addressing multiple learning styles to ensure the best learning experience. For example, tab-tutor programs include a labeled illustration (for the visual learner), two different ways to work the formula (for the hands-on learner), and a glossary of terms (for reading-oriented learners). In addition, resources that are typically static are presented more effectively in this library. The Periodic Table and Logarithm Tables, for instance, come with instructions on how to use them, while financial statements provide explanations for each line item that are usually buried within the textbook, if provided at all.
• True interactivity - Unlike the E-books and such offered by textbook publishers, College-Cram.com's study programs are truly interactive. Formula-solvers, for example, accept numbers from the student and walk them through the steps required to solve math and science problems. Similarly, financial ratio solvers show the steps and also where to find the proper values on financial statements.

Those early vaudeville and theater producers ended up being replaced by their more effective film producer counterparts, who went on to transform the industry. Will the textbook publishers learn from television's early history, and change their ways before it's too late? Or can websites like College-Cram write their own cinderella stories?