The textbook is a physical object. It is produced, shipped, distributed, and owned. It costs money. It endures for a limited time. A network of people — not just authors and teachers, but printers, sales agents, state regulators, and retailers — are necessary to support that process. And that process has been deeply political from the start.
The late nineteenth century saw many examples of textbook salesmen bribing school board members, temporarily flooding local markets with below-cost books to drive competitors out of business, colluding to change book adoptions every year to prevent reuse and drum up sales, arranging kickback schemes in exchange for exclusive adoptions, and so on. After decades of the textbook industry claiming (and failing) to regulate itself, two major shifts occurred in the 1890s. Several of the largest companies merged to form a single conglomerate, the American Book Company, which immediately represented over 80% of K-12 U.S. textbook sales. Also, Congress enacted the International Copyright Act, which prevented publishers from relying on pirated British texts and forced them to invest more seriously in content creation. Making a virtue of necessity, sales agents immediately began equating the newness of content with a book being up-to-date, a new basis on which to claim superiority over a rival’s books, and to justify the need for frequent new adoptions that prevented book reuse.
This is where the tension between the inside and outside of the textbook emerged. Even as accusations of monopoly and anticompetitive practices hounded the ABC, the federal government largely ignored the textbook industry from a business perspective and left it, as an educational issue, to be handled at the state level. As progressive education reformers pushed for widening access to public schools, there was a related “free book” movement that encouraged states or school boards to purchase books instead of passing the cost along to students. In several states, especially across the U.S. South and West, one remedy to counter corruption and uncontrolled prices was statewide adoption, typically in five-year cycles. The state took over control of textbooks from local school boards not because it wanted to exert authority over content, but because it was politically and economically more sound to regulate textbooks as objects.
This is where the Platonic textbook ideal emerged. It was a tacit marketing strategy that shifted fights over sales away from academic content and over to the physical manifestation of textbooks. This was a fight that sales agents felt more competent to engage in. And in their vitriolic competition, they colluded to make textbooks seem above the vagaries of politics. They used their leverage to make it seem as though content questions were apolitical.