David Wiley had an interesting blog post last week that touched upon this idea of "judging textbooks from commercial publishers perspective". This is a lengthy quote from the article. It is a good read.

On Quality and OER

Beyond issues of accuracy, when publishers, their press releases, and the media who reprint them say “quality” with regard to textbooks and OER, they actually mean “presentation and graphic design” – is the layout beautiful, are the images high resolution, are the headings used and formatted consistently, is the book printed in full color?

But this is not what we should mean when we talk about quality. There can be one and only one measure of the quality of educational resources, no matter how they are licensed: How much do students learn when using the materials?

http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2947

I see the additions and deletions as covering aspects of revising, but you are correct about the scope and difficulty. Often, revising is the most difficult challenge when it comes to modifying an existing textbook. Being more of a technician, I tend to focus on the technical challenges, like revising content in a PDF document (virtually impossible without exploding the revision scope to include reformatting the entire book), or trying to figure out how to author in LaTeX when you may have never worked with it before.

The plan is that the BCcampus hosted PressBooks instance will be used to author textbooks, avoiding those watermark issues. We are just tuning up the platform before we make it open to open textbook authors.

I was also thinking that this is one of the reasons why I love my Kindle device vs my tablet for reading. It is a dedicated reader that removes many of those distractions. When reading on my Kindle, I am focused on the text and not tempted to check email, Facebook, and head off in other directions.

I agree - this is an issue - the digital siren song. Distraction of the digital environment. As soon as you go online there are so many other temptations. It is such an issue, not only for education, but for all aspects of digital life. It is so easy to get off the path.

That said, I also wonder if sometimes off the path is a good thing? I wonder if some of those distractions might provide pathways to deeper learning resources & opportunities for some students who want to go deeper than the course material might take them? Wouldn't it be great if that recommendation engine on YouTube would actually recommend additional resources that matched closely with the video they were asigned to view and that was the path that students took, instead of the path to Facebook?

I know it is a rather idealistic & naive view in a world where we compete with base instincts that value novel and new, but I know personally I have often found great resources that I stumble upon more through serendipity than design. Of course, i have often gone down many a rabbit hole as well...