The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem.

Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline.

I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the people who did not write them; so it's a new definition of "author."

I don't think teachers read the textbooks. And I don't think adoption committees read the textbooks before they adopt them. I think they look at them.

There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the west.