Engaging Inquiry: Research and Writing in the Disciplines

This book, Engaging Inquiry: Research and Writing in the Disciplines, is the Ford Pinto of the behemoth Pearson publishing group - outwardly it looks like a safe vehicle for getting students from one place to another in the development of their writing. In fact, it explodes almost as soon as you get in and shut the door. Shoddy craftsmanship is the most conspicuous feature of this book. It is full of typographical and grammar errors and compositor's mistakes that, in some places, make the text unreadable. For all this, students pay a publisher's list price of $85, and the instructor has to struggle all semester with the credibility problems that his bad choice of textbooks has earned him. Even worse than the poor production of the book is the corporate culture that reveals itself once you raise these issues with the publisher. After the publisher's sales representative had forwarded my complaints to the New York office, I finally got some response - on the weekend before my course was to begin. So far the "customer service" on this "product" (that's the word Pearson folks themselves use to refer to this dud, as though it were a toaster that only browned the bread on one side) has amounted to their sending me a scanned copy of bad text that was itself made from a faxed copy of a photocopy - in short ridiculously unreadable text to replace already unusable text. After my outrage at that ineptitude, there has followed a series of little buy-offs - one rep offered to give my students "some small gift" out of her own salary; another actually sent me a $100 AmEx gift card (which I returned). It appears that a poisonous corporate culture at Pearson has so infected everyone there that not even otherwise good people are able to make good choices. So far, Pearson has done everything except the right thing: to refund my students all the money they paid for this book and remove the rest of the supply from the market. Even Ford had the eventual good sense to take the Pinto off the road, but Pearson? Not according to the New York editor, who admits to having a warehouse full of these books. If you want to order it today, they will be glad to take your money and that of your students (which latter case ought to be a criminal offense, I should think - knowingly peddling faulty goods to an unwary public; as chair of a writing department, I have urged my own faculty and colleagues not to buy any more Pearson "products"). Something is badly wrong with U.S. textbook publishing in a deep moral way, and Pearson is making itself the very emblem of the problems. One's best hope is that a book like this one will eventually bring Pearson to the condition that Ford and the other auto makers are currently in.