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By George Vlahakis
A professor in S. Michael Groomer's field of expertise has written a textbook and a solutions manual on financial accounting that together weigh close to 10 pounds. You can read and highlight key points in the margins of its 1,000-plus pages, which contain information that probably took a couple of years to go from the professor's mind to the printed page.
"It gets frozen in time," said Groomer, an associate professor of accounting and information systems at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business.
Compare that to the new textbook published by Groomer and Uday Murthy, a professor at Texas A&M. It is just as comprehensive on accounting information systems, is totally interactive, and yet weighs less than a feather.
Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach is believed to be the first business textbook published exclusively on the World Wide Web. Business faculty at nearly a dozen universities in the United States and Canada -- such as the University of Miami and the University of Texas -- have adopted Groomer and Murthy's "cybertext" as their AIS text.
"It really is a paradigm shift -- from Gutenberg and movable type to publishing in the electronic environment . . . for the timely delivery of information and knowledge," noted Groomer, who is also a partner with Murthy in the Bloomington-based company CyberText Publishing. The two originally met when Murthy was earning his doctorate at IU.
"A common complaint leveled against conventional print textbooks is that their content can become rather outdated," he said. "This is a living book -- a dynamic piece, rather than a static piece. We believe that Internet delivery of instructional materials provides authors and teachers with a unique opportunity to keep the information passed along to students as up to-date as possible."
The authors revise the material prior to the beginning of each semester to reflect changes in technology and the underlying subject matter.
For an expanded version of this story, go to:
http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/ocm/releases/cybtext.htm
Groomer and Murthy's texts are accessible in password-protected areas:
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