Outsourcing Children's Textbooks

When you were a kid, did you ever wonder who wrote the articles, study guides, and quizzes that were in your school textbooks?

Probably not. If you gave it any thought at all, you likely thought it was all written by a teacher even more boring than your own.

But now that we're adults, we should think about it. Why? Because today, much of the content of school textbooks gets outsourced to foreign countries.

It's true. A large amount of textbook content is written by non-native English speakers because American publishing houses don't want to pay higher wages to American writers.

I will be covering this subject again soon. It's too long for just one post. But for now, I'll share a blurb from a website of one particular offshore company (thanks to one of my colleagues for passing it along). This company says it provides "end-to-end content management" for schools and other clients. And yet its own website is a compelling advertisement for why you shouldn't hire them for such work. For the record, this blurb contains:

• Singular/plural errors: 2
  
• Comma misuse/omission: 4
  
• Hyphen misuse/omission: 3
  
• Erroneous capitalization: 7
• Incorrect word choice (e.g. "Corporates" instead of "Corporations"): 3
  
• Run-on sentences: 2

Would you want this company teaching your kid how to read and write?

About Us

I------ is one of the leading pre-publishing services companies, in the world, providing end-to-end content management and content transformation services including high quality Digital Typesetting, e-Publishing (SGML, XML), Data Conversion and related services for Books and Journals, for various Publishers, Presses and Corporates, around the world.

Founded in 1994, I------ today services many of the top 20 global publishers with highly specialized offerings across segments such as STM, Academic, Higher Education, School, Trade etc. With presence across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific it is currently positioned amongst the top 6 publishing services companies in India. I------ has a strong team of 1200+ highly qualified professionals with diverse skill sets delivering top notch quality to their customer which is only reflective in its long standing relationships with many of its customers.

Headquartered in Pondicherry, India, I------ has its Global Service Delivery Centers at India (Pondicherry and Chennai) and the US (Chicago and New York) services its customers through wholly owned subsidiaries in the UK and USA.